Congressional
Democrats Rule Out Iraq War Fund Cutoff
By Patrick Martin
28 February, 2007
World
Socialist Web
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan,
the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, flatly
rejected Sunday any attempt to cut off funding for the US war in Iraq,
calling such an action “immoral” and declaring his party’s
commitment to the “success” of the American occupation of
Iraq.
Levin made his comments on
NBC television’s “Meet the Press” program, after a
week in which Democratic leaders in both the House of Representatives
and Senate effectively abandoned any effort to impose binding legislative
limits on the war in Iraq—spurning popular antiwar sentiment,
which continues to grow.
In the three months after
the November 7 election, in which mass opposition to the war in Iraq
handed control of Congress to the Democrats, the Democratic Party has
demonstrated that it is just as desirous as the Republicans of maintaining
US control of Iraq and reducing the oil-rich country to the status of
an American semi-colony.
Levin told NBC interviewer
Tim Russert that the Senate Democratic leadership had decided to move
forward with a resolution to repeal the October 2002 congressional authorization
for the use of military force in Iraq and replace it with more narrowly
drawn language.
Explicitly ruling out a complete
withdrawal of American forces from Iraq—the position supported
by clear majorities of the American people in all recent polls—Levin
said, “We don’t believe that it’s going to be possible
to remove all of our troops from Iraq because there’s going to
be a limited purpose that they’re going to need to serve, including
continued training of the Iraqi army, support for logistics in the Iraqi
army, a counterterrorism purpose or a mission because there’s
about 5,000 Al Qaida in Iraq. So we want to—we want to transform,
or we want to modify that earlier resolution to more limited purpose.
That is our goal.”
He added that the plan to
reduce the combat role of American troops while maintaining a sizeable
force in Iraq indefinitely would follow the pattern proposed by the
bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which the Bush administration has rejected
in favor of an escalation of military operations in Baghdad and Anbar
province.
“The key issue is do
we want American troops in the middle of a civil war,” Levin said.
“That’s the fundamental issue which we want to debate. Almost
all the Democrats, plus a few Republicans, do not want to get in the
middle of that civil war.”
The Democrats do not want
to debate the legitimacy of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a violation
of international law that the Democratic congressional leadership supported.
They oppose the Bush administration’s conduct of the war and current
war policy not out of any principled opposition to militarism or neo-colonialism,
but because the policy has produced a military and political disaster
for US imperialism. Their goal is to salvage the US intervention, prevent
an outright defeat and secure the basic war aims—first and foremost,
US control of the country’s oil resources.
Levin did not acknowledge
that the sectarian strife is the inevitable product of the US invasion,
the shattering of the Iraqi state and the continued occupation, nor
did his interviewer suggest as much.
Russert cited the declaration
by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican of Kentucky) that
the only way for Democrats to end the war was to cut off funding. “Why
don’t Democrats do what Senator McConnell says that they could
do, cut off funding for the war?” he asked.
Levin’s reply should
dispel any illusions that the Democratic Party intends to put an end
to the war in Iraq. “Most of us do not want to cut funding for
our troops for two reasons,” he said. “One is, it’s
wrong. Our troops deserve our support as long as they’re there,
and we’re not going to repeat the mistake of Vietnam where we
took out on the troops our differences over policies with the administration.
Our differences are with the commander in chief and his policies, and
we’re going to fund the troops as long as they’re there.
“Secondly, because
that resolution would lose, the president would then use the defeat
of a cut-the-funding resolution as a way of supporting his policy. So
we would be playing right into the hands of the president and his policy
makers by having a losing vote on funding.”
It is worth examining these
arguments in some detail, as they epitomize the mixture of distortion,
evasion and political cowardice that characterizes the Democrats’
maneuvers on Iraq, behind which stands their support for US imperialism
and its drive for hegemony in the Middle East and around the world.
Levin’s first claim
is that cutting off funding for military operations is illegitimate
and represents an attack on the American troops themselves. This is
bogus both historically and constitutionally. If taken literally, it
would amount to a complete surrender of decision-making power on matters
of war and peace to the executive branch.
There is, in fact, a centuries-long
tradition of parliaments and other legislative bodies imposing their
will on the executive by cutting off funding for wars or making the
funding conditional on certain military policies. The US Congress has
repeatedly done so, not only during the Vietnam period—where Levin
grossly distorts the record—but more recently.
In the 1980s, Congress used
its funding power to force a withdrawal of US troops from Lebanon and
ban support for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua (prompting illegal efforts
by the Reagan administration to circumvent the legislation, which erupted
in the Iran-Contra scandal). In the 1990s, congressional action brought
an end to the US military presence in Somalia and limited US participation
in military operations in the former Yugoslavia.
In relation to Vietnam, Levin
recycles the right-wing myth that “we took out on the troops our
differences over policies with the administration.” This represents
a pledge on his part that the Democrats will never cave in to antiwar
forces today, as their Republican opponents claim they did during the
Vietnam era.
There was a faction within
the leadership of the Democratic Party that turned against the Vietnam
War and sought to end it, and the absence of any genuine antiwar wing
of the Democratic Party today underscores the rightward evolution of
the party as a whole in the intervening years.
Nevertheless, Congress never
actually cut off funding for US troops in Vietnam, despite the massive
and sustained opposition to the war that developed among the American
people. There were some restrictions imposed on escalation of the war,
including a ban on invading North Vietnam and limits on US military
actions in Cambodia and Laos. The cutoff of funds voted by Congress
in 1974, after US troops had been withdrawn, applied only to the Army
of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the puppet military force which was
already on its last legs and ultimately collapsed in April 1975.
Right-wing elements, many
of them prominent in the current administration, have in recent years
promoted the claim that congressional action sabotaged what would otherwise
have been a successful American policy in Vietnam, but this pretense
is absurd. As Henry Kissinger admitted, the Nixon administration was
well aware of the hopelessness of the Saigon regime, and only wanted
“a decent interval” between the final US troop withdrawal,
in 1973, and the collapse of the puppet state two years later.
The rewriting of the history
of the Vietnam War plays a similar role in American politics that the
“stab-in-the-back” theory did in the politics of Germany
in the 1920s. The Nazis repeatedly claimed that Germany’s defeat
in World War I resulted not from the superior strength of the Allies
after American entry into the war, but from the actions of the “enemy
within”—socialists, communists and Jews—who supposedly
betrayed the fatherland. In like fashion, the Vietnam defeat is used
by American bourgeois politicians, liberal as well as conservative,
to argue that any serious and effective opposition to American military
operations abroad is illegitimate.
Such methods of intimidation
rely on the biggest of the many lies in the current official “debate”
over Iraq: the claim that a funding cutoff would somehow harm the US
troops deployed in Iraq. This claim is advanced as if self-evident,
as though the legislation would leave American soldiers stranded on
the battlefield without bullets or armor.
It is, of course, perfectly
feasible to draft legislation requiring the Pentagon to use funds appropriated
for the war in Iraq to evacuate all US soldiers from that country by
a definite—and early—date. Removing them would put a stop
to the rising death toll among American soldiers, and bring to an end
the basic cause of violent death among Iraqis: the American colonial
occupation.
A handful of House Democrats
have proposed such a bill, but this serves as little more than a left
cover for the right-wing policy of the party as a whole. There is little
support for such a bill in the Democratic caucus, and none at all in
the leadership.
According to a report in
Sunday’s Washington Post, Congressman John Murtha announced his
plans for a bill to restrict the deployment of troops based on readiness
requirements to be certified by the Pentagon in order to “head
off” the introduction of legislation calling for an immediate
or rapid pullout. The Murtha bill has in turn been denounced by Democratic
Senate leaders and more conservative House Democrats as overreaching,
and is to be shelved in favor of an even less restrictive measure.
On “Meet the Press,”
Levin rejected Russert’s well-founded suggestion that the Democrats
were simply “afraid politically to cut off funding.” He
replied, “It’s not a fear of politically of doing it . .
It’s the wrong thing to do morally in terms of the message it
sends to the troops.”
Presumably it is, on the
other hand, “moral” to continue the slaughter of Iraqis
and the sacrifice American soldiers and squandering of hundreds of billions
of dollars in an unprovoked war of aggression that was launched on the
basis of lies.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
Murtha, Levin, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other leading Democrats
have embraced the “support the troops” mantra as a pretext
for maintaining the US occupation of Iraq more or less indefinitely.
The effect of this posture is to empower President Bush to wage war
wherever and whenever he pleases. He simply orders the troops deployed,
exercising his powers as “commander-in-chief,” then demands
congressional backing in the name of “support” for the soldiers,
who become little more than hostages of the Bush administration’s
program of international aggression.
The utter cynicism of both
parties and all the institutions of official Washington can be seen
in the revelations of the past week over conditions at Walter Reed Medical
Center, the main military complex for treatment of US soldiers wounded
in Iraq and Afghanistan. A four-month-long investigation by the Washington
Post found hundreds of wounded soldiers living as outpatients on the
grounds of the Medical Center, in buildings infested with rats and roaches,
poorly cleaned and maintained, and not receiving the care made necessary
by the physical and psychological damage caused by the wars.
In the upside-down world
of American imperialism, those who posture as advocates for the troops
want to kill more of them, and warehouse the shattered survivors of
combat in squalid conditions, while those who want an end to the killing
and maiming are demonized for their supposed failure to “support
the troops.”
Levin’s other main
argument against a funding cutoff is that it is politically unfeasible,
given the narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, and that failure
to push through such a measure would strengthen the Bush administration.
It is hard to know whether cowardice or deception plays a larger part
in this argument, which might be described as a strategy of “preemptive
capitulation.” Because Bush and congressional Republicans will
oppose such a fund cutoff, Levin declares, the Democrats should not
even attempt it.
Towards the end of his appearance
on “Meet the Press,” Levin dropped any pretense of appealing
to antiwar sentiment. Responding to smears by Vice President Cheney,
who suggested in televised comments during his tour of Asia that congressional
Democratic critics were validating the strategy of Al Qaeda, Levin said,
“No, quite the opposite. Our proposal is an effort to try to succeed
in Iraq . . the strategy which has been followed is a losing strategy.
It is a failing strategy. And if we want to succeed in Iraq, we’ve
got to find ways to change that strategy.”
Levin’s wish for success—echoed
by all the leading candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination—demonstrates
that the installation of a Democrat in the White House in two years
time would do nothing to bring an end to the aggressive designs of American
imperialism.
The only principled basis
for the struggle against the war in Iraq is to demand the immediate
and unconditional withdrawal of American, British and all other foreign
forces. Those responsible for launching the war—Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Rice and dozens of other top officials—should face prosecution
before an international tribunal. This requires the building of an independent
political movement from below, mobilizing working people, youth and
students against the two parties that represent the American corporate
elite.