July 14, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST With due respect to Mr. Burns, that I was not engaging the question that particularly interests him does not mean that I am participating in a “contest for civic virtue between liberals and conservatives.” Iraq poses a complicated and tragic problem for American policymakers. There is no easy way out. But I wasn’t debating Mr. Gordon on the question of whether the troop surge is working, or whether our forces are closer to victory than they were four months ago. I was taking issue with his tendency to dismiss people as anti-American when he simply does not agree with them, and to suggest that such people wish defeat on America. These kinds of ad hominem attacks only coarsen the political dialogue. Since I was addressing the need for a more civil discussion of the Iraq war, and not the Iraq war itself, Mr. Burns’s well-intentioned effort to coach me on the proper way to discuss Iraq was somewhat gratuitous. In his latest post, Mr. Gordon writes, “If the military is underfunded, as Mr. Zeitz alleges, then that is easily remedied. The Democrats control Congress, which controls the purse strings, so Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi can easily add the necessary funds to the defense appropriation bill. I am confident that the President will not veto the bill because of those additions. I am, shall we say, less confident that Reid and Pelosi will do any such thing. Of course, in the strange political calculus of the left, the underfunding will then be President Bush’s fault.” I’m pretty sure that I demonstrated, rather than alleged, that our military is being spread too thin by the Iraq war. Mr. Gordon should remember that Democrats assumed narrow control of the Congress in January. For six years preceding that, it was a Republican Congress and a Republican President who planned and funded the war. On almost straight party-line votes, the last (GOP) Congress voted down $1,500 bonuses for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; $3.6 billion in quality of life enhancements for deployed servicemen, including water treatment facilities and prepaid phone cards; extending the child tax credit to 200,000 low-income military families; and extending bankruptcy protection to deployed servicemen. The same Congress also voted on a party-line vote to under-fund veterans’ healthcare by $13.5 billion less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected would be necessary to keep pace with inflation. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were victorious last November in large part because a Republican President and Republican Congress have handled the war in a most irresponsible fashion, sending servicemen into combat without properly equipping them or caring for their families. The Democratic Congress will have to do much better. On that, Mr. Gordon and I are probably agreed. How about that political realignment question?
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