'Hell, No' To The Surge

Isaiah J. Poole

January 10, 2007

President Bush reached a new low of disregard for the will of the American people, and disrespect for the lives of the people who are fighting and dying under his command, in his speech Wednesday night calling for more troops to Iraq. There is only one correct response to this plan: “Hell, no.”

In fact, we must have a “Hell, no” response of a scale that eventually ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam—public outrage in the streets as well as political wrath in the halls of Congress. One vehicle for that response is a grassroots surge against the Bush escalation of the Iraq occupation beginning today, organized by the Win Without War coalition and MoveOn.org. The groups have a Web site, AmericaSaysNo.org , that is a focal point for demonstrations and other actions against the Bush war policy. (The Campaign For America’s Future is a partner in this effort.) On Thursday, a new Americans Against Escalation in Iraq coalition will be announced to help lead resistance against Bush’s war policy. 

Congress must also assert its constitutional prerogative and say that it will not fund an escalation of this war.

Fortunately, initial comments by leading Democrats after President Bush made his speech showed that they have heard the voters who elected them when they said they want our troops out of the misbegotten invasion of Iraq. "Escalation of the war in Iraq is not the change the American people called for in the last election," Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in a statement after the president's speech, adding that "it is time to begin the orderly redeployment of our troops so that they can begin coming home soon.” But words are not enough. Democrats should not stop at the nonbinding resolution they plan to put to a vote later this month; the right wing that lusted after this war and has until now milked it ruthlessly for political advantage is not only unmoved by reason but will, as it always has, distort principled disagreement into a political weapon.

President Bush far exceeded his authority in the first place by launching the invasion based on false intelligence and on the fallacy that the invasion would protect the American homeland from terrorism. A right-dominated Congress gave the administration a blank check in 2003 and then acquiesced as the administration cashed that check for an amount far higher than what many members of Congress and the American public had intended. We then watched as the administration made miscalculation after miscalculation, and it became increasingly clear that the neocon architects of the war had no idea what they were getting the country into. We counted the dead U.S. soldiers—3,018 at the moment President Bush was speaking. We watched critical national priorities get shortchanged because of the billions of dollars and countless amount of energy and attention diverted by this ill-conceived enterprise.

Congressional Democrats should use the marker set by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Tuesday in a speech at the National Press Club. Kennedy and Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., are sponsoring legislation that would say, as Kennedy put it, “that no additional troops can be sent and no additional dollars can be spent on such an escalation, unless and until Congress approves the President’s plan.”

He went on to say:

The American people sent a clear message in November that we must change course in Iraq and begin to withdraw our troops, not escalate their presence. The way to start is by acting on the President’s new plan. An escalation, whether it is called a surge or any other name, is still an escalation, and I believe it would be an immense new mistake. It would compound the original misguided decision to invade Iraq. We cannot simply speak out against an escalation of troops in Iraq. We must act to prevent it.

Congress is perfectly capable of drafting a law that would allow for an orderly withdrawal of troops from Iraq, with adequate funding for their protection and support. Given the consensus from military generals that adding 20,000 more U.S. troops to the quagmire in Iraq is more likely to worsen conditions there than to improve them, this is the only prudent choice. If there are procedural barriers, well, Democrats should simply take a page from the Republicans, who in the 12 years they were in the majority never allowed process to get in the way of a political objective that they wanted badly enough. There can be no higher purpose for doing so.

Bush’s speech reflected a breathtaking audacity, suggesting that the American public should throw more lives on the pyre of his Middle East policy for a “victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved” and an Iraq “that will not be perfect”—all the while saber-rattling against Iran and Syria. Under the guise of a new-found humility—“Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me”—Bush continued his pattern of arrogance and deception, claiming, for example, that he “consulted” with Democrats in Congress when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that they were merely “notified.”

That is not the behavior we expect of a president who is accountable to the American people. If we want our elections to matter, if we are to be a republic instead of a dictatorship, if our system of checks and balances is to have any meaning, then we the people must get louder — in our streets, our town squares, our houses of worship and the floors of the House and Senate — to say, “No more troops in Iraq. Bring them home, now.”