Democrats, White House agree: Iraq war will rage on regardless of Senate debate

Bush set the tone for the week with a blustering and reactionary speech in Cleveland, Ohio on Tuesday, where he made it clear that the defection by as many as a dozen Senate Republicans would have no effect on the administration’s war policy. Implicitly rejecting the notion that the American people should have any say on the war, he declared that the course of military operations in Iraq would “be decided by our commanders on the ground, not by political figures in Washington, DC.”

This demagoguery, a staple of Bush’s posture on the war for most of the past four years, amounts to a flat rejection of democratic and constitutional principles, one of which is that elected representatives of the people, not uniformed officers, should have the final decision on the great questions of war and peace.

Bush’s statement is also, like nearly everything else he says about the war, a lie. The president himself is, of course, a “political figure in Washington, DC.” While he invokes the supposed authority of the military brass in order to hide behind it, Bush has reshuffled “commanders on the ground” more than once to find officers who would embrace the military strategy propounded by the White House.

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