Last week's vote on a nonbinding resolution opposing the president's "troop surge” plan for Iraq was a waste of time and demoralizing to America's fighting forces, U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn said.

Coburn, R-Muskogee, told members of the Oklahoma City Rotary Club this week that a more meaningful vote would be whether to stop funding the war in Iraq.

"You can't say, ‘I'm against the war' without doing the constitutional duty to get rid of the war, and there's a way to do that — unfund it,” he said in an interview.