home > by publication type > daily analysis > On Iraq, the Gauntlet is Thrown
Email
| Prepared by: | CFR.org Staff |
|---|
Democrats say their plan will extricate U.S. troops from Iraq. (AP/Marko Drobnjakovic)
After years of facing relatively few obstacles to his Iraq policies from the legislative branch, President George W. Bush now confronts dual resolutions (WashPost) from both chambers of Congress demanding an end to combat operations there sometime next year. The Senate on Thursday voted 51-47 (USA Today) to set a goal of March 31, 2008 for ending U.S. combat operations in Iraq. That measure is still not as strong as the previous week’s House bill imposing deadlines for troop withdrawals, which the Christian Science Monitor called “one of the toughest antiwar measures ever passed during ongoing combat.” The president has vowed to veto either legislation. But it definitively ends a period that began with a vote in 2002 to grant Bush broad warmaking powers during which Congress has deferred to the executive.
The president and his mostly Republican supporters have argued the “surge” of over twenty thousand new U.S. troops into the country has not had time to prove itself, with only half of the forces deployed. Bush says the consequences of legislation with a timetable for pullout would be disastrous. “Our enemies in Iraq would simply have to mark their calendars,” he said. An update from Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service says Baghdad’s death rate is down (PDF), but bombings in “belts” around the capital and area provinces like Diyalah are up. The latest large-scale attack, in Tal Afar, prompted vicious Shiite reprisals (Times Online) against Sunnis in a town that Bush once held up as a model of the progress made in stabilizing Iraq.
Democrats calling for a troop withdrawal have been propelled in part by consistently negative public-opinion polling on the war. That includes a Pew poll this week indicating a majority of Americans want their representatives in Congress to support the House measure calling for a withdrawal of forces by August 2008. Now, the advancing legislation in Congress will fuel a new debate over whether it has finally owned up to its obligations (WashTimes) or is vastly overreaching itself (USA Today). Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein writes neither Congress nor the president can impose their terms on the other, but Bush must reach out to Democratic congressional leaders to restore public support for the course of the war. CFR Senior Fellow Peter Beinert argues in TIME that the Democrats are right, in the policy sense and politically, to force this debate. Tactically, both the White House and leading Democrats are mindful of the 1995 showdown between President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress, in which the president shifted blame for a budget impasse (WSJ) on Republicans.
The Center for American Progress offers examples of congressional checks on presidential wartime powers dating to the Vietnam War. Neil Kinkopf, an associate law professor at Georgia State University, writes that the Iraq war authorization was broad enough to cover President Bush’s surge plan but since the war has been conducted under false premises, congressional approval is needed for an escalation. On the other hand, the Department of Justice asserted in a memo shortly after 9/11 that the constitution envisioned the commander-in-chief with greater powers. “The Framers expected that the process for warmaking would be far more flexible, and capable of quicker, more decisive action, than the legislative process,” the memo said. John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute predicts Bush will prevail in a veto fight and the Democrats are likely to lose arguments that Bush was obstructing funding for the troops. “The course of the war in Iraq,” Fortier writes, “will be determined more by the election results (The Hill) in November of 2008 than by the 2007 supplemental vote.”
Iraq Study Group Report | Council Special Report: After the Surge
Weigh in on this issue by emailing CFR.org.
To order Task Force reports, Council Special Reports, and Critical Policy Choices, please call, fax, or order online from our distributor, the Brookings Institution Press: phone +1.800.537.5487, fax +1.410.516.6998.
For information on other reports that are not for sale, or for general publications information, please call +1.212.434.9516 or email publications@cfr.org.
Start-Up Nation addresses the trillion-dollar question: How is it that Israel—a country of 7.1 million, only sixty years old, surrounded by enemies— produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the UK? With the insights of geopolitical experts and investors, the authors examine this nation’s adversity-driven culture to answer this question and offer prescriptions for a global economy on the rebound.
In Forces of Fortune, Vali Nasr presents a paradigm-changing revelation that will transform the understanding of the Muslim world at large. He reveals that there is a vital but unseen rising force in the Islamic world—a new business-minded middle class—that is building a vibrant new Muslim world economy and that holds the key to winning the cold war against Iran and extremists.
In Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Julia E. Sweig presents a remarkably accessible portrait of Cuba's unique place on the world stage over the past fifty years, including its internal politics, its often fraught relationship with the United States, and its shifting relationship with the global community.
Complete list of CFR Books
The report of this bipartisan Task Force of distinguished leaders and experts represents a strong consensus on the importance of repairing America's immigration policy. It makes the case that maintaining America's political and economic leadership depends on attracting talented and hard-working immigrants, and on securing the country's borders in a smart, effective, and humane way.
This report finds that nuclear weapons will remain a fundamental element of U.S. national security in the near term, and makes recommendations on how to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. deterrent nuclear force, prevent nuclear terrorism, and strengthen the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
About Independent Task Forces at CFR
Complete list of Task Force reports
Identifying international threats and acting on them may be the most difficult job for U.S. policymakers. This report
provides an actionable road map for managing international threats before they erupt into crises and makes a strong case that preventive action is not a luxury but a necessity.
For more than a decade, the United States has mostly watched from the sidelines as Asian countries organize themselves into an alphabet soup of new multilateral groups. In this report, the authors review the relationship between pan-Asian and trans-Pacific institutions and suggest policy guidelines for a new U.S. approach to this new Asian landscape.
Complete list of Council Special Reports
To request permission to reprint or reuse CFR material, please fill out this permissions request form (PDF), referring to the instructions on page 1.
Copyright 2009 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All Rights Reserved.