I was on Washington Journal this morning and had the inevitable Republican caller who asked why, if the past election was a mandate to end the war in Iraq, the Democrats just don’t defund it.

I think it’s a valid point, but I argued that while Americans want to end the war, they don’t support defunding as a means to do it because they perceive it as “not supporting the troops.” Now before I start getting emails, let me state emphatically that I don’t think that’s true, it’s just an argument we have failed to make, in large part because so many have been working against it.

As Glenn Greenwald notes in his superb dissection of the problem:

The question that naturally arises is how did this happen? Why would Americans, who overwhelmingly want a forced end to the war, favor every measure for achieving that other than de-funding? How did it happen that — to use Alter’s formulation — “Americans have been convinced” of a patent falsehood: that de-funding would “endanger the troops”?

In one sense, it is hard to think of a political fact — at least since it was revealed that 70% of Americans continued even 6 months after the invasion to believe that Saddam personally planned the 9/11 attacks — which more profoundly reveals how broken our political and media institutions are than this. There are all sorts of reasons which, though misguided, at least constitute coherent arguments against withdrawal. But the notion that de-funding constitutes a failure to support the troops — in a way that, say, timetables do not — is just inane, not even in the realm of basic rationality or coherence.

And yet exactly this nonsensical notion was permitted not only to take hold, but to become unchallengeable conventional wisdom in our public debate over the war. The whole debate we just had was centrally premised on an idea that is not merely unpersuasive, but factually false, just ridiculous on its face. That a blatant myth could be outcome-determinative in such an important debate is a depressingly commonplace indictment of our dysfunctional media and political institutions.

But the real reason this happened is because Democrats not only allowed it to occur, but eagerly helped it. As much as anyone else, even leading anti-war Democrats such as Carl Levin and Barack Obama continuously equated de-funding with a failure to “support the troops.”

Time and again, even those Democrats who supported a mandatory troop withdrawal would talk about de-funding like it was some sort of grotesque act of betrayal (“oh, absolutely not, we will not de-fund the war. We will support our troops”). Over and over, this is what Americans heard even from Democrats who oppose the war:

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have their own divisions. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has called for initiating a withdrawal but has rejected a cutoff in funding. “I think that sends the wrong message to our troops,” he said a few days ago. “We’re going to support our troops, and one way to support them is to find a way out of Iraq earlier, rather than later.”

Is it any wonder that Americans reached the completely irrational conclusion that to de-fund the war is to endanger the troops? Not only were Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman saying this, so, too, were most leading Democratic war opponents.

Defunding could hypothetically be achieved by a simple majority in the House refusing to pass any more bills to finance the war. But because Democrats have failed to make the case effectively and are so prone to repeating Republican talking points on the subject, it never becomes a viable option. Which I do find terribly frustrating.

And the Feingold Amendment — which ties funding to troop withdrawal — only got 28 votes last time it was before the Senate, a far cry from what would be needed to pass it, let alone override a Presidential veto.

All of this presumes, however, that the Democrats really do want to get out of Iraq. As I’ve said before, what Harry Reid did to the Webb Amendment — which would have circumvented the PR problem of “defunding” as a means of realizing troop withdrawal — calls into serious question whether getting out of Iraq is something the leadership really want to do at all.

(h/t Bill for making the YouTubes)