Congress Iraq

Once again the U.S. military is conducting major combat operations in Baghdad's Sadr City slum. Urban street fighting, daytime air strikes, refugees fleeing, the whole 9 yards. The targets are Shiite extremists who have been killing our troops and obstructing the so-called progress of a freely elected Iraqi government....

Five years ago, President Bush dressed up in a flight suit for a self-congratulatory photo op on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner that proclaimed "Mission Accomplished". Certainly, the war was not over then and victory was not achieved. The mission has been redefined several times...

After answering question after question about how the American people can possibly think that Democrats, especially the subset of the species that lives in Washington DC are nothing more than spineless, clueless eunuchs, I have done some exhaustive quantitative and qualitative research and discovered the reason behind these widespread beliefs:

The Petraeus/Crocker testimony on Capitol Hill this week was quite grim. In comparison to their last testimonials in September 2007, they reported that almost nothing has changed. Is it their fault? Of course not. I have no desire to "armchair quarterback" the people who are tasked with making Iraq an...

The U.S. troop surge in Iraq has caused many to prematurely tout progress. The ideology driving their optimism is the decline in deadly violence in recent months.

For example, approximately 718 Iraqi civilians have been killed in November as opposed to 2,155 killed in May....

The President and the Congress are having a boxing match on the Iraq war money. Bush just went on television today with a grim face saying that if the Congress does not fund his $196 billion request for next year, the Pentagon will have to start laying...

Taking a page from America's retailers, President Bush is getting a jump on the coming battle over Iraq war funding. On Monday, he added an additional $45.9 billion in supplemental war funding to the $150.5 billion he'd already requested, and then turned up the heat on Congress to...

At yesterday's press conference, President Bush insisted that he is still "relevant." Normally, it's an immutable law of politics that if you have to say you're relevant, you're not (shades of Clinton circa 1995). But in Bush's case, his role as the primary Decider on the war in Iraq...

Where is Congress? Where is the outrage among the voters? And where are specific plans from the presidential candidates on ending the war?

Last year around this time the voters were looking ahead to a new House of Representatives and a new Senate that would be controlled by the Democrats....

When will we listen to the troops? I'm not talking about soldiers used as props for a George Bush photo op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The military is disciplined and thus accustomed, from Gen. David Petraeus on down, to toeing the official line. But the Iraq war...

Thanks to the many commenters who have posted regarding my interview with Nancy Pelosi. I want to respond with three quick points.

First, as I wrote in my post yesterday, I believe the most important issue facing Pelosi and Congressional Democrats right now is their reluctance to use their...

On Friday, I asked for your recommendations on what I should ask Nancy Pelosi during my interview with her. The response was overwhelming. And the overriding theme of the reaction was, "Ask Speaker Pelosi to please, please, stop funding the war."

And over the course of preparing for the...

This week marks the fifth anniversary of Congress's vote to authorize the Bush Administration to overthrow the government of Iraq by military force. The Nation opposed the war authorization. In "An Open Letter to Congress," which we published on the magazine's cover on the eve of the vote, we...

It is time for Congress to battle President Bush's Iraq war policy. To date, the Congress has insisted on fighting the battles on the president's turf, his role as Commander-in-Chief. Congress has tried to set deadlines and timetables for redeployment, to stop the surge and to determine troop rotation frequency....