Speaker Pelosi, More War Funding Next Week Is No 'Emergency'

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she is committed to passing an
emergency war supplemental before the July Fourth recess, Roll
Call reports.

Let us be perfectly clear, as President Obama might say. There is no
"emergency" requiring the House to throw another $33 billion into our
increasingly bloody and pointless occupation of Afghanistan before we
all go off to celebrate the anniversary of our Declaration of
Independence from foreign occupation.

This fact -- that there is no emergency requiring an immediate
appropriation -- is absolutely critical, because the claim that there
is some "emergency" requiring an immediate infusion of cash, otherwise
there will be some new apocalyptic catastrophe, is the means by which
the Pentagon and the White House hope to dodge two sets of questions
about the war supplemental urgently being asked by Democratic leaders
in the House.

Secretary Gates has complained that if the war money is not approved
by July 4, the Pentagon might have to do "stupid things" like furlough
civilian Pentagon employees. I am not in favor of furloughs, even of
Pentagon employees (can we furlough someone who approves breaking
into Afghans' homes in the middle of the night and killing pregnant
women?), but as "stupid" goes, furloughing Pentagon employees
doesn't hold a candle to laying off public school teachers, which is
the likely consequence of allowing the Pentagon and the White House
dodge their critics in the House.

The war funding proposal has been sitting in the inbox for six months.
What kind of "emergency" is that? The $33 billion represents about
five percent of the gargantuan Pentagon budget. The Pentagon can live
with a little more delay, while we get answers to some urgent
questions.

The first set of questions the Pentagon and the White House want to
dodge can be crudely summarized as: now that we've dumped McChrystal,
what the hell are we doing in Afghanistan?

Yesterday, thirty Members of the House sent
a letter to Speaker Pelosi, demanding that the questions
about the war raised by Michael
Hastings' Rolling Stone article be answered before the
House votes on the Pentagon's request for more money.

According to Hastings'
article, "Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next
year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its
counterinsurgency campaign even further." A senior military
official says, "There's a possibility we could ask for another
surge of U.S. forces next summer," which is a pants-on-fire
contradiction to the promises made when the last increase of forces
was announced. Meanwhile, McChrystal's Chief of Operatons, Maj. Gen.
Bill Mayville, said:
"It's not going to look like a win...This is going to end in an
argument." If it's going to end in an argument anyway -- Mayville is
surely right -- why shed more blood? Don't we have a right and
obligation to demand a straightforward and concrete accounting of what
the additional bloodshed is purportedly going to achieve?

Ninety-eight
Members of the House -- almost a quarter -- have now signed on to legislation
demanding that President Obama establish a timetable for military
withdrawal from Afghanistan. Shall the House not debate establishing a
timetable for military withdrawal before voting on more money for
pointless killing?

The second set of questions the Pentagon and the White House want to
dodge can be crudely summarized as: what the hell is the federal
government doing about Main Street's economic crisis? While it is
not the responsibility of the Pentagon to do
something about Main Street's economic crisis, it is the
obligation of the Pentagon to defend more Pentagon
spending as the best use of public resources, at a
time when states and local governments are looking at mass layoffs of
public employees, including school teachers.

This is the question that House Appropriations chair David Obey put
on the table when he said he would sit on the war appropriation
until the White House acted on House Democratic demands to unlock
federal money to aid the states in averting a wave of layoffs of
teachers and other public employees.

But on money to save teachers' jobs, the White House is still Absent
Without Leave, hiding behind the purported threat of a Senate
filibuster, just as it did on the public option for health insurance.
If it fought for teachers, the White House could win. But it isn't
fighting, because unlike the war funding, teachers' jobs are not a
White House priority.

If we want this to change, Obey has to be able to make good on his
threat. And that means the House has to be willing to call the
Pentagon's bluff.