Maine Owl

New Maine 1st District Representative unimpressive in borderline jingoistic comments after recent South Asia trip

If anything, Representative Chellie Pingree has a conventional Democrat-Obama position on the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But she did run on a platform suggesting she would be a stronger anti-war advocate, stating,

Pingree: We must end the war now. Congress must stop funding the war and rescind its authorization if the administration refuses to make plans for immediate withdrawal. We can't continue to squander our resources on the worst foreign policy mistake in our country's history. Leaving will be complicated, but staying only continues the tragic loss of our soldiers, Iraqi citizens, and almost unthinkable amounts of money.

Now that she is in office and traveling to the Pentagon beachheads, the tune is different. In a story in today's Bangor Daily News--"Pingree returns to U.S. after Middle East visit" (apparently not yet on line, follow-up to this one), Pingree is quoted saying that she is "closer to understanding what U.S. forces need to do to achieve victory in Iraq" and that "U.S. military and reconstruction campaign in Iraq has achieved some success."

These lines could have been written for George W. Bush.

What about the prospects for the "immediate withdrawal" she ran on? According to the BDN story, "She said it is too soon to tell, however, whether democracy will stand on its own there after American forces withdraw. 'That was one of the key questions that we asked over and over again: What is going to slide back when we leave, and what can we achieve with our limited resources? ... I don't think I came to a final answer on this, but I got a lot of information that is going to help make a final decision."

Again, this isn't much of an anti-war position. No longer is there mention of "tragic loss of our soldiers, Iraqi citizens." In fact, it is extremely disheartening that Pingree could return from Iraq and fail to communicate concern about the devastation of the Iraqi people and looting of Iraqi and reconstruction resources under U.S. occupation, preferring instead to use the Bush-McCain frame of military "victory."

It's not like she never makes such comments about the failure of military solutions, as reported HERE: "If there's one thing we've learned, it's that we can't do this all by military force, ... brutalizing people with weapons isn't going to repair what's going on," Pingree said.

But I think she is going to have to do a lot better than adopting the jingoism and paternalism implicit in these American military adventures.