Senate Resurrects War Funding Bill



23 May 2008

by: Maya Schenwar, t r u t h o u t | Report


Fighting continues in Sadr City and across Iraq as the Senate O.K.'s $165 billion for war. (Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Image)
As expected based on precedent, the Senate passed a bill Thursday morning to pump $165.4 billion into the pipeline for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As expected, the Senate rejected a provision that would have established a June 2009 goal for the partial redeployment of troops from Iraq. This move has pushed the withdrawal debate off the table until after Bush leaves office, according to Craig Jennings, federal fiscal policy analyst at the government watchdog group OMB Watch.

"This supplemental bill would fully fund the Iraq war through end of Bush's presidency," Jennings told Truthout. "Chances to substantively affect war policy will drop to infinitesimally small levels once Congress writes this check."

The writing of that check brings the total war funds approved for the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) to $860 billion. The US has now appropriated far more for the GWOT than for any other war in our history, barring World War II.

But, momentous as they are, those occupation-affirming votes were predicted by most in Congress. Perhaps more telling was the way this bill was framed: despite two days of impassioned debate, with Democrats arguing for the quick reversal of a flawed war policy, nothing in the supplemental legislation would have accomplished that goal.

Last week, the House passed an Iraq policy amendment that established a timetable to withdraw most troops from Iraq. The Senate's revisions morphed that provision into a nonbinding "sense of the Senate" resolution recommending that troops be "transitioned" to "counterterrorism operations," training and equipping the Iraqi army, and "force protection" by June 2009. Since the bill provides no definitions of "counterterrorism" and "force protection," it could theoretically maintain status quo operations in Iraq even if it had been approved.

Symbolic Gestures?

Like most of Congress's Iraq-related legislation this year, the Senate's "sense" of a withdrawal goal was symbolic, according to Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, who served as assistant secretary of defense from 1981-1985.
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