The Problem Of Tough-Guy-ism

Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog really nails this one. Warhawks, led by the Vice President, constantly jabber that we cannot allow Iran a nuclear weapon or even the knowledge to create one, and how we need to show toughness rather than capitulation, which incidentally is the mentality that has led Cheney to embrace the failed policies of the Soviet Union in the Middle East, and recreate their disaster in Afghanistan.

But the point is, a nation cannot back down from aggression. Except if that nation is called Turkey and backing down would at least save one part of Iraq from descending into catastrophe.

Turkey’s military confirmed today that eight of its soldiers were still missing after an ambush by Kurdish militants a day earlier that left at least 12 Turkish soldiers dead and touched off a major escalation in Turkey-Iraq tensions.

Kurdish militants claimed they had captured the missing soldiers, intensifying fears that Turkey would retaliate immediately by sending troops across the border into Iraq. Turkey said it hoped that the soldiers were simply out of communication range, but it continued today to bolster its forces on the border, including both land and air units [...]

On Sunday, Mr. Erdogan said that he had initially delayed a decision about retaliating against the ambush, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had personally intervened.

This is where the entire worldview of the right breaks down. The PKK is clearly a terrorist organization which has been engaging in cross-border attacks for some time. Turkey has every right to defend themselves from such attacks. But because it would destabilize Iraq, the same people who want to recklessly move into Iran must urge caution. It's nonsensical, and puts these tough-guy conservatives in the position of defending a terrorist organization (nothing new for them, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a State-Department-named terrorist organization, is who the neocons are backing in Iran) and counseling for calm and peaceful diplomacy. They claim not to be acting mindful of realpolitik, yet that's all they do.

It's FORTUNATE that Turkey will exhaust diplomatic options before striking back at the PKK, by the way. What's unfortunate is that you have so-called leaders running this country with no sense of their own intellectual bankruptcy.

UPDATE: I should add that it's also this failure of leadership and constant drumbeating for war which cause other countries to emulate the US and use US actions as justifications for their own. Eventually that's where we're going with this imminent Turkish border war. Tristero has a very smart piece about this.

Babies As Far As The Eye Can See

We really have become a nation of children, so worried about the harming power of words - WORDS - that we'll put together a Senate resolution condemning them when they are used in a pun. The latest mau-mauing from the right concerns Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the UN and Columbia University. We are for some reason given the impression that "President" must mean some sort of ruler/despot, which shows both how strong the Imperial Presidency has grown in this country, and how globally illiterate Americans, and particularly the media that seeks to inform them, are (and the media deserves practically all the blame here). Ahmadinejad is like the Speaker of the House of Iran. He actually wields a little less power than that. He doesn't control foreign policy, he doesn't control the military, he doesn't control Iran's weapons arsenal. What's more, he's very unpopular in his own country, and is unlikely to win re-election. The only thing an outcry like this does is increase the power of someone who is essentially powerless. The mullahs are using him as a lightning rod so they can curtail civil liberties and dissent at home. While we focus on one guy, ordinary Iranians see the man attracting all this criticism and rally around him.

In demonizing Mr. Ahmadinejad, the West has served him well, elevating his status at home and in the region at a time when he is increasingly isolated politically because of his go-it-alone style and ineffective economic policies, according to Iranian politicians, officials and political experts.

Ahmadinejad would just wither on the vine if we'd only stop screaming about him. But the neocons won't, because they have a very specific plan that Matt Stoller outlines well.

1) Empowering Ahmadinejad: He's not particularly important within Iran, but this kind of mindless attention helps him domestically.

2) Leading Us into a New War: Wars require villains. Ahmadinejad, as an ineffective buffoon with a weak domestic power center, wasn't enough of a villain. He must be built up into an all-powerful character that can only be removed by American force. The divestment from Iran campaign, currently swirling around the states, is accomplishing this, and will almost certainly continue, at least PR-wise, into the next Democratic administration. This will make negotiations much harder and the path to a military strike much more likely.

3) Attacking Free Speech at Columbia: Dismantling or weakening institutions that stand up against the right or could conceivably do so is one of the long-term conservative movement strategic interests. The Freedom Watch ad calling Columbia University 'appeasers' is meant to intimate, and it often works in subtle ways.

Are we so fearful of losing our own democracy that we think one lone nut's words can take it down? That's ridiculous. We've weathered the storm of dissent before and we will again. Neoconservatives want to mirror the mullah-led state of Iran here in America because it would make it easier to take the country to war that way. And a pliant media, mindful that black-and-white worldviews and good-versus-evil constructions are easier to market, willingly goes along, setting up Ahmadinejad like he's Sinestro or something. Meanwhile this isn't mentioned.

While all eyes are on Manhattan, precious few are watching what's happening in Washington. On Thursday, Senators Jon Kyl and Joseph Lieberman filed an amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill that would make it official U.S. policy to "combat, contain and roll back" Iran and its surrogates in Iraq. Section 5 calls for the United States to formally designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. If passed, this amendment would open the door even wider for military action against Iran.

Why hasn't this bit of news sparked similar debate?

Because our traditional media are a pack of babies whose buttons are easily pushed by the babies on the right. Who are afraid of somebody saying something. Please.

Wrong About Everything = Key Campaign Advisors

I think it's important to note that this headline, "Neocons aiding '08 Republicans," makes about as much sense as "Heliocentrists aiding '08 Democrats". These are people who have been wrong about absolutely everything, making them ideal consultants, right? The Republican Party is so wedded to this stale, unpopular, and amazingly wrong theory of foreign policy that they risk becoming completely marginalized as a party for the next generation.

Advisers to Sen. John McCain of Arizona include Robert Kagan, co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), while former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's policy team includes Norman Podhoretz, a founder of the neoconservative movement, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gets advice from Dan Senor, who counseled L. Paul Bremer III, the Coalition Provisional Authority administrator in Iraq.

And yet there's apparently nothing these can do about it. They've boxed themselves in to win their nomination, as a term and a half of belligerent Bushism has pressed upon conservatives a Manichean, black-and-white worldview that has absolutely no room for change. Therefore, the Republicans are preparing to nominate a Bush clone.

Defense analyst Tom Donnelly says that by surrounding themselves with such advisers, Republican candidates simply appeal to likely primary voters.

"The public in general opposes the war, but Republican primary voters are generally more supportive of the war," says Mr. Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Besides, he argues, "antiwar voters aren't likely to vote for an antiwar Republican over an antiwar Democrat."

In this environment, the man with the biggest chance to capture the hearts of the conservative base is the nastiest bully on the block, who uses fear and divisiveness as a dog whistle to voters.

As both Kevin Drum and Benen point out, the substance of (Giuliani's) speeches and public appearances are little more than gibberish --- he's the Italian George W. Bush, just trash talk and macho attitude. His personal life is so complicated that he makes Bill and Hill look like Ma and Pa kettle.

He has to go straight for the Republican id. And unsurprisingly the polls indicate that the Republican base is liking what it hears. And why wouldn't they? Rudy's campaigning as if he were a right wing talk show host. They didn't care that Rush was a thrice married drug addict and they don't care that Rudy's a thrice married, pro-choice cross dresser. They just hate Democrats, period, and they don't care what you do or even what you believe, as long as you hate Democrats too. Rudy is the first full-blown dittohead presidential candidate.

Which is why you have discredited advisors in league with ALL the Republican candidates so they can catch up and show their dittohead bona fides. They're not just driving off a cliff, they're driving toward the Grand Canyon.

Joe Lieberman Actually Said This

"If (Bill) Kristol says what I'm doing is right, it must be right."

Ho. Lee. Crap.

I don't think there's enough space on this blog to itemize all of the things about which Bill Kristol has been wrong. Let me pluck one at random.

"I think there's been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America, that, you know, somehow the Shia can't get along with the Sunni, or the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq has always been very secular."

"Always" in this context must be taken to mean "while Saddam Hussein was killing Shiites and Kurds and forcing their leaders into exile, from the outsider's view it seemed that way."

That's almost a disqualifying statement from the Senate, suitable for expulsion. The only people who listent to Bill Kristol anymore are Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney. I think even Bush looked at Kristol's advice and thought, "Well that's just stupid."

UPDATE: Lieberman spread the usual bullshit in the WSJ today, saying in the same editorial that the Sunnis are turning against Al Qaeda in Al Anbar, but if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda will take over. If Al Qaeda can't even persuade fellow Iraqi Sunnis in the West to join them, how do you think they'll fare with enemy Shiites throughout the country? What a tool.

Blowed Up! Blowed Up Real Good!

When I was a teenager I went to see one of the Lethal Weapon movies. It featured the predictable level of explosions and violence, with something or someone blowing up every five minutes or so. In one scene, the "bad guys" have rigged a diving board so that one of Riggs and Murtaugh's partners would detonate a bomb upon attempting a dive. This happened, and the crowd cheered, as they had for every other 'splosion. Except this time, the friend to the main characters of the film was being killed. No matter - a good 'splosion demands some whoopin' and hollerin'. I remember that pretty vividly as being one of the core reasons I'm not all that interested in action movies anymore - somewhere along the line, it became unimportant who's head was being blown off, as long as somebody's was.

It is in this context that I bring you, via a pre-Salon Glenn Greenwald, this snippet from Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker profile of Joe Lieberman:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

Let us remember how Joe Lieberman rose to fame in the US Senate. He was the first Senator to speak out and condemn President Clinton for his personal failings in the Lewinsky scandal. He practically ran to the well of the Senate and assumed the role of America's moral scold.

But the truth is that after much reflection, my feelings of disappointment and anger have not dissipated, except now these feelings have gone beyond my personal dismay to a larger, graver sense of loss for our country, a reckoning of the damage that the president's conduct has done to the proud legacy of his presidency and, ultimately, an accounting of the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations [...]

The president is a role model. And because of his prominence in the moral authority that emanates from his office, sets standards of behavior for the people he serves.

His duty, as the Reverend Nathan Baxter (ph) of he National Cathedral here in Washington said in a recent sermon, is nothing less than the stewardship of our values. So no matter how much the president or others may wish to compartmentalize the different spheres of his life, the inescapable truth is that the president's private conduct can and often does have profound public consequences.

In this case, the president apparently had extramarital relations with an employee half his age and did so in the workplace in the vicinity of the Oval Office. Such behavior is not just inappropriate. It is immoral. And it is harmful, for it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family -- particularly to our children -- which is as influential as the negative messages communicated by the entertainment culture.

Under this standard, it is unacceptable to have consensual relations of a private matter in the White House. It is perfectly acceptable, however, to hoot and holler in the middle of a theater at the prospect of American military weaponry incinerating other human beings.

Here's Greenwald's laser-sharp take:

That is about as vivid a profile of the neoconservative warrior mentality as one can get: paranoid and frightened guys who derive personal and emotional fulfillment by giddily cheering on military destruction from a safe and comfortable distance -- who see war as a fun video game to play, through which one can feel the pulsating sensations of power and triumph -- combined with an obsessive focus on, really a paranoia of, the threat of Islamic fantacism to the seeming exclusion of every other issue and danger.

Joe Lieberman is the ultimate 101st Fighting Keyboarder, glorying in the violence and damage done by the American military but loath to actually get close enough to the conflict himself, preferring to LITERALLY cheer it on, and to make legislation that will send people to their deaths to fulfill his fantasies. He is also profoundly dishonest when going about on these moral crusades, deploring the amount of sex - and violence - in the media. Here's Holy Joe pontificating about the depravity of 21st-century America in a statement from 2003:

Some might ask why are we talking about virtual dangers when we are engaged in a very real war. The short answer is that leadership demands facing more than one issue at a time. We must continue responding to other problems here at home as we fight abroad. And the fact is parents remain very concerned about the cultural climate their kids are growing up in today, and very curious about what the future holds.

That's understandable. More than three decades worth of research, much of it conducted by people in this room, has firmly established that the electronic media has a powerful influence on the attitudes, values and behavior of America's children, and that this influence has only grown larger as the amount of time young people spend consuming media has grown greater.

Often this has been a positive force – helping kids learn everything from the alphabet to the intricacies of other cultures. And too often, I am afraid, it has been a negative force – bombarding our children with images of sex and violence. The most extreme expression of that today is a disturbing and irresponsible new trend in top-selling video games – most notably Grand Theft Auto Vice City – to link sex with violence and reward players for degrading and killing women.

We know conclusively that heavy consumption of media violence can have harmful developmental consequences -- desensitizing children to the effects of real-life violence, making them more prone toward aggressive behavior, and encouraging them to treat violence as an acceptable and effective way to resolve conflict.

Just last month, researchers at the University of Michigan published a longitudinal study that added significantly to this body of evidence, demonstrating that prolonged viewing of violent television by children was directly linked to later aggression as young adults. Both men and women who were high TV-violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to have engaged in some form of violent behavior and committed some type of criminal act – even after controlling for a broad range of other risk factors.

I couldn't agree more. Joe Lieberman is precisely the type of impressionable child that, when constantly exposed to violent media, grows up to be desensitized to the effects of real-life violence, and is therefore more aggressive in promoting such violence. He also, due to his prolonged viewing of these disgusting images, clearly treats violence as an acceptable way to resolve conflict.

It's astonishing that somebody this juvenile would be allowed to run a cash register, let alone run the Homeland Security Committee in the US Senate. He is an odious, perfidious little man, who gets his pleasure from the very violent acts he feels so qualified to scold others for creating.

UPDATE: Here's a little-seen video of Sen. Lieberman extolling the virtues of things blowing up.

We'll Be In Iran In Months If Nobody Does Something About It

It's embarrassingly clear that the Bush Administration wants desperately to attack Iran. I don't know if they just want to blow past one failed war on the way to the next one, or if they want to keep bitch-slapping brown people in the belief that this is the only way you can "train" them, or if they expect some sweet profits for their corporate partners if they take over the Straits of Hormuz. Whatever the reason, it's an undeniable fact that this feels like 2002 all over again.

How about blaming your opponent for all your troubles, even when you know they're not responsible for all, or even most, of what you're seeing?

How about issuing a license to kill for nationals of your opponent?

How about violating a diplomatic office of your opponent, smashing into the buildings, and taking away officials who were there at the invitation of the local government?

How about bringing in more troops on your opponent's doorstep, more ships into neighboring waters, and ratcheting up the rhetoric?

Think that'll do it?

There's more to it than that. The US tried to blame Iran for the attack on Karbala because it was "too sophisticated" for the insurgents to pull it off. Except they did, with help from inside the Iraqi government. FOX is reporting this.

Citing Pentagon officials, Fox News Channel is reporting that two Iraqi generals are suspected of complicity in a Jan. 20 attack in Karbala, Iraq that killed five US troops.

"There are 2 senior Iraq generals that US officials say are now suspect of involvement in an attack against American forces in Karbala on Jan. 20th," a Fox News host reported on air. "A number of people were killed. These gunmen apparently stormed an Iraqi security dressed like American soldiers and driving SUVs. So again, US officials are saying that 2 senior are suspected of taking part in an insurgent attack that killed 5 American soldiers."

So we have every little problem in Iraq being attributed to Iran, without any evidence. In fact, just today the US delayed a written report set to detail Iranian meddling in Iraq. I guess they didn't have enough time to bury the smoking gun.

Let's be very clear with what's going on here. Actually Craig Unger goes through this point by point in his latest article for Vanity Fair. The ideologues in the US government, the neocons, who have damaged this country with their fantastical thinking already beyond reason, are hyping reports about WMD, using unreliable sources within Iran (think Chalabi redux) to prove the points they want to make, and justifying it by claiming the failure in Iraq was not a consequence of thinking too big, but thinking too SMALL. This all happened leading up to Iraq, and when Grover Norquist is making sense, we've smashed the looking glass and threw it out the window.

"Everything the advocates of war said would happen hasn't happened," says the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, an influential conservative who backed the Iraq invasion. "And all the things the critics said would happen have happened. [The president's neoconservative advisers] are effectively saying, 'Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.' But after you've lost x number of times at the roulette wheel, do you double-down?"

So these directives to kill Iranians and additional ships in the region and saber-rattling talk is designed to provoke a response, a Rosetta stone that would spark a wider war. The sycophants in the media agitating for this, people like Michael Ledeen, are ready to pounce. It really does appear to be happening all over again, with the media falling for the same stories, with the same propaganda tools put to use. The reality is, as Anthony Shadid deconstructs brilliantly, that we created this so-called monster in Iran, and if I didn't know any better I'd say we did it on purpose.

"The United States is the first to be blamed for the rise of Iranian influence in the Middle East," said Khaled al-Dakhil, a Saudi writer and academic. "There is one thing important about the ascendance of Iran here. It does not reflect a real change in Iranian capabilities, economic or political. It's more a reflection of the failures on the part of the U.S. and its Arab allies in the region."

Iran has found itself strengthened almost by default, first with the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to Iran's east, which ousted the Taliban rulers against whom it almost went to war in the 1990s, and then to its west, with the American ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, against whom it fought an eight-year war in the 1980s.

Arab rulers allied with the United States issued stark warnings. Jordan's King Abdullah in 2005 spoke darkly of a Shiite crescent that would stretch from Iran, through Iraq's Shiite Arab majority, to Lebanon, where Shiites make up the largest single community. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt suggested last year that Shiites in the Arab world were more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. And in a rare interview, published Saturday, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suggested that Iran, although he did not name the country, was trying to convert Sunni Arabs to Shiism. "The majority of Sunni Muslims will never change their faith," he told al-Siyassah, a Kuwaiti newspaper.

Across the region, Iran has begun to exert influence on fronts as diverse as its allies: the formerly exiled Shiite parties in Iraq and their militias; Hezbollah, a Lebanese group formed with Iranian patronage after Israel's 1982 invasion; and the cash-strapped Sunni Muslim movement of Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

"I disagree with Iranian policy, but you have to give the Iranians credit," said Abdullah al-Shayji, a political science professor and head of Kuwait University's American Studies Unit. "You have to appreciate that they have an agenda, they're planning for it, they seize the opportunity, they see an American weakness and they are capitalizing on it."

We paid no attention to anyone and bulldozed through all of Iran's enemies, and installed a pro-Iranian government on its doorstep in Iraq. We bluster about Iranian elements in Iraq when the Saudis and Jordanians are there too, by their own public admission. Democrats are wasting their time in the Senate on meaningless denunciations, and in fact dangerous quasi-authorizations of the current Iraq policy, when Iran is a ready to rev up at any moment.

The sick thing is that, if it weren't for Dick Cheney and these insane theorists, Iran wouldn't be an issue today.

The honeymoon is over. Iran's controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has finally come unstuck. His popularity with the Iranian electorate - the subject of much incredulous analysis in 2005 - seems to be falling back at last, and the country's latest exercise in populism seems to be reaping the rewards of unfulfilled promises bestowed with little attention to economic realities [...]

None of this might matter so much, if the president had based his rhetorical flourishes on solid policies. But much to everyone's surprise nothing dramatic materialised. Ahmadinejad appeared to follow the dictum of his mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini - "Economics is for donkeys". Indeed, his policies could be defined as "anything but Khatami" (his predecessor). So the oil reserve fund was spent on cash handouts to the grateful poor, and the central bank, normally a bastion of prudence, was instructed to cut interest rates for small businesses.

These had the effect, as Ahmadinejad was warned, of pushing up inflation. The rationale for high interest rates was to encourage the middle classes to keep their money in Iran. Now they decided to spend it. Richer Iranians, worried about rising international tension, decided it would be prudent to ship their money abroad. This further weakened the rial, and added to inflationary pressure. In the past few months the prices of most basic goods have risen, hurting the poor he was elected to help. Moreover, far from investing Iran's oil wealth in infrastructure to create jobs, he announced recently that Iran's economy could support a substantially larger population, as if current unemployment was not a big enough problem [...]

Ironically, it is this very international crisis that may serve to save Ahmadinejad's presidency, a reality that the president undoubtedly understood all too well. As domestic difficulties mount, the emerging international crisis could at best serve as a rallying point, or at worst persuade Iran's elite that a change of guard would convey weakness to the outside world.

There can be little doubt that US hawks will interpret recent events as proof that pressure works, and that any more pressure will encourage the hawks further. Yet the reality is that while Ahmadinejad has been his own worst enemy, the US hawks are his best friends. Ahmadinejad's demise, if it comes, will have less to do with the international environment and more with his own political incompetence. There is little doubt that it will take more than a cosmetic change to get Washington to listen to Iran. But the real question mark, as the Baker-Hamilton commission found to its cost, is whether Washington is inclined to listen at all.

The American people are decent and just. They understand the importance of global leadership, and will not retreat into isolationism. Even now, after the horrors of Iraq, a majority want to boldly stop the genocide in Darfur by whatever means necessary. But the American people need good information and a way to understand this manufactured crisis. They can then empower their leaders, particularly the Democrats in the House and
Senate, to take action right now to stop this imminent war with Iran, which will not only bring mass suffering to another nation, but which I fear will permanently bring about the end of the superpower status of this country. Scott Ritter has outlined the precise steps needed to be taken today.

I would strongly urge Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate, to hold real hearings on Iran. Not the mealy-mouthed Joe Biden-led hearings we witnessed on Iraq in July-August 2002, where he and his colleagues rubber-stamped the President's case for war, but genuine hearings that draw on all the lessons of Congressional failures when it came to Iraq. Summon all the President's men (and women), and grill them on every phrase and word uttered about the Iranian "threat," especially as it has been linked to nuclear weapons. Demand facts to back up the rhetoric [...]

If hearings show no case for war with Iran, then Congress must act to insure that the United States cannot move toward conflict with that nation on the strength of executive dictate alone. As things currently stand, the Bush Administration, emboldened with a vision of the unitary executive unprecedented in our nation's history, believes it has all of the legal authority it requires when it comes to engaging Iran militarily. The silence of Congress following the President's decision to dispatch a second carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf has been deafening. The fact that a third carrier battle group (the USS Ronald Reagan) will probably join these two in the near future has also gone unnoticed by most, if not all, in Congress.

The President and his advisers believe that they are acting in accordance with the authorities given to the executive by the US Constitution, and by legislative authority as well, as provided for in both the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution of September 14, 2001 (after the attacks of September 11, where Congress not only authorized the President to use military force against the perpetrators of the terror attacks but also against those nations deemed to be harboring people or organizations involved in the attacks), and the Authorization of Military Force Against Iraq resolution of October 2002 (where Congress concurred that any presidential action would be "consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001") [...]

Democrats should seek immediate legislative injunctions to nullify the War Powers' authority granted to the President in September 2001 and October 2002 when it comes to Iran. Congress should pass a joint resolution requiring the President to fully consult with Congress about any national security threat that may be posed to the United States from Iran and demand that no military action be initiated by the United States against Iran without a full, constitutionally mandated declaration of war [...]

Congress can, if it wants to, put specific restrictions on the President's ability to use the people's money. A recent example occurred in 1982, when Congress passed the Boland Amendment to restrict funding for executive-sponsored actions, covert and overt, in Nicaragua. While it is in the process of getting a handle on America's policy vis-à-vis Iran, Congress would do well to pass a resolution that serves as a new Boland Amendment for Iran. Such an amendment could read like this:

An amendment to prohibit offensive military operations, covert or overt, being commenced by the United States of America against the Islamic Republic of Iran, without the expressed consent of the Congress of the United States. This amendment reserves the right of the President, commensurate with the War Powers Act, to carry out actions appropriate for the defense of the United States if attacked by Iran. However, any funds currently appropriated by Congress for use in support of ongoing operations by the United States Armed Forces are hereby prohibited from being allocated for any pre-emptive military action, whether overt or covert in nature, without the expressed prior consent by the Congress of the United States of America.

This is not something that can wait. We're going to war again with another Islamic country if nothing is done immediately. Today I participated in calling Senators about stopping the escalation of Iraq. I would submit that tomorrow we need to make calls to stop the war with Iran.