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Budget showdowns have a way of inspiring leaders to predict national calamity should their side not prevail. In 1995, some Clinton allies warned that the elderly would be forced to eat dog food if the government shut down. Now President Bush and Republicans warn that troops are at risk of assorted deprivations because Democrats passed House and Senate funding bills tied to withdrawal from Iraq in 2008. Bush is sure to veto them. He's right that without congressional funding, military operations would eventually have to be scaled back. But calamity is not exactly imminent. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service...
...Democrats' strategy is politically risky. Bush is deeply unpopular, and so is the Iraq war. But Americans remain understandably sensitive to troop needs. Which is why experts at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal-leaning think tank, are busy supplying congressional leaders with ideas for a postveto compromise. The most promising notion--funding the war in three-month tranches, no withdrawal timetables attached--would allow opponents of Bush's policy to "gradually ratchet up the pressure" on Bush, says CAP senior fellow Brian Katulis, while avoiding an all-or-nothing showdown. After all, the Feed and Forage...
...Guard forces normally report to their state's governor, and are often used for national disasters at home. But they can be federalized - and become part of the deployed overseas Army - if needed. It's one thing for such part-time troops to be called to action in the early days of a military campaign, when the gung-ho spirit and patriotism are at their peak. But it's quite another to be sending these people with established careers and lives outside the military back to Iraq in the war's fifth year. Because former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld kept...
...fighting in Diwaniyah and the strident call to arms by Sadr on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad appear to signal the end of an uneasy truce between U.S. forces and the Mahdi army that emerged at the beginning of the U.S. troop surge into Baghdad. For a time it seemed that Sadr, who ordered his militia to stand down in Baghdad as the U.S. upped its presence, would indeed cooperate with the U.S. effort. U.S. commanders rightly claimed that the body count in Baghdad has dropped. But Sadr's patience with U.S. forces seems to have come...
...most troubling sign of gathering clouds was a statement from firebrand Shi'a leader Moqtada al-Sadr that was read at Kufa mosque south of Baghdad. Al-Sadr, still believed to be in Iran waiting out the troop surge, renewed his demand that the "occupier leave our land." He criticized "evil" President Bush for invading Iraq in the name of keeping America safe without thinking of the cost in Iraqi blood. Four years after the U.S. came to Iraq, he said, the country's leaders are "fighting over offices" while Iraq is "still without water, has no electricity, no fuel...