If you don't pass the bill I want, I'll harm the troops

President Bush has stated in no uncertain terms that if Congress fails to pass the war supplemental that he wants--one without any timetables or benchmarks--"the price of that failure will be paid by our troops and their loved ones." This claim, as many others have already pointed out, is a deeply disingenuous one. Congress has in fact appropriated every penny Bush requested; all he needs to do is sign the bill. If Bush chooses instead to veto that bill, then by any reasonable measure he is the one most directly responsible for the funding shortfall that would ensue.

But while many journalists and pundits seem to understand this, at least on some level, none of them have bothered to follow these premises to their logical conclusion. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, there is no logical reason why the cutting off of war funding has to result in increased danger to our troops. Bush wants us to believe that a reduction in funding will somehow inevitably result in troops running out of ammo in the middle of a firefight or running out of fuel in the middle of a patrol. But that's nonsense. The only way that would happen is if President Bush were to react to the funding shortfall (which he would be responsible for creating) by insisting that the war continue on unchanged, without any of the necessary supplies.

But to do so would be an act of inexcusable recklessness and indifference toward the well-being of our troops. Put simply, you don't order men to go on missions they don't have the supplies or equipment to carry out successfully. You don't order men to go on patrols without fuel or engage in firefights without ammo. Indeed, the only reasonable response to a cut off in funding--whatever the cause--is to take immediate steps to end the engagement and remove soldiers from harm's way.

As Republicans never tire of pointing out, if the Democrats in Congress "had the courage of their convictions" they could end the war right now by voting to cut off all funding. Implicit in this taunt is an acknowledgment that the only responsible Presidential reaction to such a vote would be to immediately drawdown our troop presence in Iraq. The whole point of cutting off funding, after all, is to end the war, not to have it continue without supplies.

But somehow the President and his supporters cannot seem to apply this same logic to the supplemental debate. In this context, we're supposed to pretend that the President has no agency whatsoever, and that a failure to reach an agreement on funding would somehow force him to order our troops into harm's way without the supplies they need.

In my post a few weeks ago, I compared this argument to a certain infamous magazine cover:

Bush's remarks today reminded me of that famous National Lampoon magazine cover with the picture of a gun held to a dog's head: IF YOU DON'T BUY THIS MAGAZINE, WE'LL KILL THIS DOG. Well, Bush is essentially doing the same thing, only he's deadly serious. He might as well have said: IF YOU DON'T PASS THE BILL I WANT, I'LL HARM THE TROOPS.

Well, it's been couple weeks, but finally someone with a bigger megaphone than myself has made this same point. In his column in the New York Times Monday--entitled "A Hostage Situation" Paul Krugman wrote:

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq.

But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders.

That is exactly right. Bush is playing chicken with the lives of American troops, and he's betting that the Democrats in Congress will flinch when they see how truly determined he is to continue sending troops into harm's way, with or without the necessary funding and supplies.

Though Krugman doesn't cite the National Lampoon cover, he does quote Abraham Lincoln to similar effect:

The whole situation brings to mind what Abraham Lincoln said, in his great Cooper Union speech in 1860, about secessionists who blamed the critics of slavery for the looming civil war: “A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ”

In an excellent post a few weeks ago, Hilzoy wrote the following:

The President wants to make it sound as though his veto is some sort of inevitable, inexorable fact: just as a stone dropped from a rooftop will fall to earth, a supplemental appropriations bill that includes a timeline will be vetoed. That's the way it is, and Congress should just accept that fact and work around it. Obviously, this doesn't work the other way around: Bush does not seem to imagine that if the Congress wants a timeline, then he had just better learn to deal with that. It's only his will that counts as a fact of nature, and it's only other people who have to make adjustments.

That same observation can be made of the war itself. Implicit in Bush's rhetoric is the notion that the continuation of the war is some sort of inevitable, inexorable fact. We are supposed to believe that our options are either A) the war continuing with funding or B) the war continuing without funding. It's either troops fighting with ammo or troops fighting with rocks. There are no other options.

The reality, however, is that only a monstrous tyrant would continue to order troops into harm's way without the necessary supplies and equipment to support them, particularly where the supply shortage was brought about by his own actions. Bush would like us to believe that there is a direct link between Congress's decision to tie war funding to a (purely advisory) timetable and an increased danger to our troops in Iraq. The fact is, however, there are at least two intervening willful acts necessary to complete that causal chain, and both of them can be accomplished only by the President himself. In order for Congress's actions to result in increased danger to troops in Iraq, the President would have to 1) veto the supplemental bill that arrives on his desk--a bill that will provide all the money he's asked for, and 2) continue to prosecute the war as if it were fully funded, i.e., by refusing to drawdown troops and continuing to order troops to carry out missions they are not equipped to carry out.

It's well past time for journalists and pundits to start pointing this out. Congratulations to Paul Krugman for being the first to do so.