From David Sirota:
How to End the War? Make GOPers Decide Between Bush and Their Base
By David Sirota, 8/10/07
One of the major reasons why Democrats have not yet been able to pass
legislation slowing down or ending the Iraq War is because they
remained within their archetype (aka. the role low-information voters
perceive them as reflexively playing). The strongest bills they have
proposed have all been straight-up "antiwar" bills - that is, they
bring the troops home to end the war and that's about it. True, that
IS the antiwar movement's goal (a goal I wholeheartedly support) -
but the problem with it as the stand-alone legislative strategy is
that it doesn't allow Democrats to play outside their antiwar
archetype on Republican turf, nor does it make the average Republican
incumbent all that uncomfortable, because it doesn't force Republicans
to make a choice between loyalty to Bush and loyalty to their
conservative base.
Right now, the antiwar movement's strategy is a battle of attrition.
Keep pushing standalone antiwar bills, and hope that public
opposition to the war will force Republicans to peel off. It
certainly may work - but to echo Robert Redford's famous line in The
Candidate, there is a better way - at least in terms of a legislative
strategy that gets our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible.
Think for a moment about which issue Republicans have been trying to
one-up and out-conservative each other on...Got it in your head?
Right - it's illegal immigration. On that issue, the least offensive
Republican proposal from a racist/xenophobic perspective has been the
effort to beef up border security. A look at recent congressional
votes shows that beefing up border security has the widest bipartisan
support among all the immigration-related proposals being considered.
So here's the concept (which, though I'm not 100 percent sure, I
don't think has been tried yet in Congress): How about when Congress
reconvenes in September, Democrats bring a bill to the floor of the
House and Senate mandating that, say, 25,000 National Guardsmen be
taken out of combat in Iraq and be immediately redeployed to guard
America's porous domestic borders - both southern and northern? If
Democrats wanted to get even more creative, they could additionally
mandate that some of these National Guardsmen being redeployed be
immediately sent to forest fire emergency zones - many of which are
in Republican states right now.
Think this through for a moment. All of a sudden, the
illegal-immigration-obsessed Tom Tancredo wing of the Republican
Party, which also happens to be the most reflexively pro-war wing of
the GOP, would be forced to choose either the Iraq War or beefed up
border security. All of a sudden, we would be having a debate about
two very real, very pressing priorities, rather than theoreticals and
hypotheticals, and we would be discussing exactly how the misuse of
our National Guard as a wing of the regular Army harms our ability to
deal with the domestic challenges the National Guard was originally
established to deal with.
With the war so unpopular, far-right, law-and-order, "tough on
immigration" conservatives would be hard-pressed to vote against this
kind of bill, potentially providing a veto-proof majority in support
of it. And if they didn't vote for it, Democrats would have a
flip-flop campaign ad all set for 2008. You can just hear the
voiceover: "The Republicans who told us they support border security
voted against Democrats' bill to secure our borders."
Obviously, this is not an ideal way to end the war. As Senator Dick
Durbin (D-IL) has said, there are very legitimate concerns about the
downsides of militarizing our domestic borders. But Durbin has also
said that "Democrats are willing to support any reasonable plan that
will secure our borders, including the deployment of National Guard
troops." And most if not all would be willing to accepting the
potential downsides of an increased military presence at our border
(downsides which could be minimized if managed properly) as the price
to end the war in Iraq.
And that is precisely what this bill would do. With Bush having
recklessly stretched the military so thin, taking 25,000 national
guardsmen out of the Iraq deployment rotation would compel an end to
the war.
In the legislative arena where making law is making imperfect
sausages, this is a strategy designed to break apart the Republican
coalition by playing offense on their archetype as "tough on
immigration" conservatives. Rather than pursuing only the attrition
strategy of digging in on the antiwar archetype and hoping public
pressure converts a few Republicans (a strategy that could take
months of even years), Democrats have to target one GOP weak point
that will make Republicans decide between Bush and their base. This
strategy laid out here does precisely that, and would have the very
real potential of getting a wave of Republicans to vote yes, thus
getting our troops out of Iraq right now.
Wrap...
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