Non-Binding Resolution: Is This What You Voted For?

   Here's a good little snip from World Can't Wait, a group which is basically organizing protest against Bush, the war in Iraq, and pushing for the impeachment of Bush.

   This piece, however, takes a shot at the Democrats and their attempts with the non-binding resolutions which they have tried to get passed in the past weeks.

New Congress, Non-Binding Resolution: Is This What You Voted For? 

2/19/07: Under their time honored guise of “supporting the troops”, Congressional Democrats last week pushed through a resolution declaring their support for the war in Iraq.  They also noted their disapproval with the way Bush is waging that war (read resolution below).

In the Senate a couple of days later, a similar measure didn’t come to a vote, because enough Senators support both the war and the way Bush is waging it.

These votes reflect intense differences among the political elite over the way the war is being led, not over the war itself.  They are not intended to, and in no way will, lead to ending the unjust and brutal US military occupation of Iraq.  The resolutions address, as the New York Times accurately wrote, a “specific battlefield tactic proposed by the president”.

How the conflicts within the political power structure will play out in the days and weeks ahead over the best way to pursue the war in Iraq is in great flux and is in no way predetermined.  The widely (and rightfully) despised Senator Joe Lieberman said in a recent speech that the measure for Congressional “micromanaging” a war is a “first step toward a constitutional crisis that we can and must avoid”.

But one thing is eminently clear.  The sentiments of millions of people in this country who want an end to this unjust and immoral war were in no way reflected in the Congressional “debate” or in the resolutions voted on last week.  The suffering of the Iraqi people under an ongoing US military occupation was not a factor in the voting.  Consider what a man in Baghdad said on February 19 after yet another bombing in that city killed at least 60 people: “I hold the American forces responsible for this”.

Multiply this sentiment by the millions, and multiply the Iraqi dead of last weekend by hundreds of thousands.  And ask yourself if you can really go along with this charade of “opposition” that doesn’t even put up a pretense of ending the war, only finding more “efficient” ways of conducting it.  What is needed is, as Molly Ivins wrote in her last column, “people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!’"         Read More

 

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