Democrats drop “withdrawal” deadlines as administration mulls post-surge Iraq

With just days left until Congress goes into its Memorial Day recess, the Democratic leadership has reportedly dropped any proposal for a timeline for partial withdrawal of US troops from Iraq as part of a new war-funding bill.

The Democrats’ abandonment of this principal prop in their antiwar charade comes as the Bush administration is reported to be in discussions on what shape US policy will take in the aftermath of the present military “surge” that has poured tens of thousands of more American combat troops into Baghdad and Anbar province.

Behind the media reports of a showdown between Democrats and Republicans over the Iraq war, what in reality appears to be emerging in Washington is a bipartisan consensus on a strategy that would continue the US occupation of the oil-rich country for many years to come.

In an attempt to give Bush a bill that he is prepared to sign before the Memorial Day weekend, “Democratic leaders have decided to drop their insistence on a timeline for withdrawing US forces from Iraq,” the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

CNN cited two Democratic leadership aides as telling the cable network that “Congressional Democrats plan to send to President Bush a war-spending bill without a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.”

Both reports indicated that the Democratic congressional leaders would attempt to attach a hike in the minimum wage—the first in more than a decade—to the bill. This unrelated measure is being introduced in an effort to divert public attention from the fact that the so-called opposition party is providing Bush with nearly $100 billion to continue the Iraq war, giving the administration precisely the “blank check” the Democrats claimed to oppose.

The inevitable Democratic climb-down follows a series of war-funding votes in Congress. The first were held last month, with the House and Senate passing bills that were joined into a measure that fully funded the war and its escalation, while proposing a non-binding timetable for withdrawing some—but by no means all—of the US occupation troops. Bush vetoed this measure, insisting that he would not accept any such conditions on the funding.

Then, the Senate Democrats went through the motions of voting on the resolution advanced by Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin that set a March deadline for cutting off funding for the deployment of US “combat troops” in Iraq. In this bill, as in all of the Democratic-sponsored legislation, “combat troops” is used as a term of art to mask the fact that the proposals call for US military personnel to remain in Iraq indefinitely for purposes defined as training the Iraqi military, protecting US assets and citizens and conducting “counterterrorism” operations. In other words, the occupation would continue, albeit in an altered form, with tens of thousands of American troops remaining.

This measure—designed to allow Democrats to .....