Obama: 'New Mission in Iraq: Ending the War'

By Jason Leopold, The Public Record

President-Elect Barack Obama, who defeated Republican John McCain in an Electoral College landslide in Tuesday’s historic presidential election, is following through on one of his early campaign promises: ending the war in Iraq.

Although the economic meltdown on Wall Street eclipsed much of the debate surrounding the conflict in Iraq during the last few months of the presidential campaign, Obama has returned to the issue that formed the basis of his presidential campaign 22-months ago.

The proposals he and Vice President-Elect Joe Biden have introduced, some of which Obama outlined in the early days of the Obama's campaign, will no doubt lead to a conflict with the Bush administration’s own plans for the region the White House is currently trying to hammer out before Bush leaves office.

On his newly launched transition website, change.gov, the president-elect said one of his first policy directives after he is sworn into office will be giving military commanders and the Secretary of Defense "a new mission in Iraq: ending the war."

But Obama's plan still calls for a U.S. presence in Iraq, albeit on a much smaller scale.

"Under the Obama-Biden plan, a residual force will remain in Iraq and in the region to conduct targeted counter-terrorism missions against al Qaeda in Iraq and to protect American diplomatic and civilian personnel," his proposal says. "They will not build permanent bases in Iraq, but will continue efforts to train and support the Iraqi security forces as long as Iraqi leaders move toward political reconciliation and away from sectarianism."

The Obama team also said that a Status of Forces Agreement Bush is currently negotiating with the Iraqi government must be approved by Congress or must include input from Obama and his foreign policy advisers before being signed.

“The Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress or allow the next administration to negotiate an agreement that has bipartisan support here at home and makes absolutely clear that the U.S. will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq," according to Obama’s transition website.

"Obama and Biden believe any Status of Forces Agreement, or any strategic framework agreement, should be negotiated in the context of a broader commitment by the U.S. to begin withdrawing its troops and forswearing permanent bases," states the proposal. "Obama and Biden also believe that any security accord must be subject to Congressional approval. It is unacceptable that the Iraqi government will present the agreement to the Iraqi parliament for approval—yet the Bush administration will not do the same with the U.S. Congress.”

The Status of Forces Agreement needs to be hammered out by the U.S. and Iraq by December. That’s when a United Nations mandate allowing foreign soldiers to operate in country expires.

Bush has been loath to accept a timeline for withdrawal, which has been one of the sticking points of the deal, but he has reportedly agreed to accept a plan that would allow the removal of U.S. troops by 2011. However, it’s unclear whether the agreement allows the U.S. to extend the option to have U.S. troops remain in Iraq beyond 2011, a point Bush previously insisted the agreement should state.

But Obama’s plan calls for an earlier withdrawal date.

"The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government,” the Obama proposal says. “Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months.

“That would be the summer of 2010 – more than 7 years after the war began. U.S. must apply pressure on the Iraqi government to work toward real political accommodation," Obama’s Iraq plan states. "There is no military solution to Iraq’s political differences, but the Bush Administration’s blank check approach has failed to press Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future or to substantially spend their oil revenues on their own reconstruction."

Obama has also proposed implementing some of the recommendations from the Iraq Study Group, headed by Bush family confidante, James Baker that calls for engaging Iran and Syria in discussions as a way of stabilizing the region. Bush rejected all of the recommendations put forth by the Iraq Study Group in December 2006 and instead relied upon the advice of neoconservatives and sent 30,000 more troops into the region.

Obama is scheduled to meet with Bush at the White House Monday and it is likely Obama’s plan for Iraq will come up, according to two members of Obama’s transition team.

But the real test for Obama, and for that matter, the Democrats who now control a bigger majority in both Houses of Congress will come next spring when the Pentagon submits another funding request to Congress to continue operations in Iraq.

Since the electoral victories in November 2006, the Democratic-controlled Congress has approved more than $500 billion in emergency spending bills for Iraq and Afghanistan without the benchmarks that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other leaders said they would demand.

Last summer, Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer engineered a $162 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan that funded the war until mid-2009 without a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops, a move that led to widespread anger among the Democrats constituents.

The bill was approved about three weeks after the Senate Armed Services Committee released a long-awaited report that said President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney knowingly lied about the threat Iraq posed to the U.S., it’s ties to al-Qaeda, and the country’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, in order to win support from Congress and the public for a U.S. led invasion in March of 2003.

An updated report on the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq report released last month by the Congressional Research Service, the investigative arm of Congress, said funds for Iraq and Afghanistan "are expected to last until June or July 2009." But the Department of Defense is expected to file its request for additional funding in March to cover operations beyond July 2009. The monthly cost for both wars is roughly $12 billion a month.

Pelosi did not want to risk losing Democratic seats in the House or Senate or put Democrats chances of winning the White House at risk by allowing the unpopular war in Iraq to become a campaign issue so she and Hoyer made sure there was plenty of funding for Iraq to last until early next year and when the bill was passed handed the Bush administration another blank check.

Pelosi also explained, unconvincingly to some, that although she and her Democratic colleagues campaigned during the 2006 midterm elections on a promise to bring about a swift end to the war in Iraq, the party’s razor-thin majority made it impossible to push through legislation to enact that goal.

But with additional seats the Democrats now have in the House and Senate they can scrutinize Pentagon spending in Iraq, reject emergency funding requests, and set timetables and other benchmarks the Bush administration vowed to veto if it crossed his desk.

Whether Democrats intend to adapt to a new way of legislating now that they have a Democratic president in their corner remains to be seen. Should the majority party deviate from promises they made in 2006 it will no doubt lead to a costly backlash among their supporters.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Pelosi made scant reference to ending the war in Iraq, saying it was definitely a “priority.” But she declined to elaborate. More than 4,100 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed since the start of the war in March 2003.

"That one motivation for a roadblock, which is to protect the president from a veto, will no longer be part of their motivation," Pelosi said, referring to issues such as Iraq and the economy. "And I think in the spirit of working in a bipartisan way, we will soon find out if people want to be part of the solution."

Progressive Democrats and senior members of the Out of Iraq Caucus, including Rep. Maxine Waters and Rep. Lynn Woolsey, are expected to hold up funding for Iraq operations next year unless there are clear benchmarks and timetables for withdrawal attached to spending bills.

Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow and budget scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who has closely tracked spending on the Iraq war, warned Congress, however, to radically change the way it appropriates money for Iraq.

In an interview, de Rugy said Congress must immediately end their “addiction” to emergency spending.

Emergency spending, according to the CRS report "is exempt from ceilings applying to discretionary spending in Congress’s annual budget resolutions.”

"Some Members have argued that continuing to fund ongoing operations in supplementals reduces congressional oversight,” the report says.

Dozens of these “emergency” funding requests have zipped through Congress since 2001 in an unprecedented manner when compared with previous military conflicts, the CRS said. In past wars, the bulk of the spending went through the normal appropriations process.

The Bush administration’s use of emergency supplemental appropriations to fund the six-year-old war in Iraq and the seven-year conflict in Afghanistan may have wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, according to the CRS.

Moreover, emergency supplemental bills are an opportunity for lawmakers to insert billions of dollars in pet projects into the legislation.

Emergency spending is “a way for Congress to spend money on their projects without trading off, meaning making cuts to other projects to support the spending.” de Rugy said. “I think it’s a complete bipartisan phenomenon. Both parties are bad at it and they get their stuff without compromise.

“It’s dangerous because emergency spending does not count against the budget caps. This is why Congress has used it and why they used it to fund the war. It’s not subject to the Defense Department accounting rules. It’s a total abuse of the rules.”

Emergency supplemental requests account for nearly all of the $661 billion spent thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report.

“That’s unprecedented,” de Rugy said. “Never before has emergency supplemental spending been used to fund an entire war and over the course of so many years. Other wars were initially funded through emergency supplementals but eventually it went through the regular budget process.”