Senators Reid, Levin and Durbin offered an amendment to the defense authorization bill, calling for a definite plan on Iraq, and the Republicans did their best to quickly amend that and claim it as their own.
"The Democratic call for a timetable for withdrawal was excised from the GOP version, a statement that 'United States military forces should not stay in Iraq indefinitely' was changed to say that they should not be there 'any longer than necessary,' and the first report, required in 30 days by the Democratic amendment, would be required 90 days after enactment of the defense authorization measure under the GOP plan."
As Harry Reid pointed out in the news conference, the change from "not stay in Iraq indefinitely" to "any longer than necessary" is substantive and unacceptable. Why? Well, not only is the Republican version open-ended, it doesn't address whose "necessity" is going to be served. Since the majority of Iraqis don't think the American military presence is necessary in the first place, it seems rather obvious that this is a ploy to hang on to the notion that the national interest of the United States is going to make the deployment of military assets necessary for several decades.
The double negative in the Democratic verbiage, "not indefinitely," in effect calls for a definite withdrawal, and not just as Chalabi suggested the other day, to the permanent missile bases the U.S. is busily constructing. Attaching this verbiage to the authorization measure (a bill that tells the accounting departments that it's OK to spend the money for the things outlined in the budget) is also significant. Because, if the U.S. is going to withdraw all its military in a relatively short period of time, then those bases won't have to be built and the money won't have to be spent. Indeed, it might even be possible to re-program the money that was secretly spent on the base at al-Udeid and take care of domestic needs, like the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast.
Well done, Sentors Reid, Levin and Durbin.
Posted by Hannah at November 15, 2005 05:12 AM