Revolt builds against Bush's Iraq
policy By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In the first step toward what
some believe could lead to a constitutional
crisis, a key congressional committee approved a
non-binding resolution on Wednesday formally
dissenting from US President George W Bush's plan
to send some 21,500 more troops to Iraq.
The 12-9 vote in the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, which came less than 14 hours
after Bush appealed in his State of the
Union address for Congress to
give his plan "a chance to work", sets the stage
for a broader debate next week when a majority of
the full Senate is also expected to voice its
disapproval of the president's course, albeit
possibly in a somewhat milder form.
Wednesday's resolution, which drew the
backing of all the Democrats on the committee as
well as its one Republican co-sponsor, Senator
Chuck Hagel, declared that deepening US military
involvement in Iraq at this time is "not in the
national interest of the United States".
"It's an attempt to save the president
from making a significant mistake with regard to
our policy in Iraq," said the committee's new
chairman and the principal author of the
resolution, Senator Joseph Biden, who also
insisted that, despite its timing, it was "not an
attempt to embarrass the president [or] to
demonstrate [his] isolation".
But with the
move coming less than 24 hours after Bush's
appearance before both houses of Congress and a
glittering array of other top US officials and the
foreign diplomatic corps under the Capitol dome,
most analysts agreed that he probably made very
few, if any, converts and that Congress, including
a growing number of Republicans, is likely to move
over the coming weeks to try to force a change in
US policy.
"We think Congress is going to
pass this or a similar resolution and then move to
a vigorous debate over how to use its powers under
the constitution to impose its will," said Jim
Cason, an analyst at the Friends Committee on
National Legislation, an anti-war lobby group.
"What's driving this in part is that the
growing perception that Bush is clinging
stubbornly to a failed policy, convinced that he's
right and completely unwilling to consider major
alternatives such as the [bipartisan] Iraq Study
Group [ISG] report [that called for a gradual
withdrawal of US combat troops over the next 15
months]. People are getting really angry and
worried about that."
Indeed, mainstream US
media coverage of Bush's State of the Union
address, while careful to balance the critics with
the president's supporters, underlined the degree
to which support for Iraq policy - already near
record lows - appears to have plunged even further
over the past few weeks and that opposition to
what is called Bush's "surge" of troops into Iraq
has risen sharply.
This was highlighted on
Monday when the ranking Republican on the Senate
Armed Services Committee, John Warner, presented
his own bipartisan resolution that, while somewhat
softer in tone than the one approved by the
Foreign Relations Committee, stated flatly that
the Senate "disagrees with the 'plan' to augment
our forces [in Iraq] by 21,500".
"The
American GI [soldier] was not trained, not sent
over there - certainly not by resolution of this
institution - to be placed in the middle of a
fight between the Sunni and the Shi'ite and the
wanton and incomprehensible killing that's going
on at this time," Warner, whose ties to the
military brass are perhaps the strongest of any
sitting senator, told reporters in announcing his
proposal.
"Mr President, go back and look
at all the options," declared Warner in what to
many Capitol Hill veterans was seen as a highly
unusual departure from his normal courtly and
aristocratic mien. His candor was evidence of a
growing exasperation that has been coursing
through Republican ranks since the party lost
control of Congress in last November's elections
and particularly over the past two weeks since
Bush announced his plans to add to the 132,000 US
troops already in Iraq.
Indeed, in recent
days, public opinion surveys have shown that
confidence in Bush's handling of Iraq is at record
lows and that his overall approval ratings have
reached their nadir - in some cases within just a
few percentage points of the level the late
president Richard Nixon reached just before his
resignation in 1974. The most recent polls have
also shown that a growing majority has greater
confidence in Congress' judgment about what to do
in Iraq than the roughly 30% who believe the
administration can do a better job.
Biden,
Hagel and the other co-sponsors of the resolution
approved by the Foreign Relations Committee on
Wednesday have made clear that they hope to sit
down with Warner and his co-sponsors over the
coming week to determine whether they can come up
with a common bill that would command the broadest
possible bipartisan support.
Warner's
resolution, which is more deferential toward
Bush's war-making powers as "commander-in-chief"
than Biden's, is also more specific in defining
rules of engagement for US forces in Iraq in ways
that would reduce their role in policing or
intervening in sectarian violence. It also
prescribes more specific benchmarks for the Iraqi
government to meet in order to maintain high
levels of US military and economic aid and calls
for Washington to become more engaged in regional
efforts to contain and reduce the ongoing violence
in Iraq.
The resolution is indeed based on
many of the recommendations submitted last month
by the ISG, whose co-chairmen, former secretary of
state James Baker and former Democratic
congressman Lee Hamilton, and other members have
been quietly lobbying Congress since Bush quickly
rejected key parts of their report - notably
reducing the US combat role in Iraq and engaging
Syria and Iran in regional stabilization efforts.
Biden and Hagel have also expressed strong
disappointment at Bush's failure to embrace the
ISG's recommendations, so a compromise between the
two factions - which together would command the
support of all but one Democrat and at least a
dozen of the Senate's Republicans - is likely.
As both resolutions are not binding on
Bush, who has already indicated that he will
proceed with his "surge" regardless of what
Congress does, however, the big question in
Washington is what happens after their approval.
Led by Senator Russell Feingold, a
fast-growing minority of Democrats have said they
will back legislation cutting off all funds for
the war if Bush does not heed congressional
opinion, while others, including several
presidential candidates, such as Biden, Senator
Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, say
Congress should impose limits on the number of
troops that can be deployed to Iraq or strict
conditions on how and when and for what purposes
money appropriated by Congress can be spent in the
war, which is currently costing the US Treasury
roughly US$8 billion a month.
While
precedents for these kinds of congressional
actions were established in the 1970s and 1980s,
the Bush White House - and particularly Vice
President Dick Cheney's office - is likely to
resist any such constraints on the grounds that
they believe that the president's power to wage
war as commander-in-chief is virtually unlimited.
In their view, the only way that Congress can
legally limit that power is for it to cut off all
funding.
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