from Miles Mogulescu at HuffPo:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/congress-must-hold-emerge_b_359396.htmlAS President Obama contemplates perhaps the most fateful decision of his young Presidency--whether to commit tens of thousands of additional American soldiers and most likely hundreds of billions of additional funds to a civil war in central Asia that could well last for the rest of his Presidency--it is vital that the debate not be confined to White House but also involve the Congress and the American people.
Under the Constitution, the President is the Commander in Chief, but it is the Congress that has the power to declare War and appropriate funds. Too often, in the past 60 years, Presidents have committed American troops to foreign wars on the shakiest of Congressional authorization. After that, the only alternative to those in Congress who might question the decision is to cut off funds. But doing so when large numbers of American troops are already engaged in combat on foreign soil is a politically dangerous endeavor and only takes place under the most dire of circumstances.
Therefore, the time is now--before President Obama makes these momentous and near irreversible decisions--for The Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Appropriations Committee to call emergency hearings on Afghanistan to fully air the pros and cons of committing large numbers of additional troops and tens or hundreds of billions of additional dollars for an open ended war.
As Daniel Ellsberg (the former Pentagon official turned Vietnam War critic who released the Pentagon Papers) reminded a crowd in Los Angeles last week, the Fall of 2009 is very much like the Summer of 1965 when LBJ and his military and civilian advisors debated whether to increase American troop commitments in South Vietnam from about 23,000 "advisors" (less than the 68,000 now stationed in Afghanistan) to several hundred thousand combat troops.
(Ellsberg might also have mentioned that it's also much like 1962, when another young President, John F. Kenndy, was getting conflicting advice about sending American ground troops to Laos, but eventually refused, to the dismay of many of his generals.)
read more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/congress-must-hold-emerge_b_359396.html
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