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A Democratic Congress will investigate Iraq

I've been reading The People's Almanac Presents the Twentieth Century: History With the Boring Parts Left Out again, first mentioned here over two years ago. I never finished it straight through at the time, but I've come back to it lately as digestible, non-technical, non-business bedtime reading.

The most recent articles have been on historic televised congressional hearings. The Almanac has five entries: the Army-McCarthy hearings, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Clarence Thomas's Confirmation, and Clinton's Impeachment. History has already decided on all but Thomas's confirmation, and only then because we're still not sure if Anita Hill was telling the truth though most people think she was (other corroborating witnesses never testified because the GOP already had smear information on them).

The first three are important congressional curbing of Republican excesses (though the first was actually the public seeing a Republican congressional excess in progress; the Eisenhower White House was horribly opposed to McCarthy and his tactics), and the last was a pure GOP political ploy to attempt to bring down a Democratic president for purely personal reasons.

I started thinking, "You know, if the Democrats had any kind of message discipline, they'd be using GOP history to their benefit." The Eisenhower administration was the only GOP administration of the last 85 years that wasn't corrupt or incompetent in the end. Harding had Teapot Dome; Hoover couldn't deal with the Great Depression, Nixon and Ford had Watergate, Reagan and Bush had Iran-Contra, and now George W. Bush has Iraq. The Democrats should mention the last two GOP scandals with this one all in one breath: "Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Iraq."

But there's more to it than that. The GOP wound up on the bad side of all four of those important congressional hearings - twice because a Democratic Congress was investigating the excesses of a Republican White House, and twice because a Republican Congress was showing its own nastiness in attempting to gain more power at the expense of the nation's good. Insane GOP partisans like Ann Coulter argue that everything that makes Republicans look bad was political manipulation by Democrats, but sane people understand that in both Watergate and Iran-Contra, the Congress merely started investigating evidence of wrongdoing and was both amazed and distressed at what they found. Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), the chairman of the Watergate-era House Judiciary Committee, died earlier this year, and that brought back reports of how he bent over backwards to make sure all sides were heard. When the House authorized his committee's investigation into potentially-impeachable offenses by the President in February 1974, Rodino said:

Whatever the result, whatever we learn or conclude, let us now proceed with such care and decency and thoroughness and honor that the vast majority of American people, and their children after them, will say: That was the right course. There was no other way.

After Rodino voted for the third article of impeachment, he went back to his office and cried. After the GOP passed two articles of impeachment against President Clinton in 1998, they celebrated. People know these things.

The current GOP Congress has shown absolutely no interest in investigating anything since 9/11 because there's no clear way to blame Democrats for it, and they seem to have learned a little bit that inventing blame out of whole cloth on TV doesn't always work in their favor. The only recent televised hearing in which the GOP tried to smear its opponents was the whole oil-for-food thing, where George Galloway mopped the floor with Norm Coleman (R-MN), so they're not eager for more, and they're certainly not willing to investigate the Bush administration.

Yet the public knows things are going wrong in Iraq. There were no WMDs, nearly $9 billion is just missing, there's no sign of the war winding down, and the military is having such trouble meeting its goals that several recruiters have committed embarrassing public ethics violations, to the point that the US Army suspended recruiting for a day to focus on proper conduct.

And Congress isn't going to investigate one bit of this as long as the Republicans are in charge.

That's the message for the 2006 mid-terms: A Democratic Congress will investigate Iraq.. That's the sound bite, the elevator statement the Democrats need to make the public understand what's at stake. Did key figures lie to Congress and the country to get us into the war? Where did the money go? Why aren't things going according to whatever plan there was? Was there, in fact, any plan at all?

It's Memorial Day weekend, and over 1600 US soldiers have died for this cause, although nothing seems to be different in Iraq except that it has more terrorists, who are acting more boldly, and killing more Americans there than before March 2003. Were the deaths of these brave men and women necessary for the security of the United States? Everyone but the most rabid head-in-the-sand GOP fan has these questions, and if we're going to save lives and make the country more secure, we have to have answers.

A GOP Congress won't even ask the questions. A Democratic Congress will find the answers. That's the message of the 2006 elections.

The key for the Democrats will be to emphasize that they want answers, not retribution. The GOP always uses hearings for political revenge, like the lame-duck House vs. Bill Clinton, or Sen. McCarthy vs. the Army. With plenty of progressive organizations explicitly calling for the impeachment of President Bush, the Democrats must make it clear that they want the answers, wherever the facts may lead them. If that implicates the President of the United States, then it's another sad day for the country. If it doesn't, it doesn't. There may not be any wrongdoing at all, just incompetence, or manipulation by enemies foreign or domestic. But we know the GOP isn't going to investigate at all, because it might reflect badly on the President.

Sure, I think it's pretty clear from what we know so far that the President either knew or should have known that what he was saying about Iraq was false, and that's even more true for other members of his administration. But I don't know. I want to know. The safety and security of the country demands that we know why everything the US Government said about the necessity of invading Iraq was wrong.

The Republicans learned the lessons of Watergate well, starting with making sure that any Republican Attorney General is a compliant party hack. From Ed Meese to John Ashcroft and now Alberto Gonzalez, GOP Attorneys General don't investigate their own administrations. There won't be another Saturday Night Massacre. Thanks to the Clinton impeachment excesses, there's no longer a special prosecutor law requiring them to even go through the motions. The closest thing that's happened to a real investigation in the George W. Bush administration has been the outing of Valerie Plame, and after two years, all we know about that special prosecutor is that he's trying to put two reporters in jail for refusing to reveal their sources. With no Democrats to punish in the investigation, there's been no series of leaks to the press, and the Justice Department has no interest in punishing President Bush's friends.

That means there won't be any Watergate-style rush for conspirators (if there are any) to make deals to avoid prosecution - they're already avoiding prosecution by being Republican. The judicial branch doesn't have investigative power, and the recent filibuster flap was, at its heart, about Republican efforts to appoint judges who share the executive and legislative branches' disinterest in punishing fellow Republicans for wrongdoing.

It's clear that if the American people are going to know the truth about Iraq in time to correct any errors and prevent similar ones from happening in the next few years, it's only going to come from investigations in a Democratic congress. That's the story: A Democratic Congress will fully, completely, and fairly investigate Iraq.

The GOP will try to co-opt this agenda by holding fake hearings with the White House's rules, limitations, and bad timetable, but the Democrats must not comply. They must publicly demand unlimited subpoenas, guaranteed resources, and the power to follow the facts wherever they go. There must not be unanswered questions - neither party must cut off any line of questioning because "there's nothing to see there, move along now." If the investigators ask the questions, we'll know if there's anything there or not. These are American lives being lost every day in Iraq - assumptions won't cut it.

The other catch is that if the Democrats win control of Congress in 2006 on this promise, and then don't conduct the full, fair, and complete investigations that this situation requires, the party will have shot itself in the head and will deservedly lose power for ten or more years. Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, Savage Weiner, and their thousands of clones, plus Fox News and the shouting heads of the other channels, will scream at the top of their lungs that any questioning of any Republican is a "partisan witch-hunt," because they know that's what it is any time they investigate Democrats and can't really imagine the other side is any different. It must be obvious to the American people that any such investigation is concerned solely with finding the truth, and only then worrying about where that leads.

It won't be an easy task. Fox News and the Screaming Partisans will defend any GOP-sourced misconduct as absolutely right, and any criticism as Unamerican (see, for example, Abu Ghraib). The post-Watergate press has treated all such stories as "he said, she said" as long as the conservatives accuse any investigation of being partisan, which is why they accuse every investigation of being partisan. The right wing has fought very, very hard to keep the real information about Iraq from ever coming to light, including going so far as to illegally redistrict in Texas to reinforce the GOP majority in the House to guard against investigations. They're obviously very, very afraid of something getting out. If whatever that is does surface, the news media may realize it and shake off the Fog of Non-Factual Allegations that has hung over them since 1976. Or the Fog may stay in place.

It's a risky endeavor, but it has to be done, and the GOP will never do it. If the GOP has its way, not even the history books will ever say anything about Iraq that wasn't in a White House press release. Only a Democratic Congress will investigate anytime in the next four years, and the country needs that investigation.

That's how the Democrats win Congress in 2006.

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