The fence is too rotten to support my weight

My last post highlighting commentary by Kagro X might lead some to the conclusion that I am of the opinion that the resolutions to end the Occupation of Iraq that were passed by the House and Senate were the best legislation for the job.

This is not so.

While the bills in question do call for a withdrawal by a named date in 2008, they also allocate $20b more than the Shrub requested for 2008, and they provide for an additional $50b for military operations in 2009.

Arthur has written about this disappointing, maddening turn of events here, citing powerful commentary by Matt Taibbi:

As for everyone else -- specifically, the Democrats who sponsored and passed the timetable measure -- they benefited from the bill most directly, riding a crest of antiwar sentiment and setting the Democrats up as the party that will look the best in the eyes of frustrated, war-fatigued voters in 2008. But lost amid all of this antiwar posturing were a series of inconvenient truths. One was that the bill was always going to be meaningless because Bush was always going to veto it, there were never going to be enough votes to override the veto, and everybody knew there were never going to be enough votes to override the veto. The second is that the timetable measure was buried in an emergency spending bill to pay for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a bill that ended up authorizing $122 billion in spending when the supposedly evil, warmongering, politically isolated Bush White House only asked for $103 billion. In other words, the outwardly combative Democratic leadership not only refused to do anything substantive to bring the troops home, it actually tossed Bush an extra $20 billion or for the war effort without prodding.

In my visits to Washington in the past few months I've heard different stories from Democratic congressional aides about what the party's intentions are. Some say they think the leadership is just going to stall and pass a bunch of non-binding, symbolic, Kumbayah horseshit to help propel whoever the Democratic candidate is into the White House two years from now. Others claim with a straight face that all of these non-binding resolutions are only a start, that the strategy is to really end the war via a death-by-a-thousand-cuts type of legislative grind, with the leadership sending to the floor bill after bill after bill designed to eat away at either war policy or war funding. They claim that all of these votes are exercises in coalition-building, necessary steps to gathering the support needed to pass real biting measures later on.

Dave Lindorff:

Despite polls showing that 6 in 10 Americans want the U.S. out of Iraq asap, the best that this crew can come up with is a call-not binding, or course-for the president to pull out the troops by next spring or even summer. That would be over a year from now, and more than five years (!) into this criminal and incredibly stupid war.

At the rate things have been going, it would also be perhaps 1000 more dead Americans, 14,000 more gravely wounded Americans, and 100-150,000 more dead Iraqis later.

This is not exactly the legacy I thought we had stumbled upon last November. More and more I'm coming to realize that Arthur's thoughts on the Democrat's predilection for imperialistic policies dating back to Woodrow Wilson (which are in many ways worse than those of Republicans--mainly because they are much more competent about executing those policies and achieving maximum results):

In effect, Democrats (and many liberal and progressive bloggers) would have you believe that something like the Iraq disaster would never occur if the Democrats were in charge.

This is flatly false. It is a lie offered for the least admirable and most petty of ignoble partisan motives. The Democrats would have you forget Woodrow Wilson and World War I, and the century of conflict to which our entrance into that war led (and the effects of which still play out in the Middle East and beyond today); they would have you forget Vietnam, which parallels the Iraq catastrophe in ways beyond counting -- and they would have you forget the Balkans and Kosovo.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that there aren't any candidates out there who will be around after the primaries worth even considering, and yet one of them will be in the White House trying to figure out the next chapter in this whole sordid mess on 1/20/09. How far the conflaguration has spread by then God only knows, and even that entity may have averted its eyes from the mess we may have made of things by then.

UPDATE 31 MAR 07:

In an interview with Think Progress Mike Gravel has plenty to say about this:

I think it’s ridiculous legislation. Truthfully, truthfully. Here, when they’re talking about getting out of Iraq next year, what about the people that die between now and then when they know they’re going to get out? What about the families of those people that going to get killed between now and then? We need to get out now.

A year from now isn’t going to make it any better. And I have my suspicions that — whether Democrats or Republicans — they’re not going to get out of Iraq, even after the election. I don’t care who’s elected.