Pelosi: 'We will not cut off funding' for Iraq

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Imposing conditions on spending
The war spending bill “is going to be the turning point for a new direction,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D- Ill., the architect of the Democrats’ takeover of the House this November.

He said the bill will impose conditions which Bush will be forced to accept if he wants the money, such as a commission to investigate funds unaccounted for or allegedly wasted in Iraq.

To voters who’d be disappointed because they thought the new Congress would bring the troops home from Iraq, Emanuel gave a tentative answer: “From now on we are beginning to figure those questions out in the proper way.”

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Meanwhile some Congressional Democrats expressed minimal expectations for the report which will be issued Wednesday morning by a panel headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton.

Said an exasperated McGovern: “I’m hearing the Baker-Hamilton report is going to call for more benchmarks and more training of Iraqi soldiers. Well, what the hell have we been doing for the last several years?”

Walz said, “I’m hearing now, ‘was there a compromise in the (Baker-Hamilton) commission for political reasons’? There should have been no compromise for politics; there should have been ‘what is the best plan to solve this?’ My fear is if the pullback of troops was either delayed or sped up based on politics, that that’s dangerous.”

Bush, advisers get early peek at Iraq report

He added, “I feared that that the Baker group would create this unreasonable expectation” that it would devise some solution no one had envisioned before. “How many great thinkers have been thinking about this for four years? And there’s no real good solution.”

While it might be better politically for the Democrats’ chances in the 2008 election if Iraq remains a continuing burden on Bush and the Republican, Kucinich’s argument is that voters will hold the Democratic congressional majority responsible for Iraq.

Attempts to shift blame?
But Democratic pollster Jeremy Rosner took the opposing view on responsibility for the war.

“Despite the war’s initial bipartisan authorization, Iraq belongs to George Bush,” Rosner wrote in a memo last week.

He was on the alert for any of what he saw as blame-shifting: “Democrats will still need to take care not to give Bush and his team any easy pretext for shifting responsibility for the outcome in Iraq.”

And Rosner warned against exactly the course Kucinich wants to take: Democrats, he said, “need to avoid pushing for funding cut-offs that could be cast as undermining the troops (and which would in any event merely be veto bait).”

For now, Pelosi is listening to Rosner and not Kucinich. And 2008 may determine who was right.

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