Most Americans don’t want this war, and among Democratic voters, 89 percent say the United States should not have attacked Iran. Yet with bombs killing Iranian children, all the legislative opposition to Donald Trump’s war that congressional Democrats could manage this week was a feeble procedural, symbolic quibble — in the form of a War Powers resolution by Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky and Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia — demanding that the president halt the war until Congress has given its permission. On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Senate voted that down.
The failure of that resolution is the fault of the Republican majority, of course. But for the Democratic tepidity, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York deserves significant blame.
As Aída Chávez reported last week, Democratic Party leadership tried to derail even this pathetic effort to throw sand in the gears of this insane war, making sure to delay the vote until the war was already underway. Schumer and House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries worked to undermine and delay the vote because they knew that the antiwar position was popular with the Democratic base, but they weren’t personally interested in defying the elite security consensus, sources told Chávez.
But Jeffries, for his part, at least has made marginally better public statements, denouncing all recent regime wars as “expensive,” declaring that each of them — Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — had “failed in their mission.” He said this one had “no justification” and acknowledged that “the American people want us to focus on making their life better, making their life more affordable, not getting involved in another endless war in the Middle East that is going to end in failure.”
Stronger stuff than we got from Schumer, who said, with his characteristic milquetoast mien, that the administration had not provided “critical details” about the threat from Iran. He mentioned that there…
Auteur: Liza Featherstone
