If You’re Confused By Democrat Rhetoric On Iraq…
…it’s probably not your fault.
Case in point, Senator Carl Levin’s appearance with Tim Russert on Meet The Press yesterday. He started out the interview with this statement about Democrat plans for Iraq:
SEN. LEVIN: Hopefully, we’re going to come up with a resolution which is going to modify, in effect, the previous resolution, which was very broad, told the president that he had authority to do basically whatever he wanted to in Iraq, and to come up with wording which would modify that broad resolution and broad authority so that we would be in a supporting role, rather than a in combat role, in Iraq. Things have changed in Iraq. We don’t believe that it’s going to be possible to remove all of our troops from Iraq because there’s going to be a limited purpose that they’re going to need to serve, including a training, continued training of the Iraqi army, support for logistics in the Iraqi army, a counterterrorism purpose or a mission because there’s about 5,000 al-Qaida in Iraq. So we want to—we want to transform, or we want to modify that earlier resolution to more limited purpose. That is our goal. We hope to pick up some Republicans; we don’t know if we will. But the final drafting is going on this weekend.
Sort of vague, no? I mean, we get that he wants to take the power to define the mission in Iraq away from the President and bestow it to Congress, but aside from buzzwords and talking points there’s not a lot of details there. Russert later tries to pin Levin down on some specifics:
MR. RUSSERT: Will you set a goal for withdrawing combat troops?
SEN. LEVIN: We would. We would follow basically the pattern which was set or proposed by the Iraq Study Group, which was to set a goal for the removal of combat troops, as you put it correctly, by March of next year.
MR. RUSSERT: So how many troops would that be, of March of next year, would be taken out?
SEN. LEVIN: We don’t have a specific number, nor did the study group. But it would be most, that there would be a limited number of troops that would be left.
MR. RUSSERT: So out of 150,000, we would take out how many?
SEN. LEVIN: I would say most.
So Levin wants to take most of the troops out of Iraq. Yet, later he says this:
MR. RUSSERT: What would be left behind?
SEN. LEVIN: It would be a limited number, which would…
MR. RUSSERT: Ten thousand, 20,000?
SEN. LEVIN: I don’t want to put a specific number on it because that really should be left to the commanders who decide how many would be needed to carry out those limited functions.
Left to the commanders.
Yet, according to the U.S. Constitution, the commander-in-chief of the military is none of other than President Bush. But something tells me that Levin isn’t in favor of letting President Bush make this decision, Constitution be damned.
So then what exactly is he proposing here? That we ignore the chain of military command established in the Constitution, freeze the President out of the process, and let this decision be made by the commanders on the ground? Well, the commander on the ground now in Iraq, by unanimous appointment of the Senate (including Sen. Levin), is General David Petraeus. The man who authored the surge strategy currently being implemented in Iraq. The very strategy Levin and his fellow Democrats are seeking to oppose.
Which statement from Levin’s lips are we supposed to believe? The one where he says that we should pull most of the troops out of Iraq or the one where he says that we should let people like Genera Petraeus, who supports the surge, set troop levels? Seems like the Senator (and most of his fellow Democrats) either a) are confused about their own Iraq policy or b) are talking out of both sides of their mouths.
And above all of this there is still to be considered the President’s constitutional role as commander-in-chief of the military. The Constitution clearly indicates that Congress authorizes and funds wars while the President prosecutes them. I don’t see anywhere in that document where Congress has the power to tell the President how to prosecute a war and how many troops he can use.
