Forward Observer: Herding Cats

By the end of this week, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., should be feeling a little more sympathy for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq, as he will be trying day and night to get the House equivalent of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis behind his supplemental war-funding bill to give Congress more control over the war in Iraq, including setting dates certain for U.S. troop withdrawals.

The 68-year-old Obey, son of a factory worker, was first elected in a 1969 Wisconsin special election to replace Melvin Laird, who resigned to become President Richard Nixon's Defense Secretary.

Obey looked around him as Congress divvied up the money for the Pentagon and soon concluded lawmakers tied into the military-industrial complex were calling the shots. Obey believed then and now that the system was broken and needed fixing.

Never before has Obey had as much opportunity to change the system as he has now: a full Congress as Appropriations chairman. His former chairmanship of the committee, where he was installed by fellow Democrats in March 1994, lasted less than a year as Republicans swept to power that fall.

But as much as Obey would like to force change in the military-industrial-congressional complex, he sees his more immediate and urgent challenge as helping Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., and other allies get fellow Democrats and hopefully a few Republicans behind the painfully crafted fiscal 2007 supplemental to provide $95.5 billion to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and improve health care for soldiers.

Obey told me that he regards last year's election results as more than a mandate for change in Iraq. He said he sees them as desperate Americans calling "Help!" to Congress.

With an edge of only 233 Democrats to 201 Republicans in the House, with one vacancy, Obey and his Democratic allies cannot afford many defections from the supplemental bill they will mark up in committee this week, with hopes of getting it on the floor the following week with dates-certain language.

Under the Democratic bill unveiled Thursday and promptly denounced as a "non-starter" by the White House, U. S. troops would have to be out of Iraq no later than Aug. 31, 2008, and sooner than that if the Iraqi government failed to take such actions as apportioning its oil money fairly to its people and making it easier to amend the Iraqi constitution.

One section of the Democrats' draft bill has an objective that everybody in the U.S. government, including Bush, seems to share: Find some teeth that would bite Prime Minister Maliki if he fails to make good on his promises.

The teeth in the supplemental are withdrawals of U.S. troops from Iraq before Aug. 31, 2008, if Bush could not certify that Maliki had held up his end of the bargain. Obey sees it as a matter of common sense for Congress to put strings on its aid to Iraq.

"The Iraqis need to perform on the military front in a way that is acceptable; they need to perform on the political front in a way that is acceptable," said Obey in arguing that only Iraq can save Iraq, not the U.S. military or any other outside party. "If the Iraqi [ruling] faction had performed the way they should have performed, this would be a George Bush success story. The problem is that they aren't and never have and our administration's expectations about their ability to do that were wildly optimistic for the last four years."

While putting strings on U.S. aid for Iraq should be easy for Obey to do as he oversees the markup and debate on the supplemental bill, how many strings to put on Bush will be hotly debated.

A sample of what Pelosi, Obey, Murtha and other Democratic leaders can expect in trying to patch together a passable bill on Iraq was put on display Thursday when members of the Progressive and "Out of Iraq" caucuses railed against sending Bush any more money to keep fighting the war in Iraq.

"The occupation of Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., -- who last year was as lonely as the late Sen. Wayne Morse, D-Ore., was in the early 1960s when he attacked the Vietnam War -- but now draws a scrum of reporters wherever she goes. "This nightmare must end." She is among several liberals championing an amendment that would require President Bush to get American troops out of Iraq by this coming Christmas.

Woolsey, Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and a half-dozen other liberals sounded their protests while standing tightly together on the small stage at the front of the small House press gallery on the third floor of the Capitol.

Behind them was a book case with such dusty tomes as "Diseases of the Stomach" and "Year Book of the United Nations, 1946-1947." There was no book that Obey could really use in the ongoing debate on his bill, like Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott's recent "Herding Cats."