On Iraq war, don’t blame Congress

Ken Anderson, Las Vegas

Thursday, May 1, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

It seems to me that the handful of people who still support our president are trying desperately to blame Congress for things that are going wrong to divert any blame from George Bush. I guess the truth is that we all have our opinions and freedom of speech has allowed us to put our own spin on any subject, whether we are the media or just plain folks.

The House of Representatives voted 296-133 and the Senate 77-23 to give the president authority to attack Iraq if Saddam did not give up his weapons of mass destruction. The minority who did not approve the measure perhaps questioned whether there were WMD in the first place.

It seems rather obvious the majority believed that the president would not make a preemptive strike on Iraq without an exit strategy. It shows how wrong we can be. Once it was understood what a mess we were in over there, a majority made it known that we wanted to end our participation in the war and to bring back the troops.

It is difficult to understand why the Congress continues to receive criticism for lack of determination when it has been documented that most recently it has proposed plans to George Bush that would directly effect an end to our involvement. The president, however, made it very clear that he would veto any bill that went against his plans.

So who do we blame? It looks like the current administration is willing to keep the status quo and wait for the next administration to act. While that may be its only strategy at this point, it is too willing to give up American lives and taxpayer dollars to a hopeless cause. Of course, that’s only my opinion.