Lost in the News: Pentagon just defied Congress on Iraq!
Wed Jul 13, 2005 at 12:49:29 AM PDT
That's the trouble with big stories like Rove, things like this get lost in the frenzy.
The report to Congress, due yesterday, was required under the $80 billion war spending legislation approved in May. It is intended to help answer one of the most pressing questions hanging over the American-led occupation: when the United States might be able to begin drawing down the estimated 140,000 forces in Iraq.(emphasis mine)
This is the kind of thing that can bring down ruling parties. Not as splashy as outright treason, but just as able to get the job done.
More on the flip.
The fit has hit the shan in the Pentagon.
The Pentagon yesterday maintained that it is still compiling the report, but did not say when it would be complete.
The war spending legislation, approved by both houses of Congress, stipulated that ''the administration must develop and provide to the Congress a more comprehensive set of performance indicators and measures of stability and security in Iraq than is currently available."
It calls for ''detailed descriptions" of how the Pentagon will measure the security environment, political stability, and economic progress and how it will assess the capabilities and readiness of Iraqi security forces, including military and police, to take over the mission now performed by US-led forces. The report must also include ''an assessment of US military requirements, including planned force rotations, through the end of calendar year 2006," according to the instructions from Congress. The Pentagon is providing updates to Congress every three months until Oct. 1, 2006.
The Army, meanwhile, also delayed the scheduled release of a study about the impact of the extended deployment, which officials said raises new questions about its ability to respond to other trouble spots around the world.
Any person with more then two braincells to rub together can figure out why they're stalling on this.
It doesn't take a genius to do the math on the troop levels. Bush dug into the reserves so deeply that he's hit the bottom of the barrel and scraped it clean. There are NOT ENOUGH TROOPS LEFT for further rotation into the combat zones in 2006 under current deployment rules. Almost 9,000 troops have been killed or crippled from both theatres of operations. Coupled with the drop in recruitment and the expected flow out of disgruntled troops sick of stop-loss and being away from their families and regular lives, its a deep hole that's just being dug deeper by Bush and the GOP.
But Bush's Pentagon just crossed a red line when it failed to deliver this critical report to Congress.
Defying the people who control the purse strings is always a bad idea.
The trick is getting the televised media to notice it.
[Edit]
The reason this is so important on the political front is that this effectively is an attack on Congress's powers. If the Pentagon is allowed to successfully defy them on this report, it will have implications that go far beyond this session of the body. Republicans Legislators are in this for the long term, they won't take such an attack by Bush on their own fiefdoms lightly...especially when it offers so many juicy soundbites for the Democrats. If anything can get the Republican Senators up in arms against Bush, its a direct threat to themselves.
[Edit 2]
Additionally there is also the matter of the next time Bush and Rumsfield come running to Congress for the next off the books appropriation for Iraq and Afghanistan. Somehow I get the feeling they're going to have a LOT harder time explaining it to an unsympathetic panel of Senators.
Permalink | 125 comments