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New Poll: Iraq Funding |
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This week, we ask you to predict the outcome of the upcoming Iraq war funding battle in Congress. But first, last week's results:
Last week, in anticipation of the White House's progress report on Iraq due in mid-September, we wanted to know how Seminal readers thought the surge was going. Not surprisingly, the feeling was overwhelmingly negative, with 71% of respondents voting that the surge was not working. 16% voted that the surge was having an effect and 13% voted that they couldn't tell, closely mirroring national polls about the Iraq war in general.
On Wednesday, President Bush asked Congress for an additional $50 billion to fund the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the $147 billion he had previously requested. Most of this money will go towards Iraq, not Afghanistan, according to the Washington Post:
The revised supplemental would total about $200 billion, indicating that the cost of the war in Iraq now exceeds $3 billion a week. The bill also covers the far smaller costs of the war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon said recently that the cost of the Iraq war has surpassed $330 billion, while the war in Afghanistan has cost $78 billion.
Which of course is a problem, as Ish has argued we should be paying way more attention to Afghanistan.
There will be a fight about this supplemental request, as there was about the last one. Our question this week is more of a prediction. Do you think the Democrats will fold and provide Bush with the money he wants without attaching any significant conditions to it? (For example, no money until after political progress has been made, or attaching a deadline for a withdrawal.) Or do you think the Democrats will have the backbone to stand up this time?
Voting begins now in the sidebar at right. Feel free to leave your explanations in the comments below.
I vote a pessimistic no, and here's why. I don't see how conditions have changed since the last bill. There has been no major shifts in leading Democratic rhetoric. You don't see a concerted effort to combat the right wing fallacy that not approving Bush's appropriations is equivalent to not supporting the troops. You don't see major leaders putting their foot down and saying no. There is the same talk about "not giving Bush a blank check" and pledges to look over the request in detail and to work to a solution. That's the same talk you had last tiime and it didn't work. On top of that, you've got no concerted effort to sway the Bush Dogs away from voting for the war (though I'm working as part of an effort to change that).
So, because things look pretty much exactly the same as they did last tiime around, I predict that the Democrats will fold, much to the chagrin of the netroots.