Lawmakers move to restrain Bush on
Iran By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Increasingly concerned about
the escalating rhetoric against Iran by senior US
officials, including President George W Bush,
members of Congress are trying to put limits on
his ability to attack the Islamic Republic.
Their efforts so far have primarily taken
the form of what one lobbyist refers to as
"resoliferation" - that is, the proliferation of a
number of mostly non-binding resolutions - in both
the House of Representatives and Senate -
asserting that Bush must seek
Congress' approval before any
attack on Iran or any of Iraq's other neighbors.
The latest resolution, introduced on
Wednesday by a group of five House Democrats,
declares that it is the policy of the United
States not to enter a preemptive war with Iran and
bans the expenditure of congressionally
appropriated funds for covert actions designed to
achieve regime change or to carry out any military
actions against Tehran in the absence of an
imminent threat.
Several influential
senators have also posed pointed questions to the
administration about whether it believes it has
the constitutional authority to carry out military
action against Iran without Congress' approval.
"Is it the position of this administration
that it possesses the authority to take unilateral
action against Iran, in the absence of a direct
threat, without congressional approval?" asked
newly elected Virginia Democrat James Webb during
testimony by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
on January 11. Rice said she would have to respond
later.
Webb, who achieved overnight
stardom when he delivered a remarkably tough
Democratic response to Bush's State of the Union
address last month, reiterated his question in a
pointed letter to Rice that gained him additional
notice this week. "This is basically a 'yes' or
'no' question regarding an urgent matter affecting
our nation's foreign policy," he wrote.
Indeed, the fact that the administration
has not yet issued any formal response to
questions such as that posed by Webb has stoked
fears on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that the White
House believes not only that the answer is indeed
"yes", but also that it is planning to attack Iran
sooner rather than later.
Adding to those
fears this week was a battery of new charges,
especially by senior military officers, that
Tehran is supplying Iraqi Shi'ite militias with
weapons ranging from deadly, armor-piercing
"explosively formed projectiles" to Katyusha
rockets of the kind used by Lebanon's Hezbollah
against Israel in last summer's month-long war but
which have yet to be used in Iraq.
In
addition, US officials have suggested that
Iranians were behind a sophisticated attack on
January 20 on a government compound in Karbala in
which one US soldier was killed and four others
abducted and subsequently slain. The incident,
which is still under investigation, stirred
speculation that it may have been carried out in
retaliation for the seizure of a number of Iranian
diplomats and security officials in two
high-profile raids by US forces over the past five
weeks. Five of the Iranians are still being held.
"We have picked up individuals who we
believe are giving very sophisticated explosive
technology to Shi'ite insurgent groups, who then
use that technology to target and kill American
soldiers," said Under Secretary of State for
Political Affairs Nicholas Burns on Thursday in an
interview with National Public Radio.
"It's a very serious situation. And the
message is, Iran should cease and desist," said
Burns, who, clearly conscious of the growing
concern about the administration's intentions,
repeatedly insisted that Washington has no
intention of attacking Iran in retaliation.
"We don't intend to cross the border into
Iran, we don't intend to strike into Iran, in
terms of what we are doing in Iraq," he said,
conspicuously leaving open the possibility that
Washington might yet attack Iran for other
reasons, such as Bush's long-standing warning that
"all options are on the table" regarding Tehran's
nuclear program.
Some observers here have
long believed that, in the absence of a diplomatic
solution to US demands that Iran freeze its
uranium-enrichment program, Bush intends to attack
Iran's nuclear facilities before the end of his
term. However, congressional concern rose sharply
with the president's speech on Iraq strategy on
January 10.
In that speech, Bush accused
both Iran and Syria of granting safe passage in
and out of Iraq to "terrorists and insurgents" and
accused Iran, in particular, of "providing
material support for attacks on American troops".
In response, he announced the deployment of a
second aircraft-carrier strike group to the
Persian Gulf and pledged to "destroy the network
providing advanced weaponry and training to our
enemies in Iraq".
His remarks came just
hours after US forces seized Iranian officials,
who have still not been released, in a raid on the
Iranian Consulate in the Iraqi Kurdish city of
Irbil.
The reaction on Capitol Hill was
virtually instantaneous. "When you set in motion
the kind of policy that the president is talking
about here, it's very, very dangerous," Republican
Senator Chuck Hagel told Rice the following day
during the same hearing in which Webb asked her
whether the administration thought it had the
authority to attack Iraq, a question also raised
by the new chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Senator Joseph Biden.
Since then, and despite the rising tide of
charges by administration and military officials
regarding Tehran's alleged support for Shi'ite
militias, the clerk of the House of
Representatives has received a growing number of
resolutions to steer the administration toward a
less confrontational course.
On January
16, Congressman Peter DeFazio introduced a
resolution with 18 Democratic co-sponsors,
including the powerful chairman of the House
Subcommittee for Defense Appropriations, John
Murtha, declaring that Bush lacked the authority
to take military action against Iran without
congressional approval. Biden has since said he
will introduce a similar measure in the Senate.
On January 18, another bipartisan group,
including Murtha and Republican Congressman Walter
Jones, submitted a second resolution demanding
that the president seek congressional
authorization before initiating the use of force
against Iran absent a "demonstrably imminent
attack by Iran" on the US or its armed forces.
That was followed several days later by
another, also signed by Murtha, as well as eight
other Congress members, that expressed the sense
of Congress that Bush should implement a
recommendation - explicitly rejected by Bush - by
the Iraq Study Group headed by former secretary of
state James Baker and former congressman Lee
Hamilton that Washington "engage directly with
Iran and Syria" in trying to stabilize Iraq.
On January 24, Senator Robert Byrd, the
Senate's the longest-serving member, introduced
another "sense of the Senate" resolution on the
need for congressional approval for any offensive
military action against another nation, a position
that was explicitly endorsed in respect to Iran
last week by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
While all of these resolutions are either
non-binding or include provisions that could be
easily ignored or circumvented by an
administration determined go to war and willing to
stage a provocation to do so, lobby groups and
activists on both the left and the right say they
hope they will serve as a "shot across the bow" of
administration hawks.
"It's about time
Congress focuses attention on this issue and tries
to take back its constitutional right to declare
war and not simply write a blank check to the
president," said Carah Ong, an Iran specialist at
the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation,
who is coordinating anti-war efforts by some 50
groups across the political spectrum.
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