Scaring the bejezuz out of ’em
by digby
Dday has the rundown on how the votes went down last night on the war. The short version is that it passed as expected, but the details are complicated and interesting.
However, the most interesting is this:
The other three votes were test votes on the level of opposition to the Afghan war. An amendment pushed by Blue Dogs to embarrass the antiwar crowd by calling for an elimination of military funding got 25 votes. But Barbara Lee’s amendment calling for money to only go toward a withdrawal garnered 100 votes. And the McGovern amendment, which would have required a timetable for withdrawal, received a whopping 162 votes, including the majority of the Democratic caucus and 9 Republicans. This shows a real crumbling of the Afghanistan policy.
I was having a conversation the other night about these latest signs of unrest among the Democrats over Afghanistan and we discussed the fact that history shows these Congressional debates on the war are important regardless of the short term success rate. Back in 2007 Rick Perlstein wrote about how this worked during the Vietnam era:
Let’s start at the very beginning. Representatives and senators had been criticizing the creep, creep, creep of America’s escalating military involvement in Indochina at least since 1963. The hammer really started coming down, though, in February 1966 — when, a year after Lyndon Johnson began the first bombing runs over North Vietnam, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright of Arkansas called hearings questioning the entire underlying logic of the war. Americans had been doing that in the streets for some time by then. Shortly after the Senate passed the president’s 1965 $700 million military appropriation for Vietnam 88 to 3, the antiwar movement staged its first big Washington demonstration — with about 20,000 young people on the Mall. But the collective reaction of the guardians of polite opinion was a sneer. “Holiday From Exams,” the New York Times headed its dispatch.
By contrast, when Sen. Fulbright began his hearings, they stood up and took notice. All three networks covered the hearings live over six days. Thus did Americans learn from hippies like World War II hero Gen. James Gavin and George Kennan, architect of the Cold War doctrine of “containment” — who said, “If we were not already involved as we are today in Vietnam, I would know of no reason why we should wish to become so involved, and I could think of several reasons why we should wish not to,” and that victory could come only “at the cost of a degree of damage to civilian life and civilian suffering … for which I would not like to see this country responsible.”
President Johnson did not sit by idly. He directed the FBI to monitor the proceedings to find where they were echoing the so-called Communist line — and had agents study wiretaps of the Soviet Embassy for evidence of friendly congressional contact. He also may have had words with the top network brass. CBS, for one, cut away from Kennan’s testimony to return to regularly scheduled programming (“I Love Lucy” and “Andy Griffith Show” reruns). The execs defended themselves, claiming the hearings served to “obfuscate” and “confuse” the issues.
First lesson: Forthright questioning of a mistaken war by prominent legislators can utterly transform the public debate, pushing it in directions no one thought it was prepared to go.
Second lesson: Congress horning in on war powers scares the bejesus out of presidents.
It’s past time for more horning. This was a good start.
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