xTYBALTx

Kero -

The Congress does indeed have the power to cut "Iraq War Funds" specifically.


NorCal -

Actually, Luttwak does not in any way recommend stabilizing Iraq prior to pulling out. He recommends pulling out now. He discusses this in a bit more detail in this Google Video presentation:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...3335&q=luttwak

Much of the video concerns Iran. If you want to skip straight to the Iraq war section, head to about twenty minutes in. Watch the whole video if you can though -Luttwak is if nothing else a provocative and fascinating character.

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AMosely

To oversimplify this, you get your troops out of an occupied country with a staged withdrawal. The grounds for such a withdrawal in Iraq have been in place for years. Withdraw to the green zone (which for a time was pretty much the case) and begin a sad and bitter retreat that will undoubetedly leave Iraq in chaos and the US in a foul position both domestically and internationally (not that it isn't already).

It gets sticky when the topic turns to any kind of 'stabilization' or 'security.' Right now I don't see much hope for this in Iraq unless the UN wants to commit another 100k troops in addition to the US force. The country is a shambles, and the US is to blame for this due to their imperial hubris and Rumsfeld's underhanded 'minimalist' strategy that degraded into outright denial. Iraq was, by and large, better off under Hussein. The world was better off. This is not the fault of the forces on the ground - they are doing the best that they possibly can. The blame lies squarely with an executive administration that seems shamefully hellbent on avoiding it. I understand that these conjectures are debatable, yet these are my conclusions.

I can only hope that the next American president will turn their attention to domestic security, which was equally (if not moreso) simultaneously botched and financially depleted by Bush's administration. What is your current impression of the Department of Homeland Security and its underlying departments - FEMA, Coast Guard, TSA? Is the nation prepared for disaster?

CingularDuality

Funny that you mention some of the smallest agencies within DHS. Nobody ever mentions the major agencies within the department...

The nation is more prepared than it was ten years ago, that's for sure. But it's not as prepared as the government would like you to believe. I think that seeing Katrina did more for the individual readiness of our nation than anything else. People don't want that to happen to them, regardless of the emergency.

As for my impression of DHS? This should sum it up: http://bestplacestowork.org/BPTW/rankings/

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AMosely

What are the larger ones? The only others I can think of are customs, immigration and the secret service.

(hijack warning)
Speaking of DHS, did anyone see the 60 minutes piece on the Coast Guard last night? Ouch. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on rendering a signficant portion of their ocean-going fleet unseaworthy.

Kerostasis

In case the thread title was misleading, I'm pretty sure the topic under discussion is not "how do we logistically withdraw from Iraq (with/without causing chaos)", but rather, "given that the man in charge of the army refuses to order a withdrawal at all, what legal options do we have to over-ride him?"

The best answer to that is still "elect a new President".

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El_Gringo_Grande

Yes.

But does that imply the following.

We elect an evil president that gets us in a war the first couple of months. Then he flatly says "We will not withdraw our troops while I am president."

Can anything be done legally? Can the president be impeached for simply being impossible and or evil? If not, would that mean the nation would be at war for 4 years without recourse short of overthrowing of the government and or military leadership disobeying orders?

This is all hypothetical but I am curious.

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I’m not racists, I have republican friends. Radio show host.
- "The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity". -Jacob Burkhardt
- "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Emerson
- "People should not be afraid of it's government, government should be afraid of it's People." - Line from V for Vendetta
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Kerostasis

Impeachment is technically always an option. Its just that impeachment requires a much larger majority than you are likely to find in most cases. If you had a President that everyone agreed was evil, as in your example, then yes, he would likely be impeached and replaced with someone else who would hopefully be more reasonable.

However, if you had a President who was agreed to be evil by everyone in the opposite party, that probably wouldn't be enough to impeach him. A simple majority isn't enough to override the President's authority to dictate military policy.

Now, there is a constitutional requirement that only Congress can authorize a Declaration of War. But if we are in a foreign country with permission of the local government, its hard to make the case that we need a Declaration of War to remain there.

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Tarenth

I believe after Vietnam congress put a tight seal on the military and war powers of the president so they don't start a war unilaterally by invading a country.

Easiest would be to say "We're no longer at war with Iraq. You have 30 days to get our troops out of there or you will be in violation of the law"

Of course that would involve congress admitting they were wrong to give the president the authority to do military operations in a country we are not at war with. To the layperson that would look very bad and mean a lot of hate from their voters and possible removal from office depending on how bad the mud slinging gets.

Right now both Congress and the President are trying to save face by any means possible. Congress is trying to work with the President by passing him a bill to get the troops out instead of ordering him to get them out so it looks like a joint effort. The President doesn't want to look like he made a mistake and is trying to keep troops in so Congress can't claim it was their idea to pull out of what he made.


I think the only act that will redeem the current heads of state right now in my eyes is if they just calmly explained the facts to the average american without trying to color things to show how baddly we screwed up.

"After several years of fighting in Iraq we have decided to remove out military presence from the country. War? What war? We were never at war with Iraq because there was no formal declaration from Congress. We just gave the President authority to invade a country and remove its leadership because it was beligerant to US interest in the area. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I guess it really wasn't since we were chasing assumptions."

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Kerostasis

Tarenth, we aren't at war with Iraq now. I don't mean in some technical "we forgot to get a formal declaration of war" type way, I mean we are allied with Iraq right now. The government of Iraq has publicly stated that they want us to stay for the forseeable future. (Granted the "forseeable future" in Iraq is pretty short...)

So declaring that "We are no longer at war with Iraq" is a pretty meaningless statement. It wouldn't do anything to force the President to pull out.

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xTYBALTx

Your scenario is not actually all that hypothetical. President Johnson was almost uniformly despised by Congress and went through two impeachment attempts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_...5.E2.80.931869

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El_Gringo_Grande

Hmmm. And if you impeached and then convicted the President this forcing him/her from office the Vice-President is left. And he/she could be even more evil than the president.

The more I think about it the more I agree with the founding fathers. Standing army bad, militia good.

__________________
Sen. John McCain (AZ) For President '08
---
I’m not racists, I have republican friends. Radio show host.
- "The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity". -Jacob Burkhardt
- "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Emerson
- "People should not be afraid of it's government, government should be afraid of it's People." - Line from V for Vendetta
- If software were as unreliable as economic theory, there wouldn't be a plane made of anything other than paper that could get off the ground. Jim Fawcette

ScratchMonkey

How did we disengage from Europe following WWII? How long did that take? (One could argue that we stayed for the whole Cold War, of course. But we didn't leave our entire force there for that.)

Kerostastis, it's now possible to elect a Republican President to extract us from Iraq. There's an outspoken candidate who's strongly against continued involvement.

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MajWood

We are still in both Europe and Japan.


I think we should be looking at how to get our troops home after winning the peace . no matter how you feel about this "war" in Iraq, we are there. We should do what it takes to get Iraq stable, then come home.Not before then. That is how I think we should get our troops out of Iraq.

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NorCalRoach

So here's the short end of it, a couple of people elluded to the point, but let me summarize as simple as possible:
1. Congress authorized the president to go to war with Irag,
2. Technically, congress is an administrative body with budget and lawmaking responsibilities.
3. Once congress gave the president the green light, the president as commander in chief calls the shots- keep the war going or stop- it's up to him at this point going forward,
4. If congress want to end the war, they only have two options after that: a) do what they tried to do by strong arming the president with budgetary pressures, or b) initiate an impeachment process.

A buddy told me that there is a sunset clause on how long the president is authorized to conduct the war. Once that term ends, congress has the responsibility to a re-evaluation the president's war/anti-terrorist campaign. I'm still trying to find out if its true or when the sunset clause takes affect.

Bottom line is it's the presidents ball game. And, as many of you probably heard, congress recently passed a budget w/o time limits so that's that.

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snooggums

We are allied with a government we set up by overthrowing the previous government? How convenient.

If we aren't at war then the congress has 100% authority to pull funding for military projects, just like they do when we are at war. If the president isn't being funded he needs to pull out. The president executes the orders of congress, he does not get the power to act on his own will all of the time no matter how much he states he has that ability.