Congress and Defunding the Iraq Occupation

We all have such short memories.

To get out of Viet Nam, Congress passed a series of defunding bills. They cut funding for the huge land force. They funded only bombing from Guam. They funded "Vietnamization," that is, requiring the build up of security capability by the South Vietnamese. Then they finally pulled the plug.

I believe many of the Democrats who voted for the Iraq military funding bill last week, despite loud voices from the left, did so because President Bush acquiesced on short term funding, on funding care for veterans, and not vetoing the minumum wage add-on. Imagine, the President actually bent! That's the big story of this recent funding bill.

President Bush wants time to be the winner of that war. I would bet that he has been talking to his staff about leaving Iraq on a high note where there is relative peace in Baghdad and where the parliament has voted some kind of sharing arrangement for oil revenues. Then he can say we won. Why should Democrats get the credit for ending the war!

There is a chance the insurgency will cause so much havoc that even General Patraeus can't make it sound like a success. There is a chance the Iraqi parliament will not want any major decision to be made while the occupation is in full effect.

And do not doubt the President will face a bi-partisan Congress that will pass a veto-proof defunding bill in September.

The myth is that such a vote fails to support the troops. Even some big-name Democrats who know better played along with that myth in order to justify their vote for the current bill.

Maybe they couldn't say publicly that any defunding bill would have funding for safe withdrawal and deployments that make sense given how depleted our military resources are becoming.

They better start saying it soon or the Republicans will continue to call the Dems "cut and runners" and eventually blame the Democrats for "losing" the "war" in Iraq.