Spineless
The war is turning nasty. The war of words in Washington, that is.
This week, Vice President Cheney accused "certain politicians" in Congress of being dishonest and spineless for accusing the administration of misleading them and the nation into war.
And as much as I hate to give this VP in Charge of Torture any credit whatsoever, he's absolutely right.
Three years ago, when it was the easy and popular thing to do, Congress abdicated its constitutional responsibility for declaring war and gave President Bush the authority to launch an invasion of Iraq at will.
Today, those who voted for the war before riding their moral high-horse against it whine that they were fed false information three years ago. And they, too, are absolutely right.
If there is a God in Heaven, and if He is not a Republican, a presidential impeachment trial will determine whether the administration deliberately used false information to mislead the nation into an unjust war.
But whether the administration's stated reasons for starting this war were deliberately false or not is beside the point. The Founding Fathers gave the responsibility for waging war to Congress for a reason — to prevent a president from pursuing a personal agenda of aggression, and to ensure that the horrors of war are not unleashed unless there is absolutely no other choice.
With Iraq, war was not the only choice, or anything close to the best choice. And the only thing we can say in defense of the administration, the Congress, and the intelligence community is that they were all hopelessly incompetent.
But incompetence is an unlikely excuse for all but the president himself. More likely, Congress, which could have stopped this war before it became anything more than a sneer on Dick Cheney's lips, was quite simply, spineless.
The Boston Globe's Joan Vennochi gives the situation just the right perspective:
In 2005, belated spine is better than no spine. But it should never be confused with real political courage, the kind that stands up to presidents when it is unpopular to do so.
America deserves better. When will we finally demand it?
