Reply #18: Yes, Congress created a mess for itself by not requiring Bush to submit

[Peace Patriot]

a request for a formal declaration of war. And, in my opinion, Congress violated the Constitution by handing over their power to start a war to Bush (as they did to LBJ in Vietnam--same problem).

However, this mess can be solved very easily by Congress rescinding the "Iraq War Resolution" (IWR) (--misnamed, because it was NOT a vote for war, but a vote to let Bush decide whether to invade or not, based on potential Saddam threat). Rescind, or amend, it--as Sen. Kennedy has proposed. The reasons for giving Bush this power--such as they were--are all gone. No WMDs. No connection to 9/11. No Saddam. (And beyond that, we now know all of them to have been lies.)

Then, get the troops out, and if Bush won't do it, start de-funding the occupation.

Congress has the SOLE POWER to declare war AND the sole power to FUND war, under the Constitution. They could withdraw funding tomorrow. They did this to Reagan re Nicaragua. (You can't use any funds we appropriate to make war on that country.) (Then Reagan operatives secretly sold missiles to Iran, to fund the fascist "contra" war against Nicaragua--a direct violation of a law passed by Congress, for which a few underlings paid in jail time.) (Yup, they sold missiles to Iran!)

We've got soldiers stuck in Iraq, but existing funds can be used to withdraw them and to protect their withdrawal. That argument for NOT de-funding the occupation is bogus. The Pentagon has TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS of dollars. They don't need EXTRA money to withdraw our troops.

All that's going on there now is a bloodbath--mostly a civil war. ANYBODY we kill is questionable. Intel on who might be Al Qaeda is questionable. We can't trust intel from our totally Bush-fucked up intelligence agencies. We also can't trust ANY side the Bushites choose to support. What are their motives? No doubt getting the oil contracts signed is their main one. So they support a puppet government run by the majority Shias that is permitting massive death squad activity against the Sunnis. We might as well be in the middle of Rwanda, taking sides.

What's needed is a U.N. peacekeeping force--EU, African, Arab/Muslim and/or other. Just not us. We have lost all credibility--and it may take decades if not centuries to get it back--that we have any claim to being "honest brokers" in the Middle East, or anywhere else.

This is just devastating for Israel as well--whose rightwing war profiteers allied themselves with the despised Bush Junta, and now Israel has hardly another friend left in the world, and could even lose the long-standing support of the American people. I am not for that. I want Israel to survive, and to play a positive role in the Middle East. But their government has screwed the Israeli people over, just as ours has screwed us over--involving us in an unnecessary, unjust war in which hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims have died, and their country destroyed.

The potential for a conflagration in the Middle East is very great--and it is going to require great leadership to head it off. Unfortunately, we have a complete idiot and puppet of the oil corporations in the White House. This is one of the reasons that Congress is in such a bind. They don't even have a halfway competent President to negotiate with, or to rely upon to carry out rational actions. It is a very dicey situation. They MUST find a way to curtail Bush (and of course the power behind the throne, Cheney), and to get around them to calm things down in the Middle East, while yet the two of them are doing everything they can to instigate wider war. An attack on Iran (most likely to come in some sort of trumped up 'Gulf of Tonkin' incident) could EASILY involve surrounding states AND China AND Russia (--with four nuke powers potentially involved, including Pakistan and Israel). The best scenario of a Bush/Cheney attack on Iran is disaster in the Middle East. The worst scenario is laid out by Carl Sagan in his book "The Cold and the Dark," which describes the impacts of even a limited use of nuclear weapons on earth's atmosphere--end of all life on planet earth.

That is what madmen Bush and Cheney are risking by escalating the Iraq War and provoking Iran. All of us dead, over a period of months, as the dust cloud from even a limited use of nuclear weapons spreads around the earth and blocks out the sunlight, killing plant life. As the food runs out, we will all starve to death. All life on earth ended forevermore.

EVEN Daddy Bush and Co. have said de-escalate Iraq, and negotiate with Iran and Syria. I think this is why. The potential for utter disaster, with the present policy, is very great.

So Congress MUST act--in whatever way they can devise--to take war powers away from the Bush Junta. And they have plenty of Constitutional authority to do so. But it is not an easy thing for Congress to do, for various reasons, among them, that Bush/Cheney remain in control of the powers of the president, including power over the armed forces, and police powers of various kinds (and including black budgets and operatives to contrive excuses for, say, martial law). Also, Congress has no single leader--it is a "committee." This complicates taking action with regard to the executive branch, which is a more consolidated center of power--the President, the White House (and, in this case, also Cheney). I think that ultimately Congress will be compelled to impeach them and remove them from office. Developments in the Fitzgerald trial of Cheney aide Libby provide good reason to start impeachment proceedings against Cheney. He has not been indicted, but he is strongly implicated, and impeachment BEGINS with an investigation, with questions that need answers, and it is Congress' special DUTY to investigate the Executive when such grave questions are raised.