White House Expects No Iraq Funding Cutoff
Advisers to President Bush are clinging to the notion that, in the end, majority Democrats in Congress won't cut off funds for U.S. forces in Iraq or even for the president's "surge" of an additional 21,500 troops.
"A funding cutoff would undermine our men and women in the field," says a Bush adviser, "and that's something most Democrats won't do."
True, White House officials expected that the controversial nonbinding anti-surge resolution would pass the House with considerable GOP support, but they argue that cutting off the money will be a much harder sell. When the Democrats' antiwar faction attempts to block the expenditures, one Bush insider predicts, "they just won't have the votes" in the House–and will be in an even weaker position in the more conservative Senate.
For his part, Bush won't back away from his insistence on "victory," and he believes he can maintain the current level of U.S. forces in Iraq through the end of his presidency in January 2009 if he thinks it's necessary, White House insiders say. They tell U.S. News that Bush is prepared to stay the course until then and let his successor figure out what to do next. He is convinced that most Democrats will realize that if they somehow succeeded in ending the war by cutting spending for it, they would be blamed for the catastrophe that Bush believes would follow–and they know Bush would argue that he could have finished the job if Democrats had only backed him.
"Besides," says another administration insider, "he has based six years of his life on this policy, and he won't admit it was a mistake. That would mean his whole presidency was a failure."
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