 | From today's Detroit Free Press, an article on Michigan Senator Carl Levin doing his job: |
Michigan's senior U.S. senator, Carl Levin, used his first hearing as chairman of the Armed Services Committee to say that adding more U.S. troops will lengthen, not shorten the war.
"We've got to let the Iraqis know that we're going to have to reduce troops, not increase troops, and that needs to begin in four to six months," Levin said after the committee's four-hour grilling of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The hearing followed a similar interrogation of Gates and Pace by the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, and the contentious Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting where senators from both parties chastised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Both sessions left an unanswered question: What will the United States do if an increase in troops cannot help stabilize the situation in Iraq?
After the hearing, Levin said the Iraqi government can't be trusted to get the country under control. "Of course we would reconsider our strategy," he said. "I presume next time, we'll send in 40,000 more troops. Get in deeper and deeper."Sounds about right; in watching some of the House and Senate hearings, worrisome questions-without-answers kept popping up: If this 'surge' doesn't bring the country under control, then what? How long will this 'surge' last? Despite Gates' assertion that he would know in "a couple months" whether or not this escalati...I mean, surge is working, any information regarding what happens afterward has been basically nonexistent. I really don't like the idea of an open-ended committment allowing Dubya to extend the US occupation of Iraq indefinitely, or at least until the next President is elected.
Kudos to Levin and to all the other members of Congress who are asking the questions that need to be asked...Oversight is good, and we've had little of it over the past few years.
