Concerned Kirk, Still Concerned About Iraq, but Only For Show With an Assist from Lipinski

Kirk and Lipinski have decided to join together in supporting a bill that calls for the Iraq Study Recommendations, but doesn’t actually require anything of the President such as, you know, reducing troops or actually following through on the recommendations so all he has to do is report to Congress every 90 days.

WASHINGTON – A pair of moderate Illinois congressmen, Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Dan Lipinski, will join forces Monday to discuss the “path forward” in Iraq with a focus on the long-shelved recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.

Kirk was one of 14 Republican congressmen who told President Bush in May that they worried the war was going poorly and could hurt the GOP in next year’s elections. So far he has opposed Democrats’ attempts to link war funding to timelines for troop withdrawal.

This week, Kirk quietly signed on to a bipartisan bill that would give the Study Group’s recommendations the force of law, including political benchmarks for the Iraqi government and a goal, but no requirement, of U.S. troop withdrawals beginning next year. Lipinski is one of the bill’s four original sponsors.

That depends on what you mean by the force of law.  The only true requirement of the law is that the President reports to Congress every 90 days.  We’ve seen what the President did with the current benchmarks and how GAO measured them–with GAO being the most respected agency in the United States government–the hollowness of this measure becomes clear.
This bill is nothing, but an effort to act concerned, but do nothing to end this war.

Lipinski voted for a withdrawal timeline earlier this year but didn’t like it because he knew Bush would veto the bill. He said he and Kirk — along with 25 other Democratic and 35 Republican co-sponsors — have agreed that “the Iraq Study Group bill is the way to go” to begin to change the course of the war.

“Over the last six months the president has been able to maintain the status quo [in Iraq] largely because Democrats haven’t been able to get Republicans on board” to change the U.S. role in Iraq, Lipinski said. “This is all part of coming together.”

So now Mark Kirk has a twin who wants to be concerned about the war, but not make the decisions to end the war.  And Lipinski only voted to end funding because he knew the President would veto it.  Dandy. Two profiles in courage.

“He needs to have the courage to stand up to the [Bush] administration and bring our soldiers home,” said Dan Seals, who narrowly lost to Kirk last fall. Added Jay Footlik, a former Clinton administration official also gunning for the Democratic nomination, “The fact is Kirk has completely ignored the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations by consistently voting to rubber-stamp George W. Bush and the Republicans’ failed policies in Iraq.”

You might think they support the war given they won’t do anything to end it.