CONGRESS IS PREPARING TO consider (finally) the remaining $108 billion in supplemental authorizations to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Previous talking points of the antiwar party–the surge has failed, Iraqis will never reconcile, Iraqi troops won’t fight, violence won’t fall or, if it does, it won’t stay down–have fallen by the wayside as they have been visibly disproven one by one. So the current authorization debate is unlikely to see serious renewed attempts to legislate military failure by imposing a timeline, denying funds for our troops, or attempting to micromanage the deployment and/or use of American forces in a combat zone. The new talking point is that the war costs too much, America’s economy is in trouble, Iraq is a an oil-rich nation, and we must make the Iraqis pay.
As is so often the case with the antiwar party, this talking point proceeds from assumptions that are false:
