| User Blox 4 |
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Barack Obama  |
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Rob Kailey is a working schmuck with no ties or affiliations to any governmental or political organizations, save those of sympathy.
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Thu Jun 21, 2007 at 16:34:24 PM MST
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In today's Washington Post, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) wrote an editorial explaining his stance on funding the troops in Iraq:
I voted against going to war in Iraq; I have consistently challenged the administration's conduct of the war; and I have long fought to change our policy there. But I cannot vote to stop funding the troops while they are in harm's way, conducting dangerous missions such as those recently begun north of Baghdad. I agree with Lincoln, who decided "that the Administration had done wrong in getting us into the war, but that the Officers and soldiers who went to the field must be supplied and sustained at all events." As long as our nation's policies put them there, our troops should hear an unequivocal message from Congress that we support them.
Look familiar? It should; it's also the reasoning that Jon Tester gave for voting against the Reid-Feingold bill that would have cut off funding for the Iraq War. While Congress has every right to cut off funding, as I said back then, support for Reid-Feingold was based on the "faulty assumption that the President would actually withdraw the troops after funding was cut off." |
| Jay Stevens :: Get out of Iraq by deauthorizing the war |
| Additionally, Levin's editorial was ultimately a call for alternative means to end the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, he got drilled by bloggers who got caught up in the GOP-lite rhetoric of supporting the troops, and seemed to miss his advocacy for legislation that would actually extract the troops from Iraq.
As an example, here's Jeffrey Feldman:
Senator Levin, the only way to send a wrong message to our soldiers is to tell them that Democrats will try anything short of everything to bring them home. "We will try everything--without pause, without fear--to end the Bush Iraq policy that is destroying the lives of America's soldiers!" That is the only right message to send the troops. Can you not see that, yet?
But Levin wants out of Iraq, and he's got a plan:
We can end the war without stopping funding for the troops. For more than a year, I, along with Sen. Jack Reed, have introduced legislation requiring the president to begin reducing the number of American troops in Iraq within four months while transitioning our military mission there to limited force protection, training of Iraqi security forces and counterterrorism missions.
It seems the best way to end this thing is to simply end the authorization to go to war. Carl Levin had been working on a new Iraqi Resolution for some time now, and it got swept under the rug for some reason. But a new resolution is exactly the way to go. It'd be a clear yes or no vote on the war.
That said, if all these resolutions fail, and September rolls around, Senate Democrats should seriously consider stopping the war by filibustering funding. That only requires 40 votes. |
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