Democrats back $162 billion more war funding

Democrats back $162 billion more war funding

by Yosef M

News sources on the Web report that on Thursday, June 20, the US House of Representatives approved Iraq and Afghanistan war funding of $162 billion. The legislation was passed without any timetable for US military withdrawal from the two conflicts. The bill, supported by the US House Democratic leadership Pelosi and Hoyer, will fund US wars in the two Middle Eastern countries through the middle of 2009. House Democrats, who were sent to Washington with a single mandate from the US electorate in 2006, to extricate the US from the two wars in the Middle East, consistently support legislation to continue those very wars. The vote is instructive; it reflects the same pattern we saw in the passage of the government spying bill the next day. If the Democrats had voted as an opposition, against war funding, the bill would have failed to pass, with 188 Republicans in favor and 235 Democrats opposing. And there would have been nothing Bush could have done: he can veto what Congress passes, but no President can veto what Congress refuses to pass.

What happened instead is that 80 Democrats joined the Republicans to approve the funding and continue US wars of aggression against the long-suffering peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq. As has already been noted in the press, Bush's popularity has fallen to historic lows; it is also true that a majority of US residents have opposed US intervention in Iraq for many years, a fact not reflected in the US press until after the Democratic sweep of Congress in the 2006 elections. As other people have noted, there is no way the thoroughly despised lame duck Bush can hurt Congressional Democrats now. If the Democrats go on funding Bush's wars, and they are and will, it is because they want to. All of which makes it inexplicable that most of the US "left" is ga-ga over the Democrats and their candidate this election year.

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