Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) unveiled a non-binding resolution condemning the president’s policy. It was followed by Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) resolution that would cap troop numbers on January 16 levels. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) unveiled her own resolution, requiring the president to get Congress’ permission before sending additional troops. Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) went further than all of them.
Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, one of the most prominent Democrats in the 2008 presidential field, proposed for the first time setting a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq, as part of a broader plan aimed at bolstering the freshman senator’s foreign policy credentials.
Obama’s legislation, offered on the Senate floor last night, would remove all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008. The date falls within the parameters offered by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended the removal of combat troops by the first quarter of next year.
“The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close,” Obama said in his speech. “It is time for us to fundamentally change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back.”
I’ve always been a fan of deadlines for Iraqis, because they tend to work. When Iraqis were given a deadline for creating a constitution, they met it. When they were given a deadline for provisional elections, they met that, too. When they were given a deadline for parliamentary elections, they met that, too. Deadlines create a sense of urgency and prompt action — they’re the opposite of an open-ended commitment.
With this in mind, I’m inclined to like the basic structure of Obama’s “Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007.” Escalation would be cancelled. Withdrawals would begin in May, but would leave some forces in Iraq to conduct counterterrorism activities and train Iraqi forces. If Iraqis wanted to prevent withdrawal, they’d have to meet a series of fairly specific benchmarks.
There are, however, some practical concerns.
Kevin Drum argues that Congress has some choices here: “Congress can declare war, it has certain military rulemaking powers, and it can fund and defund a war. But that’s it.” Obama’s plan, therefore, isn’t within Congress’ purview.
Like it or not, Congress simply doesn’t have the power to manage specific operational aspects of a war. Big Tent Democrat made the case for this a couple of weeks ago, and I think it’s pretty convincing.
Now, this is not a problem. Anyone who seriously wants us to withdraw from Iraq merely needs to introduce legislation defunding the war. Even Dick Cheney agrees that Congress can do this. But Obama’s description of his legislation very carefully avoids any mention of funding other than to explicitly say that it “does not affect the funding for our troops in Iraq.” (Italics mine.) Without that, he must know that his legislation is almost certainly futile.
For the defense, we have Mark Kleiman, with the opposite take.
[I]f I read Obama’s statement correctly, he means that it won’t reduce funding for troops currently in Iraq; it will forbid adding new ones, and it will mandate a systematic withdrawal by a date certain. Clearly the Congress has the power to limit not only funding but troop levels, and it has the power to order the Pentagon to plan and execute a withdrawal.
Congress’s inability to control operations in detail stems from its lack of capacity, not any Constitutional limitation. That’s the brilliance of the Obama plan: it puts the operational responsibility where it belongs, but it dictates an endpoint.
Kleiman adds that Obama’s approach “provides a legally binding and administratively and tactically feasible process for doing the job: a cap on troop strength now, a requirement that the Pentagon prepare a withdrawal strategy that gets our combat troops out by March of next year, with a Presidential option to come back to Congress for a relaxation of that deadline, if the Iraqis hit certain targets.” It also “allows Bush and Petraeus to approach al-Maliki as the good cops to the Democrats’ bad cops.”
I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I tend to lean more towards Kleiman’s interpretation.
But even if we accept Kevin’s argument, there’s the political angle to consider, which I think works very well in Obama’s favor. Republicans argue that Dems aren’t willing to offer a substantive plan of their own. Dems argue that presidential aspirants should step up and offer a forceful opposition to the president’s policy. Obama’s plan does both.
Good for him. There’s also a video clip of Obama talking about his proposal on the Senate floor yesterday.