The New War Congress: An Obama-Republican War Alliance?

To understand just how bad the 112th Congress, elected on
November 2nd and taking office on January 3rd, is likely to be for
peace on Earth, one has to understand how incredibly awful the 110th and
111th Congresses have been during the past four years and then measure
the ways in which things are likely to become even worse.

Oddly enough, doing so brings some surprising silver linings into view.

The House and Senate have had Democratic majorities for the past four
years. In January, the House will be run by Republicans, while the
Democratic majority in the Senate will shrink. We still tend to call
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "Bush's wars." Republicans are often
the most outspoken supporters of these wars, while many Democrats label
themselves "critics" and "opponents."

Such wars, however, can't happen without funding, and the past four
years of funding alone amount to a longer period of war-making than U.S.
participation in either of the world wars. We tend to think of those
past four years as a winding down of "Bush's wars," even though in that
period Congress actually appropriated funding to escalate the war in
Iraq and then the war in Afghanistan, before the U.S. troop presence in
Iraq was reduced.

But here's the curious thing: while the Democrats suffered a net loss
of more than 60 seats in the House in the midterm elections just past,
only three of the defeated Democrats had voted
against funding an escalation in Afghanistan this past July 27th.
Three other anti-war Democrats (by which I mean those who have actually
voted against war funding) retired this year, as did two anti-war
Republicans. Another anti-war Democrat, Carolyn Kilpatrick of Michigan,
lost in a primary to Congressman-elect Hansen Clarke, who is also
likely to vote against war funding. And one more anti-war Democrat, Dan
Maffei from western New York, is in a race that still hasn't been
decided. But among the 102 Democrats and 12 Republicans who voted "no"
to funding the Afghan War escalation in July, at least 104 will be back
in the 112th Congress.

That July vote proved a high point in several years of efforts by the
peace movement, efforts not always on the media's radar, to persuade
members of Congress to stop funding our wars. Still a long way off from
the 218-vote majority needed to succeed, there's no reason to believe
that anti-war congress members won't see their numbers continue to climb
above 114 -- especially with popular support for the Afghan War sinking fast -- if a bill to fund primarily war is brought to a vote in 2011.

Which President Will Obama Be in 2012?

The July funding vote also marked a transition to the coming
Republican House in that more Republicans (160) voted "yes" than
Democrats (148). That gap is likely to widen. The Democrats will have
fewer than 100 House Members in January who haven't already turned
against America's most recent wars. The Republicans will have about
225. Assuming a libertarian influence does not sweep through the
Republican caucus, and assuming the Democrats don't regress in their
path toward peace-making, we are likely to see wars that will be
considered by Americans in the years to come as Republican-Obama (or
Obama-Republican) in nature.

The notion of a war alliance between the Republicans and the
president they love to hate may sound outlandish, but commentators like
Jeff Cohen who have paid attention to the paths charted
by Bill Clinton's presidency have been raising this possibility since
Barack Obama entered the Oval Office. That doesn't mean it won't be
awkward. The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), for example,
is aimed at reducing the deployment and potential for proliferation of
nuclear weapons. Obama supports it. Last week, we watched the
spectacle of Republican senators who previously expressed support for
the treaty turning against it, apparently placing opposition to the
president ahead of their own views on national security.

That does not, however, mean that they are likely to place opposition
to the President ahead of their support for wars that ultimately weaken
national security. In fact, it's quite possible that, in 2011, they
will try to separate themselves from the president by proposing even
more war funding than he asks for and daring him not to sign the bills,
or by packaging into war bills measures Obama opposes but not enough to
issue a veto.

For Obama's part, while he has always striven to work with the
Republicans, a sharp break with the Democrats will not appeal to him.
If the polls were to show that liberals had begun identifying him as the
leader of Republican wars, the pressure on him to scale back
war-making, especially in Afghanistan, might rise.

If the economy, as expected, does not improve significantly, and if
people begin to associate the lack of money for jobs programs with the
staggering sums put into the wars, the president might find himself with
serious fears about his reelection -- or even about getting the
Democratic Party's nomination a second time. His fate is now regularly
being compared to that of Bill Clinton, who was indeed reelected in 1996
following a Republican midterm trouncing. (In his successful campaign
to return to the Oval Office, Clinton got an assist from Ross Perot, a
third-party candidate who drew off Republican votes and whose role might
be repeated in 2012 by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.)

History, however, has its own surprises; sometimes it's the chapters
from the past you're not thinking about that get repeated. Here, for
instance, are three presidents who are not Bill Clinton and whose
experiences might prove relevant: Lyndon Johnson's war-making in Vietnam
led to his decision not to run for reelection in 1968; opposition to
abuses of war powers was likely a factor in similar decisions by Harry
Truman in 1952 in the midst of an unpopular war in Korea and James Polk
in 1848 after a controversial war against Mexico.

The Unkindest Cut

Bills that fund wars along with the rest of the military and what we
have, for the past 62 years, so misleadingly called the "Defense"
Department, are harder to persuade Congress members to vote against than
bills primarily funding wars. "Defense" bills and the overall size of
the military have been steadily growing every year, including 2010.
Oddly enough, even with a Republican Congress filled with warhawks, the
possibility still exists that that trend could be reversed.

After
all, right-wing forces in (and out of) Washington, D.C., have managed
to turn the federal budget deficit into a Saddam-Hussein-style
bogeyman. While the goal of many of those promoting this vision of
deficit terror may have been intent on getting Wall Street's fingers
into our Social Security savings or defunding public schools, military
waste could become collateral damage in the process.

The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and
Reform, known on television as "the deficit commission" and on
progressive blogs as "the catfood commission" (in honor of what it could
leave our senior citizens dining on), has not yet released its
proposals for reducing the deficit, but the two chairmen, Erskine Bowles
and Alan Simpson, have published
their own set of preliminary proposals that include reducing the
military budget by $100 billion. The proposal is, in part, vague but --
in a new twist for Washington's elite -- even includes a suggested
reduction by one-third in spending on the vast empire of bases the U.S. controls globally.

Commission member and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has proposed cutting
only slightly more -- $110.7 billion -- from the military budget as
part of a package of reforms that, unlike the chairmen's proposals,
taxes the rich, invests in jobs, and strengthens Social Security. Even
if a similar proposal finally makes it out of the full commission, the
new Republican House is unlikely to pass anything of the sort unless
there is a genuine swell of public pressure.

Far more than $110.7 billion could, in fact, be cut out of the
Pentagon budget to the benefit of national security, and even greater
savings could, of course, be had by actually ending the Afghan and Iraq
wars, a possibility not considered in these proposals. If military cuts
are packaged with major cuts to Social Security or just about anything
else, progressives will be as likely as Republicans to oppose the
package.

While the new Republican House will fund the wars at least as often
and as fulsomely as the outgoing Democratic House, namely 100% of the
time, the votes will undoubtedly look different. The Democratic
leadership has tended to allow progressive Democrats the opportunity to
vote for antiwar measures as amendments to war-funding bills. These
measures have ranged from bans on all war funding to requests for
non-binding exit strategies. They have not passed, but have generated
news coverage. They may also, however, have made it easier for some
Democrats to establish their antiwar credentials by voting "yes" on
these amendments -- before turning around and voting for the war
funding. If the funding is the only war vote they are allowed, some of
them may be more likely to vote "no."

On March 10, 2010, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) used a
parliamentary maneuver (that will still be available to him as a member
of the minority) to force a lengthy floor debate on a resolution to end
the war in Afghanistan. Kucinich has said that he will introduce a
similar resolution in January 2011 that would require the war to end by
December 31, 2012. That will provide an initial opportunity for
Congress watchers to assess the lay of the land in the 112th Congress.
It will likely also be the first time that war is powerfully labeled as
the property of the president and the Republicans.

The other place public discussion of the wars will occur is in
committee hearings, and all of the House committees will now have
Republican chairs, including Buck McKeon (R-CA) in Armed Services, and
Darrell Issa (R-CA) in Oversight and Government Reform. In recent
decades, the oversight committee has only been vigorously used when the
chairman has not belonged to the president's party. This was the case
in 2007-2008 when Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) investigated the Bush
administration, even though he did allow high officials and government
departments to simply refuse compliance with subpoenas the committee
issued. It will be interesting to see how Republican committee chairs
respond to a similar defiance of subpoenas during the next two years.

A Hotbed of Military Expansionism

The Armed Services Committee is likely to be a hotbed of military
expansionism. Incoming Chairman McKeon wants Afghan War commander
General David Petraeus to testify in December (even before he becomes
chairman) on the Obama administration's upcoming review of Afghan war
policy, while the Pentagon reportedly
does not want him to because there is no good news to report. While
Chairman McKeon may insist on such newsworthy witnesses next year, his
goal will be war expansion, pure and simple.

In fact, McKeon is eager to update
the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to grant the
president the ongoing authority to make war on nations never involved in
the 9/11 attacks. This will continue to strip Congress of its
war-making powers. It will similarly continue to strip Americans of
rights like the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable
searches and seizures that President Obama has tended to justify more on
the basis of the original AUMF than on the alleged inherent powers of
the presidency that Bush's lawyers leaned on so heavily.

The president has been making it ever clearer in these post election weeks that he's in no hurry to end the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The scheduled end date for the occupation of Iraq, December 31, 2011,
will now arrive while Republicans control a Congress that might
conceivably, under Democrats, have been shamed into insisting on its
right to finally end that war. Republicans and their friends at the Washington Post
are now arguing avidly for the continuation of existing wars in the way
their side always argues, by pushing the envelope and demanding so much
more -- such as a war on Iran -- that the existing level of madness
comes to seem positively sane.

The most silvery of possible silver linings here may lie in the
possibility of a reborn peace movement. George W. Bush's new memoir
actually reveals the surprising strength the peace movement had achieved
by 2006. In that year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY),
who was publicly denouncing any opposition to war, privately urged
Bush to bring troops out of Iraq before the congressional elections.
But that was the last year in which the interests of the peace movement
were aligned with those of groups and funders that take their lead from
the Democratic Party.

In November 2008, the last of the major funders of the peace movement
took their checkbooks and departed. Were they at long last to take
this moment to build the opposite of Fox News and the Tea Party, a
machine independent of political parties pushing an agenda of peace and
justice, anything would be possible.