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January 12th,
2007 - Bush’s Plan for Iraq Runs Into Opposition |
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Bush’s Plan for Iraq Runs
Into Opposition By Thom Shanker and David S. Cloud New York Times January 12, 2007 Washington, Jan. 11
President Bush’s call to increase the American military commitment in Iraq
ran into intense Congressional opposition Thursday from Democrats and from
moderate Republicans who expressed profound skepticism. A day after the president
set out a new strategy for bringing stability to Iraq, the White House found
few allies on either side of the aisle when Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The reception
she received suggested that Mr. Bush’s prime-time address to the nation on
Wednesday had done little to build political support for sending additional
troops to Baghdad. “I think what occurred here
today was fairly profound, in the sense that you heard 21 members, with one
or two notable exceptions, expressing outright hostility, disagreement and or
overwhelming concern with the president’s proposal,” the committee’s new
Democratic chairman, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, said at the
conclusion of Ms. Rice’s testimony. Republicans were more
supportive in the House, where the new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates,
and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before
the Armed Services Committee. But Democrats were scathing in their criticism,
and in both the House and the Senate, Democratic leaders moved ahead with
plans to oppose Mr. Bush’s plan through nonbinding resolutions. While saying they do not
plan any immediate effort to try to thwart the Bush plan by cutting off
funds, some Democrats said they would continue to consider placing
limitations on the administration when Congress considers a war spending
measure later in the year. Despite the decision by many
members of his party to break with the White House over the troop increase,
the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he
would use parliamentary tactics to try to thwart the Democratic effort to
adopt the Senate resolution opposing the plan. In Baghdad, Iraq’s
Shiite-led government responded tepidly to Mr. Bush’s announcement that he
would send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq to bolster the effort
to curb rampant sectarian violence. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki failed to appear as scheduled at a news conference and did not make
any public comment. Meanwhile, President Bush
and his top cabinet officials spent Thursday traveling and testifying in
support of his new Iraq strategy. Early in the day, in an
emotional ceremony at the White House, Mr. Bush awarded the Medal of Honor to
the family of Cpl. Jason Dunham, a marine from Scio, N.Y., who was killed in
Iraq in 2004 when he threw himself on a grenade to save the rest of his unit.
The president began crying during the ceremony. It was the second Medal of
Honor proceeding to come out of the Iraq war. Afterward, he traveled to
Fort Benning, Ga., where he spoke to Army soldiers about the Iraq plan. He
said his approach would not produce an immediate reduction in violence but
represented “our best chance for success.” Some of the troops based at Fort
Benning have already served twice in Iraq and are scheduled for a third
deployment. Ms. Rice appeared on morning
news programs before joining Mr. Gates at a news conference in the White
House. Both then moved to Capitol Hill for a first substantive showdown with
the new Democratic majority and an encounter with the shifting politics of
the war. At the House Armed Services
Committee hearing, it was standing-room-only, with some spectators sprawled
on the floor and others spilling out the door. In the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee hearing room, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a
Republican who has been critical of the administration’s handling of the war,
drew applause when he described the president’s proposals as a “dangerous
foreign policy blunder,” and vowed to oppose them. Senator Russell D.
Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and a vigorous opponent of the war, spoke of
it as “quite possibly the greatest foreign policy mistake in the history of
our nation.” Expressing doubt about
whether Iraqis “are done killing each other,” Senator Norm Coleman,
Republican of Minnesota, said, “Why put more American lives on the line now
in the hope that this time they’ll make the difficult choice?” Several Republicans
questioned the Bush plan without rejecting it outright, but their call for
greater detail made it clear they remained unconvinced. Senator John Sununu
of New Hampshire agreed that approving new legislation in Iraq on sharing oil
revenue would be central to weaving estranged Sunni Arabs into the political
process, but he said no United States government official could describe the
law to him. “It’s the most remarkable
law that no one has ever seen,” he said. Away from the Congressional
hearings, White House and Pentagon officials held a series of private
meetings with lawmakers on Thursday in an attempt to blunt the criticism,
especially from Republicans. Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus,
the new American commander in Iraq, waved off reporters as he shuttled
between the offices of Republican Senators John W. Warner of Virginia and
Jeff Sessions of Alabama. “Please, guys. Can I just make the rounds up here?”
he said, declining to answer further questions. During their testimony, Mr.
Gates and Ms. Rice declined to specify a time limit on the troop increase and
were cautious about predicting rapid improvements in security in Baghdad,
where most of the additional troops will be positioned, saying progress is
likely to come gradually. “I think that we all know
that the stakes in Iraq are enormous and that the consequences of failure
would also be enormous not just for America and for Iraq, but for the entire
region of the Middle East and indeed for the world,” Ms. Rice said. The deployment schedule, in
which more than 20,000 fresh soldiers and marines would roll into Iraq over
several months, was intended to give the president time to reconsider the
increase should the Iraqi government fail to provide its share of security
forces as promised, Ms. Rice said. “I have met Prime Minister
Maliki,” she said. “I was with him in Amman. I saw his resolve. I think he
knows that his government is, in a sense, on borrowed time, not just in terms
of the American people, but in terms of the Iraqi people.” Still, she spoke directly
about Mr. Maliki’s failure to come through on his past promises to bring
additional Iraqi troops into Baghdad. “They haven’t performed in the past and
so the president is absolutely right, and we have all been saying to them,
‘You have to perform,’” she said. Mr. Gates would not say when
asked whether the planned American troop increases over the next few months
could be withheld if additional Iraqi units promised for Baghdad failed to
materialize. “We are going to have a
number of opportunities to go back to the Iraqis and point out where they
have failed to meet their commitments,” he said, adding, “I think our
assumption going forward is that they have every intention of making this
work.” Pressed repeatedly by
members of both parties about what steps the Bush administration would take
if Iraq continued to balk, he added, “We would clearly have to relook at the
strategy.” Mr. Gates said the Pentagon
was revising rules governing mobilization of Army National Guard and Reserve
members so troops who had already done a tour in Iraq in the past five years
could now be sent back to Iraq if their units was remobilized. But the new
policy would aim to shorten the time Guard members were mobilized to a
maximum of a year. He also announced a large
permanent increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, a repudiation of
the approach of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who argued for
keeping ground force levels low and insisted that authorization for any
additional troops be done temporarily. Under Mr. Bush’s plan, the
active duty Army total manpower over the next five years would grow to
547,000, an increase of 39,000 over the current level. In addition, the
Marine Corps would grow to 202,000, an increase of 23,000. The expansions
would have to be approved by Congress. Democrats in both the House
and Senate would not rule out eventually putting limitations on financing for
the war if Mr. Bush continued on a course they contended defied the will of Congress
and the American public. But they say that possibility, which could open them
to Republican attacks, will have to be faced later when an emergency spending
request and Pentagon spending are considered in the spring and summer. Representative John P.
Murtha of Pennsylvania, the Democratic chairman of the appropriations
subcommittee that sets military spending and a leading party critic of the
war, is exploring ways to attach conditions to a Pentagon measure. Representative David R.
Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin and chairman of the Appropriations Committee,
said “a wide variety of ideas are bubbling forth,” for how the party should
respond to the president. But beyond voting on a resolution to symbolically
oppose the Iraq plan, he said it remained unlikely that Democrats could block
the troop increase to Baghdad. “If you were going to have a
so-called surge, part of that is supposedly by keeping people there longer,”
Mr. Obey said. “It’s pretty hard to shut off funds for troops who are already
there, so it gets very, very complicated.” Late Thursday, James A.
Baker III and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group, whose
report in December the Bush administration largely spurned, said in a
statement that some of its recommendations were reflected in Mr. Bush’s plan
and urged the White House to give “further consideration” to the panel’s
remaining ideas. At the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee hearing, Mr. Biden issued a sharp warning to the
administration after Mr. Gates discussed recent raids against Iranians in
Iraq, including one in Erbil early Thursday, and described them as part of a
new effort “to root out the networks” involved in bringing Iranian-supplied
explosive devices into Iraq. Mr. Biden responded by saying
that the vote to authorize the president to order the use of force to topple
Saddam Hussein should not be used as a vehicle for mounting attacks inside
Iran, even in pursuit of cells or networks assisting insurgents or sectarian
militias. “I just want the record to
show and I would like to have a legal response from the State Department if
they think they have authority to pursue networks or anything else across the
border into Iran and Iraq that will generate a constitutional confrontation
here in the Senate, I predict to you,” Mr. Biden said. Also, the State Department
announced on Thursday that Timothy Carney, a retired Foreign Service officer
who served as a senior civilian American authority in Iraq for three months
in 2003, is the new coordinator for Iraq reconstruction. Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny
contributed reporting. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12policy.long.html |