Smokescreens big and little

Anti-war folks have been wetting themselves in glee over a maneuver by Senate minority leader Harry Reid. The Democratic chief used a parliamentary tactic to force the Senate into closed session. Reid's gambit was intended to speed up a stalled Senate investigation as to whether pre-Iraq invasion intelligence was misused or manipulated in selling the war to Congress and to the American public.

Bush's allies didn't appreciate Reid's move.

"Since I've been majority leader, I have to say, not with the previous Democratic leader or the current Democratic leader, have I ever been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution," bemoaned Republican leader Bill Frist, with a melodramatic tone rarely seen outside the teenage girl set.

That the GOP views attempted accountability as a 'slap in the face' is fairly common knowledge.

"For the next year and a half I can't trust Sen. Reid," Frist sniffed, conveniently ignoring the fact that the real question raised by all this is if anyone should trust President Bush.

Many have suggested Reid for canonization because of what he did, but I am not one of them. While what he did is correct, the timing stinks.

In fact, Reid's move only serves as a bitter reminder of how spineless the Democrats have been in the last 3 1/2 years. Perhaps if they'd bothered to question the intelligence BEFORE the war, we might not be in this mess. Instead, a majority of Democratic senators approved the resolution that gave Pres. Bush a blank check to launch the aggression against Iraq. Now, they're calling for investigations to make people forget about their complicity.

I suspect that most of the Democratic senators knew at the time that invading Iraq was a horrible, counterproductive idea, but were cowed into voting for it by the president's then-sky high approval ratings. Now that the White House is weakened by many scandals and public confidence and trust in the administration are very low, Democrats smell blood in the water.

That's not courage, it's cowardice. While I've come to expect nothing more of national Democrats, I won't praise it. Too little, too late.

Maybe they can instead call for investigation into something current, such as why the CIA is allegedly running secret prison camps into eastern Europe to interrogate kidnapees without meddlesome restrictions like US law or the Constitution.

Just click your heels and repeat, "They hate us because us because we're free" until you delude yourself into believing it.

President Bush has steadfastly denounced increasing calls even for setting a timetable for gradual US withdrawal from Iraq. "We must stay until the job is finished," goes the conventional wisdom. The president doesn't like to be seen as caving in to pressure, even if it means refusing to do something blindlingly obvious.

Back in 1996, the Republican Congress passed a so-called welfare reform bill, which was signed into law by President Clinton. The law limited the amount of time welfare recipients could remain on the dole. Supporters (and it was a pet cause of conservatives who never liked the concept of welfare but saw this change as the next best thing to eliminating it) argued that without the pressure of a time limit, recipients would have no incentive to get a job or improve their skills. The bill didn't eliminate welfare altogether and it didn't say that people should be kicked of the rolls immediately; it said that if you are going to be subsidized by the money of American taxpayers, it ought to be for the purpose of helping you on the (not endless) road toward self-sufficiency. The time limit was pushed as a way to add a sense of urgency to those efforts toward self-sufficiency.

Fair enough. But can anyone explain why that same rationale does not apply to the American occupation of Iraq.

Without this sense of urgency, US troops will be in Iraq for decades. Chicken Little rantings, you say. Ask yourself how long American soldiers have been in South Korea. Are South Koreans not self-sufficient in terms of national defense more than half a century after the end of the war? They haven't needed to be because they knew the US would never leave.

Cynics have argued that decades of US military presence in the oil-rich country is precisely what some parts of the establishment want, but clearly most of the American people do not.

I don't advocate immediate withdrawal and I never have. I believe we made a mess and broke a previously stable (if autocratic) country. Therefore, we need to stay either until we clean up the mess we made or arrange for someone else to clean it up. If that means getting on our hands and knees and grovelling to the UN, who actually has both experience and competence in nation-building, then so be it. I can't and won't support an open-ended commitment of US troops and tax dollars in that country. Writing blank checks is an invitation for disaster; that's what got us into this mess in the first place.

Though I don't advocate immediate withdrawal, I would like to have confidence that our leadership had a clue about what it was doing, where it was going and how it intended to get there. President Bush's defiant callings of 'Stay the course' might be a little bit more compelling if Americans had faith that the commander-in-chief actually had some idea of what that course is; for years, the president has been under the delusion that macho, sneering rhetoric is an adequate substitute for a real plan. 'Getting specific will only aid the terrorists' and demagoguery like that don't cut it any more now than it did before.