I'm glad this went through as well, especially with the college-fund for veterans. Those guys don't get half as much as they deserve when they come down, and if anybody's earned the right to an education and an opportunity to make something of themselves, they're it. That veterans are allowed to come home with grossly insufficient benefits, poor-quality mental and physical healthcare, and a (formerly) pitifully-sized education fund is just inexcuseable.


Going into Iraq was a major mistake, in my humble opinion, but now that we're there obligations have to be met, hundreds of billions of dollars and up to a million lost lives should not be sacrificed for nothing. The war caused a lot of Iraqi's a lot of suffering, and it still wouldn't compare to the suffering that would be caused by pulling out and leaving them to the mercy of criminals, terrorists, gangsters, Iranian Millitia, and Saddam Loyalists. The saddest thing of all may be that in that horrible situation, Saddam's Royal Guard (still there and fighting) would be their best choice for a victor.


So until the US is out of there, it's just idiodic to withhold badly-needed funding then continue bitching that they're not winning in there. I swear some anti-war folk are so fixated on their "the war is a failure" assertions that they don't want America to win for fear that they could be wrong. To me that wouldn't make an anti-war stance wrong, because the cost has already been far too high for what we're all getting out of it.
Gandalf_The_Grey Reviewed by Gandalf_The_Grey on . House approves $162 billion war-spending bill The House approved the largest war-spending bill to date Thursday, bending to President Bush's call for $162 billion in war funding with no strings attached and giving his successor enough money to wage the wars until July 2009. In exchange, Democrats won Bush's blessing for several of their domestic priorities, including a 13-week extension of jobless benefits for workers who have exhausted theirs, and a new GI bill benefit allowing veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to attend a Rating: 5