The Feingold Option--Justin Raimondo

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Link to whole great article--portion of which below--from antiwar.com here: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10418

Sen. Russ Feingold may have withdrawn from the presidential sweepstakes, but he has entered the national debate over the Iraq war in a fairly dramatic fashion. Indeed, he has matched the president's escalation with one of his own by launching hearings, scheduled to begin on Tuesday, designed to point out the obvious – that Congress has the power to cut off the funding for the war. He plans to introduce legislation doing just that. Naturally, the piece reporting this on the new Politico Web site frames the matter in terms of the "conventional" wisdom, personified by the ultra-conventional Sen. Harry Reid, who opines,

"Republicans 'would like this debate to be as whether or not we are going to be cutting off money for the troops. The logical conclusion is that a lot of things can happen. But right now, the most important thing is to tell the president that what he has done with the escalation is wrong. And that's what we are doing, bipartisanly.'"

Democratic complicity in this futile and increasingly dangerous conflict is only underscored by the weakness of the party's ostensible opposition to it: they say they're against it, but on the other hand, apart from sponsoring nonbinding resolutions and posing for the cameras, they refuse to take meaningful action to end it. They can appeal to the president until they're blue in the face, but as Dick Cheney pointed out the other day, that won't stop this White House.

What will stop them, of course, is if Congress cuts the purse strings: that's the one and only way to end this senseless policy, because not even Cheney and his pet neocons can wage war without dineros. Like a parent who cuts off an errant teenager's credit card after it's maxed out, Congress can discipline the warmakers and ensure we're out of Iraq by voting to make funds unavailable after a date certain. But Reid and his fellow enablers of Republican militarism are quaking in their boots at the prospect, supposedly on the grounds that this will leave the Democrats open to the charge that they've abandoned the troops in the field – without bullets, without body armor, and at the mercy of the enemy.