The Hastert-​Gephardt pro­posal (H.J.R 114) passed the House today on a 296 – 113 vote. The Sen­ate also voted 75 – 25 to limit debate, mean­ing its vote on the war res­o­lu­tion could come as early as tomor­row. This is dis­ap­point­ing as the Spratt amend­ment was a common-​sense approach to this whole killin’ Iraqis busi­ness. (For a glimpse of alter­na­tives, Here’s a PDF that com­pares the var­i­ous House and Sen­ate pro­pos­als.)
All of this may be moot, how­ever because sources on Cap­i­tal Hill are say­ing that Bush doesn’t want war at all! That come Nov. 5, Bush will sud­dently start talk­ing about how the United Nations is a use­ful body after all, and that inspec­tors will be allowed to do their job. I’m told Bush doesn’t want to be look­ing at an occu­pied Iraq two years from now when we have guerilla fight­ing in Bagh­dad sub­urbs, a mas­sive drain on the national econ­omy and a sta­ble oil sup­ply only because United States occu­pa­tion forces keep Kurds, Shi’ites and Sunni Arabs (not to men­tion Turkomen and Ira­ni­ans) from each oth­ers’ throats. Add to that a daily trickle of body bags as one or two GIs die every cou­ple of days. That wouldn’t be very fun to run on, would it? Espe­cially since Bush avoided the hor­rors of a long, drawn out guerilla war once before!
This would be a fas­ci­nat­ing exam­ple of dog-​wagging. At least Pres­i­dent Clin­ton actu­ally tossed some cruise missles around when he was accused of doing it to dis­tract the nation from him “doing it.” In Bush’s case, how­ever war with Iraq will have been talked up, the Mid­dle East desta­bi­lized, the UN insulted and our rep­u­ta­tion trashed with allies — all for short-​term elec­tion gains. (Well, not all for short-​term gains. No doubt there are plenty of true believ­ers who think that Sad­dam should be blowed up real good, but try­ing to divine the influ­ence of peo­ple like Karl Rove, Dick Cheney et al., is akin to Krem­li­nol­ogy.) A post-​election change in rhetoric would prove the influ­ence of “Gen­eral Rove.”