"my approach is likely a pipe dream"

I make the same critique that you make - your approach is a pipe dream. Obama's 67 votes was also a pipe dream. Some problems have no solution. There is no game plan to make the Knicks a championship team and there is no strategy to make the current US Senate (or the 108th, or 109th) worth a damn.

No war was ever defunded by the method you propose or the veto-override method Obama proposed. Both approaches were zillion-to-1 shots. The only precedent for ending an unpopular war is an increasingly restrictive series of checks and limits by Congress (see Vietnam). In hindsight the best chance to limit the damage in Iraq was an all-out push for the Webb approach to limit deployments (12 months in, 12 months out). That would have kept the US presence in Iraq at about 100,000 which is 50% less bad than it's been for the past 6 months. That didn't happen either and IIRC the Webb approach was attacked from the left as well as not strong enough.

The day AUMF/Iraq passed we were in Iraq for the duration of George W. Bush's presidency. Shame on everyone that voted for it. No op-ed or subsequent leadership will ever erase the stain of that vote. The 107th Congress was one of the most spineless in US history.

Sen. Byrd on the AUMF/Iraq vote:

Like a whipped dog, the Senate put its tail between its legs and slunk away into the shadows, slunk away from its responsibility. Congress--and I mean both houses--Congress delegated its constitutional authority to the President and effectively washed its hands of the fate of Iraq. It is a dark and despicable mark on the escutcheon of Congress.

A whipped dog isn't resolute enough to force a constitutional confrontation with the President over 'not funding' and the Senate that "washed its hands of the fate of Iraq" isn't eager to dirty them again. The only solution is to replace enough Senators and change enough minds that there is an effectively new dynamic in the Senate. We're not there yet and we've never been close in the past 5 years.

Leaving aside the horrible Republican leadership, Democratic Iraq War opponents could never get traction in the Senate because they were undermined at every turn by Clinton allies like Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, and the DLC crowd who wanted to run in '04 and '06 on the economy and avoid Iraq. Bill Clinton said in his own autobiography that he had to defend George W. Bush from "the left". So in addition to the Republican caucus you had 1/2 the Democratic caucus not wanting to admit a mistake for more than 2 years.

I don't fault Sen. Obama for not changing the minds of the 109th and 110th Congress. You do fault him for being a variety of things (being naive, timid, a poor tactician) and you have the right to your opinion. But IMHO you can't beat hope INTO a whipped dog like you beat it out of it. A whipped dog stays whipped a long time. I believe Obama quickly realized that fact. Tiny fixes at the margins were possible but that's not enough for the problems we face. So Obama decided to run for President because the issues were too important to only pretend to solve them in the US Senate.

The Senate is an undemocratic relic (50 seats represent 16% of the population) that's hardly responsive to popular opinion (staggered terms over 6 years). You fault Obama for not "leading now" on Iraq but what did Chris Dodd accomplish on Iraq other than make some noise? I like and respect Sen. Dodd but the unkind words Robert Byrd  has for the 107th Congress apply to Chris Dodd as well. Dodd certainly got wise over time but it did take time. Dodd himself cites the death of one captain in early January '07, a man he had just spoken with in Iraq in Dec. '06, as a catalizing moment for his opposition. Obama called for phased redeployment in November '06. How you can credit Dodd for "leading now" while Obama gets slammed for being absent from the debate I'll never know. Where are Dodd's successes on Iraq? Taken as a whole there's only two Senators that have a better record on Iraq than Obama and that's Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders. If Paul Wellstone were alive it would likely be three. I'm not going to apologize for being enthusiastic about the fourth most progressive Senator in recent Democratic history taking a pragmatic approach to solving the largest problem facing the country - Iraq. Reread all the steps taken to end the Vietnam war. It's not so simple as you say. Your 'not-funding' idea IS a pipe dream. The most difficult aspect of the your plan, resolve enough to carry it out, is the very thing most absent from the current Senate. Wishing it weren't so isn't a good plan. The most aggressive Senate anti-war bill presented still wasn't 'not funding', it was fully funding withdrawal and a deployment of limited purposes. Obama's 67 votes plan was also a pipe dream but he was a vocal supporter of the Webb amendment which was not.  I thought in pushing for 67 votes Obama would get to 60 votes to get cloture on more modest measures like the Webb amendment. I was wrong.

I've tried to convince you of the merits of Obama's approach, you've rejected  my arguments, I'm OK with it. I'm not going to play ping-pong on Iraq for another year. I have a different view of what pieces of the Iraq War debate are most important. You place more value on different pieces of the puzzle. I've tried to stop arguing with you on Iraq because I don't find it productive to rehash the same points endlessly and I'm sure you feel the same way.