This is what should be grabbing headlines: not a single senator voted against $70 billion more for war, in either party. I think the World Socialist Web Site sums it up quite well:
Not a single senator of either party missed the opportunity to demonstrate his or her support for the bloody interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia. This vote rips asunder the miserable attempts of a section of the Democratic Party to posture as “critics” of the Iraq war. It demonstrates that behind the quibbling over tactics and complaints about the incompetence of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, the Democrats remain committed to violently suppressing the resistance of the Iraqi people to the US occupation and Washington’s drive to seize the country’s oil resources.
The vote shows that a Democratic victory in the November mid-term elections will in no way alter the basic course of US foreign policy–whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, or other countries targeted for future aggression such as Iran and Syria.
In its report on the Senate vote, the Associated Press noted that the war funding measure was passed “after minimal debate.” Such is the contempt of the two corporate-controlled parties for the sentiments of the American people, who oppose the war by a wide margin.
Nothing could more clearly express the unbridgeable chasm that separates the entire political establishment from the broad mass of working people. These two parties are accountable not to the American people, but rather to a financial oligarchy. What has emerged in America, behind the increasingly threadbare trappings of democracy, is a plutocracy.
As for the Iraqi people, the Associated Press reported one day before the Senate vote the results of two polls that show overwhelming opposition to the US military occupation. A poll conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes reported that 60 percent of Iraqis approve the attacks on US-led forces and almost 80 percent say the US military provokes more violence in Iraq than it prevents.
The US State Department’s own poll, according to the AP, found that two thirds of Iraqis in Baghdad favor an immediate withdrawal of US forces.
