You and What Army?
There’s a lot of comment on this already, but I want to make one small point:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned yesterday that a new Democratic effort to repeal the 2002 Iraq war resolution would meet the same fate as two previous efforts to limit President Bush’s authority: blocked by procedural obstacles, unless Democrats relent to GOP terms.
Speaking to reporters by conference call from his Louisville home, McConnell compared the latest Democratic move to “trying to unring a bell.” He warned that Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, would “have to surround himself with lawyers” to comply with the new resolution that senior Democrats are drafting.
Without getting all “checks and balances” on you, the Dems seem to be overreaching Congress’ Consititutional authority. But now it gets weird:
[Deputy Press Secretary Tony] Fratto said the United States went in as a multinational force under United Nations authorization to take military action against Iraq and was there as an occupying force. “And now we’re there at the invitation of the sovereign elected government of Iraq, he said, adding that “U.N. Security Council resolutions that came subsequent to the war authorization, you know, envisioned those kinds of changes.”
…
[Senator Joseph] Biden responded in a CNN interview that while the Constitution allows Bush to conduct war, it does so “only if the Congress gave him the authority in the first place.”
“We are repealing the initial authority,” Biden said. “And by the way, the United States Constitution cannot be trumped by the United Nations. It cannot be trumped by it. The implementation act of the United Nations treaty, when we passed it, said, it depends upon the Congress’s authority.”
Now we have Democrats telling the UN to get lost? I mean, of course Biden is right—but since when did he and his party actually believe it? I’m serious. These guys have preconditioned all US foreign policy on approval by the UN, and now they’re saying they don’t want it even when they get it? That’s wack.