So how, exactly, does it change the course of human events for San Francisco?s Board of Supervisors to urge an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq?
Sitting in their chamber 3,000 miles from Washington, D.C., the San Francisco supes possess no constitutional authority to make such a pull-out happen. Indeed, the concept of municipal foreign policy is of recent and dubious provenance. But then passing nonbinding resolutions and indulging in cheap posturing as substitutes for an unattainable strategic retreat is a familiar exercise to many here in the nation?s Capitol.
If you are President George W. Bush, you feel no obligation to heed six San Francisco pols who?d rather see him impeached before welcoming democracy to Iraq. Reinforcing troop strength, you focus on pacifying Baghdad, where an elected government just might outlast terrorist insurgents.
If you are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, how are you supposed to process the hometown headline? Are you to feel empowered now that your closest constituents have registered their absolutist anti-war opinion? But you have just ducked a meeting with the “Code Pink” activists who camped outside your San Francisco home. You need to fly back to Capitol Hill and accommodate your party?s moderates, who fear the bloody consequences once, by defunding the war, they help create a power vacuum in the Middle East. Soyou don?t actually defund our military engagement; you pass resolutions.
If you are Chris Daly, the San Francisco board?s most activist progressive, perhaps you imagine you can stiffen the speaker?s spine by sending a message tapping into Bay Area politics. Those sentiments, of course, can be summarized as war weariness before the war even started. But your grasp of history is tenuous: The “greatest generation” was likewise weary at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, but something in the American character held back if an ambitious demagogue contemplated a premature withdrawal from Europe.
No, for resolution-oriented pols everywhere, your historical template is the Vietnam War, the irresolute prosecution of which enabled the cultural iconization of anti-war activists. You can be one of them, too, and, by mobilizing the political descendants of the old anti-war movement, you think you can fuel your own ascendancy.
If you are a jihadist or an Al Qaeda terrorist determined to set up a new caliphate in Mesopotamia, the better to destroy Western civilization, perhaps you?ll take notice of San Francisco?s peaceful purposes and exempt it from your target list. Or not.
If you are one of the other five supervisors who voted for Daly?s resolution ? or a Member of Congress inclined to vote for an Iraq pull-out resolution ? your thoughts are not eadily comprehensible. One thing?s certain: You?re not thinking about crime in the streets, traffic congestion, fixing broken schools, promoting affordable housing or cutting burdensome taxes.
