Congressional Democrats rule out Iraq war fund cutoff

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.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/dems-f27.shtml