last week Hillary Clinton called for a cessation of funding for Iraq's Maliki government until certain conditions are met.
"I think putting leverage on them and saying, 'You know what, we provide security for the members of this government. We're cutting funding for that. We're not going to fund an army that doesn't show up half the time, that is more aligned with their sectarian position than with the national identity.'"
Now, I'm not generally much of a Hillary Clinton fan, but in his case I am totally in her court. She is about as politically cagey as they come, which often turns me off; however, in this case she has stumbled upon the perfect medium between cutting off funds for the troops, and thus playing right into Karl Rove's stickiest wet dream, and Joe Biden's toothless non-binding resolution (which, incidently, also plays into Karl Rove's stereotyping of Democrats as spineless. after all, kerry didn't lose because people necessarily believed those swift boat slime-jobs, he lost because he didn't fight back against them!)
This is a ball the democrats should pick up and run with; in fact, they should go further with it and cut off funding for the "reconstruction" that Dick Cheney's corporate buddies are "doing." Considering the total incompetence of the CPA and the fact that the Bush administration's own Government Accounting Office has said that despite the tens of billions of dollars we've pissed away there,
Iraq’s crude oil production and overall power generation were lower than before the 2003 conflict
and,
Reconstruction efforts continue to face challenges such as rebuilding in an insecure environment, ensuring the sustainability of completed projects, and measuring program results.
I can't for the life of me guess what possible justification there can be for spending MY money and YOUR money on this bottomless pit of lunacy.
Just to put some of this into perspective, check out this report by the American Society of Civil Engineers on the sorry state of America's infrastructure (I haven't figured out the system of imbedding images on this site yet, so you have to click this ASCE link to see their report card where in 15 infrastructure categories such as drinking water, dams, bridges and security we scored 10 D's, 4 C's and one incomplete -- the incomplete was in security!!)
I've had a lot of heated arguments with a lot of right-wingers in my time and one thing they all have in common is they aren't too crazy about inefficient, wasteful, corrupt "big government" projects -- unless they're in their districts! last time i checked, Iraq wasn't; and so this seems to me to be a huge card for Democrats to play as we try to put an end to Bush's legacy even before his term as president expires.