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Liberals’ anti-war push intensifies

April 25, 2007 | By Nathaniel Ward

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that “this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week.” He further argued that Iraq is in “an intractable civil war” and said in an interview yesterday that he wouldn’t believe Gen. David Petraeus if he said things were improving in Iraq.

Just yesterday, members from the House and Senate agreed on a bill to fund the war in Iraq—a bill which also includes a call for withdrawal and billions of dollars in wasteful spending. President Bush has rightly vowed to veto the legislation and called for a version without the unconstitutional and wasteful amendments.

“Congress simply cannot micromanage the conduct of the war,” former Attorney General Edwin Meese and Heritage scholar Todd Gaziano wrote in a letter to Congressional leaders. “Congress cannot place unconstitutional timetables or conditions on the President’s military command.”

Meese is the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and Gaziano is the Director of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

At the same time, Congress is holding the troops hostage to their political calculation and wasteful spending practices. Heritage visiting fellow Ernest Istook explains in a new Heritage video that members are using special interest handouts to buy votes for withdrawal.

For members normally unwilling to undermine national security with a withdrawal deadline, this pork is “a little extra incentive for him to vote for the bill,” Istook says. “Congress is putting pork-barrel spending above principle.”

Ignoring the reality of the war

Meanwhile, liberals in the House have proposed abolishing the phrase “the long war” to refer to the war on terror. The House Armed Services Committee ruled that the phrase cannot be used in the annual defense authorization bill.

They claim that they’re only seeking to be precise, but Heritage national security expert James Carafano wonders if “maybe they don’t understand what the war on terrorism is all about.”

“Simply changing words won’t change the nature of the war,” he continues in an article that appeared in The Modesto Bee, The Charlotte Observer and other papers nationwide

“It is hubris to think it is all about us, to believe that if we just change the words, elect new leaders, or adopt ‘smarter’ policies that America will automatically triumph,” Carafano elaborates. “It takes a humble and realistic leadership to admit that the fight is tough—that the war will, in fact, be a ‘long’ one—because the enemy is determined.”

“Acknowledging that America is waging a long war is essential,” Carafano continues. “It must be recognized to make sure this nation takes the right steps to win. It’s just as important as when we called the Cold War ‘cold,’ which helped Americans understand that we couldn’t defeat the Soviet empire through direct military confrontation.”

Watch Gingrich live online Thursday

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will address The Heritage Foundation’s annual Resource Bank meeting in Philadelphia on Thursday evening at 7:00 Eastern.

Watch his remarks live on MyHeritage.org.

America’s entitlement crisis

Hard as it may be to believe, America’s long-term spending problem actually got worse over the past year. Heritage scholar J.D. Foster reports that “Social Security is facing a financial abyss that got $200 billion deeper over the past year, while Medicare’s abyss deepened by $3.8 trillion.”

“The latest Social Security and Medicare Trustees reports confirm again that these two large and vital programs for seniors are unsustainable in their current form,” writes Foster, the Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the Economics of Fiscal Policy.

Click here to find out what Congress can do today to improve these entitlements’ long-term outlook.

In other news

  • Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin died Monday. As mayor of Moscow, he blocked a 1991 coup by Communist hardliners and precipitated the Soviet Union’s collapse.
  • In an example of private enterprise working to advance health care, Wal-Mart plans to open clinics in stores around the nation.
  • Some Congressional Republicans still have yet to learn the lesson of the 2006 elections: wasteful pork-barrel spending isn’t a winning issue. According to Congress Daily (no link available), Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) argued against common-sense efforts to eliminate such waste by saying, “you need Republicans to pass the bill and Republicans need their pork-barrel projects.”
  • A new radical group is calling for laws regulating religious ethics and morals in the practice of medicine. They argue that doctors should not be able to exercise their private judgment and refuse to treat patients with procedures, like partial-birth abortion, that they consider immoral.
  • In weekend presidential balloting, French voters sent Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal to a runoff election to be held in two weeks. Sarkozy, who holds many free-enterprise and pro-American views, and Royal, an unabashed socialist, will now vie for the nation’s centrist vote.
  • Testifying before Congress Tuesday, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency refused to commit to a timetable to action on greenhouse gas emissions. Restrictions on the gasses could be very environmentally damaging.
  • Gov. Timothy Kaine (D-VA) said he would issue an executive order making it more difficult for the mentally ill to acquire firearms. Federal law blocks the sale of firearms to the mentally ill, though it is up to states to inform the federal government who should be so barred.

Coming up at Heritage

To attend the following Heritage Foundation events, RSVP at Heritage’s events website. Or you can watch these events live online at Heritage.org.  All times are Eastern.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.