William Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general who was head of Army intelligence, Reagan’s director of the National Security Agency, and a professor at Yale, has taken a leading role in criticizing the president’s Iraq war policy. A few months ago, he wrote a devastating op-ed for the WaPo, debunking several pernicious myths bolstering war supporters’ arguments.
This week, Odom follows up with a piece documenting the stunning strain the Bush administration’s policies have put on U.S. troops.
If the Democrats truly want to succeed in forcing President Bush to begin withdrawing from Iraq, the first step is to redefine “supporting the troops” as withdrawing them, citing the mass of accumulating evidence of the psychological as well as the physical damage that the president is forcing them to endure because he did not raise adequate forces. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress could confirm this evidence and lay the blame for “not supporting the troops” where it really belongs — on the president. And they could rightly claim to the public that they are supporting the troops by cutting off the funds that he uses to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. […]
To force [Bush] to begin a withdrawal before [the end of his second term], the first step should be to rally the public by providing an honest and candid definition of what “supporting the troops” really means and pointing out who is and who is not supporting our troops at war. The next step should be a flat refusal to appropriate money for to be used in Iraq for anything but withdrawal operations with a clear deadline for completion.
The final step should be to put that president on notice that if ignores this legislative action and tries to extort Congress into providing funds by keeping U.S. forces in peril, impeachment proceeding will proceed in the House of Representatives. Such presidential behavior surely would constitute the “high crime” of squandering the lives of soldiers and Marines for his own personal interest.
I’m not quite sure keeping troops in Iraq is an impeachable offense — Congress did authorize and fund the war — but Odom’s broader point about what it means to “support the troops” is more noteworthy.
I’m just not sure he’s right about how to win the argument.
Spencer Ackerman recently explained that the notion Odom is advocating — one can prove their support for men and women in uniform by getting them out of Iraq — doesn’t actually work with the troops themselves.
Haunted by Vietnam, Democrats are determined to express support for the troops. This is admirable. The truth of the matter, however, is this: many troops in Iraq, perhaps even most of them, want to stay and fight. […]
Democrats have made the decision — rightly, I think — that withdrawing from Iraq is the least bad of many bad options. But they shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking that a majority of the troops doing the fighting agree with them. For soldiers like Lieutenant Wellman, this will be hard to accept. As he told me of war doubters back home, “I don’t want them to just support the troops. I want them to support the mission.” This matters, because pretending that in ending the war they’re doing the troops a favor hurts Democrats politically. They risk looking condescending, and, worse, oblivious — which has the broader effect of undermining public trust in the Democrats to handle national security. More basically, it does a disservice to those who serve. For soldiers who are optimistic, being told that the war can’t be won is bad enough. But to be told that politicians are doing them a favor by extricating them from a mission they believe in is downright insulting.
So what’s the preferable argument? Like Kevin Drum, I recommend telling the truth: the war in Iraq is undermining our national security interests, creating more terrorists, making the Middle East less stable and more dangerous.
To be clear, I don’t think Odom’s wrong on the facts — the strain the president is putting on the troops is a disgrace. Bush and Cheney, both of whom avoided military duty in a time of war, haven’t expressed any interest at all in what this conflict is doing to the Americans who volunteer for duty and their families.
But therein lies the rub: if the White House could somehow figure out a way to shorten troop deployments, treat PTSD, provide equipment and body armor, and give the troops longer breaks, the current war policy would still be awful.
Dems obviously should continue to support measures that help those who serve in the Armed Forces — and for several years now, they’ve done a hell of a lot better job than the GOP — but in terms of changing the policy, “supporting the troops” isn’t enough. We need to “support the superior policy,” too.