Boehner Op-Ed: "Abdicating Responsibility Sends a Dangerous Message to Troops, Enemy"

Via email:

I consider it a great honor to serve as your Congressman for Ohio’s 8th District. I do not consider myself a military tactician capable of managing a war.

But legislation approved last week in the U.S. House of Representatives lets me do that. The war spending bill has several unpalatable features, including requiring our troops to bear the burden of millions of dollars of unnecessary pork that was used to convince Democrat rank-and-file Members to vote for it. Among the most offensive provisions: It puts Congress in charge of making decisions about the war rather than the generals on the ground and requires the U.S. military to reduce the number of troops in Iraq below the level military commanders requested.

In 1999 when our military was involved in ground and air operations in Kosovo, I was adamant that while I did not agree with then-President Clinton ’s direction, I respected his authority as Commander-in-Chief. I believed then – just as I do now – that we must resist any urges we might have to wrest control of the military from the President understanding that doing so would damage the institution of the presidency.

This time, though, the Democrat majority has decided that it is more capable of controlling our military than our Commander in Chief, despite that not being the role for which they were elected. Each of us in the House is elected to vote on policy and fiscal matters, not determine military tactics. But we abdicated our responsibility when a bare-majority approved an emergency war supplemental bill that would require us leaving Iraq with our tails between our legs.

This marks only the second time in the history of our country that Congress has voted to withdrawal our troops in the middle of a war. The first time was during the Vietnam War, and I am sure we all recall the horrific images of the last American helicopters leaving that country to degenerate into chaos.

We are facing as grave threat to our freedom today as we did in World War II. The radical Islamic terrorists do not just want us out of Iraq ; they want us destroyed and have made clear that they will not stop their jihad until they accomplish that goal. And it’s clear that they learned lessons from our retreat in Vietnam : Make a war politically unattractive for enough politicians and the Americans will run home in defeat.

That’s not the message I want to send to the terrorists. That’s not the message I want to send to the world. And that is not the message I want to send to our troops.

Boehner represents Ohio ’s 8th District, which includes all of Darke, Miami and Preble counties, most of Butler and Mercer counties, and the northeastern corner of Montgomery County. He was first elected to Congress in 1990.