An astonishing turnaround occurred in the Senate on Tuesday: 70 senators voted to fund the Iraq war with a fresh $70 billion and no strings attached. Think about this a moment. Last winter, after Democrats captured the Senate and House, it seemed likely they'd succeed in limiting or ending the Iraq war, probably by setting a firm timetable for withdrawal of American troops. After all, both President Bush and the war itself were highly unpopular. The Democratic triumph in the election made that clear, even to those who doubted opinion polls. And Democrats made the anti-Iraq crusade their top priority in the new Congress. Now, the 70-vote approval of the war by the Senate represents the breathtaking dimension of their failure.
For much of 2007, the question was whether Democrats would get 60 votes to halt Senate debate, pass an anti-war measure, and send it to the president. And Democrats came close to achieving that. To belabor the point, they had in the neighborhood of 60 senators ready to vote against the war. Compare that with the 70 votes in favor of the war on Tuesday. That's a historic shift on a high visibility issue that has strongly emotional opposition. Do the math. You don't see turnarounds like this very often, especially in a Congress as polarized as this current one.
Last summer, Republican leaders figured that Democrats finally had the 60 votes. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell informed the White House of this. Veteran Republican senators - Richard Lugar, Pete Domenici, John Warner - were jumping ship. More were expected to. Democrats had come up with a clever proposal for restraining the war. It was the proposal by Senator James Webb of Virginia to lengthen the time soldiers had to remain at home before redeployment to Iraq. Warner, in fact, endorsed it, but he changed his mind after military officials told him the Webb scheme was unworkable. The proposal lost.
But what if one of the anti-war measures had passed? True, Bush would have vetoed it and chances are Senate Republicans would have mustered the 34 votes to sustain his veto. But congressional passage of a bill limiting the war would have been politically disastrous even if it didn't go into effect. It would have undercut the president, galvanized the opposition, and most likely prompted a stampede of congressional Republicans away from support for the war.
Everything changed, of course, when General David Petraeus, the Iraq commander, testified before Congress in September. He said there had been measurable success in reducing violence in iraq, including a sharp drop in American casualties. Since January, Petraeus had been carrying out the new Iraq policy that Bush had announced in January to add troops - the so-called surge - and implement a new counterinsurgency strategy. By the time the Senate voted on Tuesday, the decline in violence in Iraq had become more dramatic.
Credit for keeping anti-war measures from reaching the White House goes to a number of senators. Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Democratic ally Joe Lieberman were able to persuade queasy senators from voting against the war at critical times. McConnell, once worried that the war would drag on and damage Republican senators running in 2008, was key to holding the line. So was Trent Lott, the Republican whip. And the president never flinched.
To be fair, all of the 22 Democrats who voted for the $70 billion haven't suddenly become backers of the war. Rather, some merely wanted to pass the omnibus budget bill, which Republicans said they'd block if Iraq money weren't passed first. Still, 70 votes is 70 votes, and this majority included Carl Levin, one of the war's chief Democratic critics.
