The New York Times

April 23, 2007

A Hostage Situation

By PAUL KRUGMAN

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and
the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend
that it's a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it
really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush,
barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for
innocent bystanders - the troops - if his demands aren't met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would
clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a
timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust
Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job handling the situation in
Iraq.

But this isn't a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn't really trying
to win the argument on the merits. He's just betting that the people
outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those
innocent bystanders.

What's at stake right now is the latest Iraq "supplemental." Since the
beginning, the administration has refused to put funding for the war in
its regular budgets. Instead, it keeps saying, in effect: "Whoops!
Whaddya know, we're running out of money. Give us another $87 billion."

At one level, this is like the behavior of an irresponsible adolescent
who repeatedly runs through his allowance, each time calling his parents
to tell them he's broke and needs extra cash.

What I haven't seen sufficiently emphasized, however, is the disdain
this practice shows for the welfare of the troops, whom the
administration puts in harm's way without first ensuring that they'll
have the necessary resources.

As long as a G.O.P.-controlled Congress could be counted on to
rubber-stamp the administration's requests, you could say that this
wasn't a real problem, that the administration's refusal to put Iraq
funding in the regular budget was just part of its usual reliance on
fiscal smoke and mirrors. But this time Mr. Bush decided to surge
additional troops into Iraq after an election in which the public
overwhelmingly rejected his war - and then dared Congress to deny him
the necessary funds. As I said, it's an act of hostage-taking.

Actually, it's even worse than that. According to reports, the final
version of the funding bill Congress will send won't even set a hard
deadline for withdrawal. It will include only an "advisory," nonbinding
date. Yet Mr. Bush plans to veto the bill all the same - and will then
accuse Congress of failing to support the troops.

The whole situation brings to mind what Abraham Lincoln said, in his
great Cooper Union speech in 1860, about secessionists who blamed the
critics of slavery for the looming civil war: "A highwayman holds a
pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or
I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!' "

So how should Congress respond to Mr. Bush's threats?

Everyone talks about the political risks of confrontation, recalling the
backlash when Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in 1995.
But there's a big difference between trying to force a fairly popular
president to accept deep cuts in Medicare - which is what the 1995
confrontation was about - and trying to get a deeply unpopular,
distrusted president to set some limits on an immensely unpopular war.

Meanwhile, there are big political risks on the other side. If Congress
responds to a presidential veto by offering an even weaker bill, voters
may well react with disgust, concluding that the whole debate over the
war was nothing but political theater.

Anyway, never mind the political calculations. Confronting Mr. Bush on
Iraq has become a patriotic duty.

The fact is that Mr. Bush's refusal to face up to the failure of his
Iraq adventure, his apparent determination to spend the rest of his term
in denial, has become a clear and present danger to national security.
Thanks to the demands of the Iraq war, we're already a superpower
without a strategic reserve, unable to respond to crises that might
erupt elsewhere in the world. And more and more military experts warn
that repeated deployments in Iraq - now extended to 15 months - are
breaking the back of our volunteer military.

If nothing is done to wind down this war during the 21 months - 21
months! - Mr. Bush has left, the damage may be irreparable.

From http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/opinion/23krugman.html?hp