Floatingbadger Political Community Site

 Ripped from Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/29/iraqi-lawmakers-protest-humiliating-treatment-by-us/#comment-4171513

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Iraqi lawmakers protest ‘humiliating’ treatment by U.S.

The LA Times reports that “[d]ozens of Iraqi lawmakers walked out of parliament Wednesday to protest what they view as overly aggressive and humiliating treatment by U.S. soldiers when representatives enter Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, where the legislature is located:

“I and many of my colleagues who live outside the Green Zone face a lot of problems,” said Feryad Rawandozi, a high-ranking official with the Kurdish parliamentary bloc. U.S. soldiers “are very arrogant and impolite when they talk to us, especially with those who don’t speak English.”

Legislators, like everyone else entering the Green Zone, must submit to a gauntlet of physical searches, and allow their vehicles to be inspected by bomb-sniffing dogs. They must line up with the throngs of other residents and employees seeking to enter the area, which is also headquarters to U.S. operations in Iraq. The process can take up to two hours.

“If we come off as aggressive, it might be a cultural thing,” claimed Army Maj. Anton Alston, a spokesman for Multi-National Force-Iraq.  November 29, 2007 3:32 pm

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First of all: What the Fuck?  It MIGHT be a cultural thing?  Don't you think that if you're going to invade a country and then rebuild it to be more tolerant of the western world, you should take a LITTLE time out to study the damned culture?  It's a miracle the war isn't a total disaster..... oh wait...

Second of all:  I think this is such a good idea that it should be done with United States Senators, Representatives and even the President everytime they come to work.  We should go further than that.  They should be followed and every conversation they have with anyone should be recorded.  If they go to a resturant, meet someone on the street, talk to their mothers on the phone, a recording should be made.  Everything they do or say should be avaliable for public scrutiny.  Might teach them to be better people.. might not, but at least they wont be able to say anything that would get them into trouble.  Well, they could... but then they would... you know.... get into trouble.

  Why is it legal and considered standard practice for the Whitehouse to fire ANY US attorney without giving good cause?  I understand the three branches of the government are supposed to be checking up on each other, but when accepted tradition is for the incoming President to fire a bunch of US attorneys and try to install his own, that is not what is taking place.  What is occuring is an attempt by each administration to stack the deck in his favor.

  Congress foolishly abdicated their ability to confirm or reject new attorneys, something that most people didn't know about and might not have been reversed if the current scandal didn't break into the public spotlight.  That would have meant that hiring and firing attorneys for ANY reason would be legal and soley the province of the current adminstration.  Is this the way to run a government?  The only reason this scandal is not brushed off is because the democrats are getting tired of being told to "Go Away" whenever they propose a law and because the Bush adminstration didn't cover what they were doing well enough.  They might have gotten away with it had they fired a smaller number or staggered their firings over the course of months.  Bush's habit of thinking that if it's legal, no one will challenge him worked in our favor this time.  What about next time?

   The beauty of the United States government has been its adversarial structure.  The Legislative, Judicial and Executive branches are constantly at odds.  They have very specifically overlapping jobs to check each other.  When all three agree on something, then it becomes a law.  Congress and the President fight over creating bills, but once they have been signed, challenges of them fall on the judges to sort out.  Many laws enacted by congress and signed by the president end up in the waste basket of the Supreme Court.  A lot of times, this structure makes it hard for anything to get done, but that is as it should be.  It should take a monumental effort for the government to change things in any drastic way.

   Enter the Bush family.  George W Bush has been centralizing the government to a degree unprecedented.  He has repeatedly refused to cooperate with Congress, preferring to issue executive orders and use the Republican party to craft last-minute laws that no one else has a chance to review before he's able to put his signature on.  Through this process, he has stripped freedoms from the public, taken away congressional confirmation of US attorneys and was in the process of firing many attorneys under suspicious circumstances before Congress caught him at it.  Without Republican control of the House and Senate, things are coming rapidly to a showdown.  The grey areas between the jurisdiction will be tested as people are frantically trying to figure out just who can do what to whom.  The Executive Branch and the Legislative branch are butting heads over the attorney issue and we'll know in a few weeks who's telling the truth, or at least who has overstepped their authority to guide where this investigation is going.  My money is on Congress.

   With the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States both controled by Democrats, the question is: When and how are they going to stop the war and bring the soldiers home?  The most favored method seems to be financial.  Simply don't give Bush the money to run the war.  While that may work in the long run, I feel it is the worst way to do it.  Bush is stubborn.  He think's he's right.  He doesn't take kindly to people telling him he's wrong.  If you cut off the money, then before it reaches the point where Bush brings the troops home, they'll end up even more unprepared for combat than they are now, and that means more casualties.  The country needs to support the troops and not the war.  This means giving everything we can to pay for the war, but in the mean time, tell Bush to bring the troops home.  Order him to do it.  Call his bluff.  Push so that in order to push back, he has to go on record and not just weasel his way through interviews with sound bites that are vague and useless.

   Nothing will stop this war besides a direct order from Congress.  Congress gave him his leash.  They should take it away and bring Bush and his cronies back home.  Cutting off the money only hurts the troops, and the soldiers are what everyone should be trying to protect.