Eleabor Clift's Column for Newsweek: "Marketing the War"

Here is a link to a great column by Eleanor Clift because it contains an analysis on how the Republicans plan to blame the Democrats when things go wrong in Iraq. This is a quote from the article:

Forget September. April is the real deadline. That’s when the U.S. military can no longer sustain the surge, and the debate will then be over whether to return to pre-surge levels or begin a staged withdrawal. You can guess where Bush will be; he’ll want to keep 130,000 troops (down from the current 160,000) in Iraq until he leaves office. The strategy of the war’s architects is clear: keep enough troops in Iraq to provide a surface illusion of progress, and then when the Democrats (ideally, Hillary) win the presidency in ’08 and pull out of Iraq, Bush and the Republicans can claim they were on the verge of a great victory against Islamofascism when the weak-willed opposition party betrayed the troops and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. It worked with Vietnam, crippling Democrats on national security for decades because it was a Democratic Congress that pulled funding from the South Vietnamese government.

This is why Democratic politicians in Washington are not lining up to cut off funding for troops while they are serving in Iraq. They realize that they are going to be blamed if we withdraw rapidly and a bloodbath results. The thing that is not known, however, is whether the American public will care if there is a bloodbath in Iraq. If you want an explanation of why Democrats aren't willing to cut off funding, Clift's column is a good place to start.