Exit Strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq - Tom Hayden/The Nation

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

It's time for congress to quit ducking and step up again and end the wars.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hayden

Representative Dennis Kucinich will step into the crosswinds this week and force the House of Representatives to wake up, pay attention, and vote up or down on the Afghanistan war. The Kucinich initiative at least will reveal where Congress stands. Whether it will energize the peace movement for upcoming March protests or beyond is unpredictable.

Kucinich, interviewed along with other members of Congress by The Nation last week, is introducing a so-called privileged resolution requiring the House to hold a three-hour debate this coming Wednesday, followed by a vote on the Afghanistan war. The vote is expected to authorize the war, but passage of Kucinich's initiative would require a withdrawal in thirty days. If the president rejected such a decision, the withdrawal would be delayed until the end of 2010, nine months from now.

"It's time to force a debate," Kucinich says. "It's not enough to slow-walk the end of the war." On Friday Kucinich had seventeen co-sponsors for his measure. The Kucinich bill is based on the 1973 War Powers Act, passed during the upsurge of Congressional opposition to the unilateral war-making of the executive branch during the Richard Nixon era. The War Powers Act, strongly opposed by Bush-era officials including Dick Cheney and John Yoo, was based on Article I, Section 8, of the federal Constitution, which, according to James Madison, "expressly vested" the power to "declare" war in Congress.

The Kucinich measure seeks to remind Congress of the peak progressive moment when, in tandem with a vast antiwar movement in the streets, Richard Nixon was forced to resign and the Vietnam War was terminated. A decade later, Congress again would play a key role in the Iran/Contra hearings during the Reagan era.