The fight over "ending the war"

Washington Times:

Republicans yesterday rejected the Democrats' plan to withdraw Congress' 2002 vote to invade Iraq, while Vice President Dick Cheney said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not unpatriotic but plain wrong to oppose President Bush's troop-reinforcement plan.
"There's only one way to end the war, if that's what our Democratic friends want to do. That is to cut off funds for the war," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican. "That's our constitutional role, and we shouldn't drag this into the morass of Democratic presidential primary politics."
Key Senate Democrats are writing a bill to rescind the broad authorization to go to war in Iraq that Congress passed in 2002 and replace it with a narrow mission that would take all combat troops out of Iraq by March 2008.
Drafted by two top committee chairmen, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the proposal would keep some troops in Iraq to assist with training, border security and counterterrorism but, Democrats hope, would keep U.S. troops out of what they say has become a civil war.
"The 2002 authorization is no longer relevant to the situation in Iraq," Mr. Biden said in a speech last week. The 2008 presidential candidate argued that the measure was predicated on the presence of Saddam Hussein as dictator and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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While Biden and Levin are busy demonstrating that they are not as smart as they think they are especially when it comes to military strategy and the use of force, McConnell is also wrong. Cutting off funds to our side of the war can force a retreat, but it will not end the enemy's side of the conflict. the only way to do that is to defeat him. He is certainly not going to quit just because we do. Heck, he declared war against us years before we even returned fire why should he quit now?

The Washington Post reports that McConnell has told Democrats that this proposal will meet the same fate as their attempts to pass non-binding resolutions on the war.

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Speaking to reporters by conference call from his Louisville home, McConnell compared the latest Democratic move to "trying to unring a bell." He warned that Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, would "have to surround himself with lawyers" to comply with the new resolution that senior Democrats are drafting.
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It is an exceedingly silly idea by men who have no concept of warfare and fighting a war or ending a war.

Who do you think knows more about counterinsurgency warfare, Gen. David Petraeus who wrote the Army manual on the subject, or Carl Levin who sits on Senate committees and asks questions of experts, because he is not one? Who is most likely to have a handle on what it will take to defeat the enemy?