The Daily Background

Republican Senator George Voinovich Wednesday, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, repeating the White House talking points that the Biden-Hagel-Levin non-binding resolution to condemn the President’s Iraq escalation would send the wrong message to US troops serving over in Iraq.

Somehow I am not convinced that US soldiers in Iraq will pay much attention to whether or not the US Senate passes a non-binding resolution condemning the President’s Iraq escalation plan.

After all, the New York Times reported that in the wake of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, many soldiers did not find out about it for days- and even when they did, some of them had a very revealing question: “Wait, who is Donald Rumsfeld?” There seems to be this myth that US soldiers are paying attention to every move that Congress makes, and are interpreting it as either a show of support or a show of dis-support.

As much as people like Senator voinovich think that they’re this important, they’re simply not. And US soldiers fighting over in Iraq are much too busy to even know who Chuck Hagel, Joe Biden and Carl Levin are- if they don’t know who their own Secretary of Defense is. I’m not saying they’re intentionally uninformed, I’m saying that they’ve got enough on their hands that they may not be watching Meet The Press or Face The Nation every Sunday.

And even if they were, this idea that if the Senate or Congress as a whole condemn Congress-members the President’s escalation plan (as it is likely to do), then American soldiers will feel isolated or unrepresented or disappointed is silly in and of itself.

Indeed, polls conducted among military servicemen and women in Iraq have shown decisively that they- like the vast majority of the American public- don’t support the President’s escalation plan. If anything, more troops would feel represented by their Congress-members than not.

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog