Is Cheney Right? Will Democrats Cave on Iraq Funding?

By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t Guest Contributor
Monday 16 April 2007

The rhetoric over recent days and this morning makes it clear that Vice President Dick Cheney is still in charge of Iraq policy. He seems supremely confident that the Democrats can be intimidated into giving the White House the only thing it really wants - enough money to stave off defeat until President George W. Bush and Cheney are safely out of office.
That, of course, is also what lies behind the "temporary surge" in troop strength.

Was Defense Secretary Robert Gates being naive or disingenuous on January 11, when he appeared before the Senate Armed Forces Committee and addressed the "surge?"

I don't think anybody has a definite idea about how long the surge would last. I think for most of us, in our minds, we're thinking of it as a matter of months, not 18 months or two years.

I know Gates; he is not naive. And, whatever the relative merits of positions on a policy issue, neither he nor anyone else in the small coterie of presidential advisers is likely to stand up to Cheney. The $64 question is whether the Democrats will. To me, that appears a long shot.

While some Democrats in Congress have shown backbone since becoming the majority, key members like Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin of Michigan seem willing to acquiesce in giving Cheney and Bush funding to continue the war, no matter what. On April 8, right after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he would cosponsor legislation cutting off all funding for combat troops next March, Levin undercut Reid by telling ABC's "This Week, "We're not going to vote to cut the funding, period.... We're not going to cut off funding for the troops. We shouldn't cut off funding for the troops.... We're going to vote for a bill that funds the troops, period. We're going to fund the troops. We always have."

Do you want me to repeat that?

Levin is a smart fellow, but his progressive credentials have been tarnished by his caving in on funding for an unworkable National Missile Defense project; by his working out an unsavory compromise with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) on depriving detainees of rights formerly guaranteed them by the US Constitution. And now this.

What would prompt Levin to pre-empt his own majority leader? One possible explanation might be found in the chutzpah-laden admonitions coming from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) cheerleaders for Cheney, who do not disguise their fervor for the US continuing the war in Iraq. Their gratuitous warnings at last month's AIPAC meeting in Washington that US politicians not show "weakness" on Iraq spring from their conviction that withdrawal of US troops would make the neighborhood more dangerous for Israel. (Israeli politicians should have thought of that before goading Bush and Cheney into attacking Iraq in the first place.)