WASHINGTON - After several weeks of
internal wrangling, the Democratic leadership in
the US House of Representatives on Thursday
proposed legislation that, if enacted, would
require all US combat troops in Iraq to be
withdrawn by October 1, 2008.
The measure,
which will take the form of an amendment to a
pending US$100 billion supplemental defense
appropriations bill, also requires President
George W Bush to begin such a withdrawal as early
as July of this year unless he certifies that the
government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
is making
progress toward achieving
national reconciliation and ending sectarian
violence there.
The proposed amendment,
the first concrete effort to set a specific
timetable for a US withdrawal, faces an uncertain
future. With all but a handful of Republican
lawmakers likely to oppose it, House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi will have to rally her party's right- and
left-wing factions to ensure its passage.
Several leading Democrats in the Senate
also introduced a joint resolution on Thursday
that contains binding language directing the
president to begin the phased redeployment of US
troops in Iraq within 120 days, with a goal of
redeploying all combat forces by March 31, 2008 -
although Republicans have twice blocked the Senate
from even debating the administration's policies
in Iraq.
The Democratic Party's
"Progressive Caucus", which currently makes up
about one-fifth of House Democrats, released its
own proposed amendment. It called for a complete
withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by no later
than the end of this year.
"We are a
caucus, and we will come together and find our
common ground," said Pelosi when asked about
prospects for maintaining unity among Democrats.
"I believe in the end we will be unified."
Even if she succeeds, however, the
proposed amendment would still have to be
reconciled with any version of the supplemental
appropriations bill approved by the Senate, whose
leadership is still hashing out its terms, and
overcome a likely veto by Bush, who has rejected
any proposal, including one by the bipartisan Iraq
Study Group (ISG), to set a timetable or deadline
for the withdrawal of US troops.
Indeed,
the House Minority Leader, John Boehner,
immediately attacked the proposed amendment,
insisting that it would compromise all chances for
success in Iraq by "establishing and telegraphing
to our enemy a timetable" for withdrawal.
Echoing the White House, he said the new
commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, "should
be the one making the decisions on what happens on
the ground".
The proposed amendment was
finally agreed nearly three weeks after 17
Republicans joined all but two Democrats in the
House to approve a non-binding resolution that
formally disapproved of Bush's decision to add
some 29,000 troops to the 140,000-troop force that
is currently deployed in Iraq.
Having gone
on record as being opposed to the latest
escalation - or "surge" - in Washington's
intervention, however, Democrats have found it
much more difficult to agree on whether, and how,
to put real teeth into their policy views by
passing binding legislation that would force Bush
to comply with their wishes.
While its
"Out-of-Iraq Caucus", which constitutes about
one-third of House Democrats, argued that the
results of last November's elections gave the
party a mandate to force a swift withdrawal, the
party's leadership worried that such a move would
alienate its more conservative members, the
so-called "Blue-Dog Democrats".
The Blue
Dogs, who hail from districts - particularly in
the south, the southwest and Midwestern states -
that normally vote Republican, are considered
particularly vulnerable to administration attacks
that they are "soft on defense" or not providing
adequate support to soldiers in the field.
They balked, in particular, at a proposal
by John Murtha, the powerful and normally hawkish
chairman of the subcommittee on defense
appropriations whose outspoken opposition to the
war has been spurred by concern that US land
forces have become dangerously overstretched, to
include specific readiness and training
requirements for troops deployed to Iraq that
would have made Bush's "surge" plan impossible to
carry out.
The bill to which the amendment
is to be attached is Bush's request for nearly
$100 billion to continue to fund military
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the end
of fiscal 2007.
Because the more than $60
billion already appropriated for 2007 is fast
running out - war-related costs in both countries
are running at some $12 billion a month - the
supplemental bill has been given a high priority
in the legislative calendar. Pelosi said she hoped
it would clear the Appropriations Committee in a
week so that a floor vote could take place by the
end of the month.
The amendment would
actually add $4 billion to Bush's original
request, including $1 billion for operations in
Afghanistan where both lawmakers and the
administration appear increasingly concerned about
a resurgence of the Taliban.
The proposed
amendment also attempts to incorporate some of the
key recommendations of the ISG, which was
co-chaired by former secretary of state James
Baker and former Democratic congressman Lee
Hamilton.
The ISG, which released its
report in early December, had called for all
combat forces to be redeployed from Iraq by March
31, 2008; the Democratic amendment puts that
deadline off for an additional six months.
The ISG had also called for Washington to
reduce its aid to Iraq if the Maliki government
failed to demonstrate real progress in achieving
national reconciliation.
Under the
Democrats' proposal, Baghdad must make progress
toward certain "political benchmarks", such as the
enactment of laws that would ensure equitable
regional distribution of Iraq's oil revenues and
the adoption of amendments to the constitution
designed to boost the voice of the Sunni
population, which largely boycotted elections to
the country's constituent assembly. If Bush fails
to certify that such progress is being made by
this July 1 and again by October 1, he must
withdraw all combat forces over the following six
months.
The amendment also explicitly
prohibits the establishment of permanent bases in
Iraq, which was another major recommendation by
the ISG, and also forbids "the initiation of
offensive military actions against Iran, except
when such operations are authorized" by Congress.
It also imposes, as Murtha first proposed,
a number of requirements regarding the readiness,
training and rotation of forces deployed to Iraq,
but permits Bush to "waive" them under certain
circumstances.
The amendment disappointed
some anti-war activists who have rallied behind
the ISG's withdrawal timetable of an even shorter
period, coupled with an intensified negotiation
process both within Iraq and among its neighbors,
as also called for by the ISG.
"Congress
has failed to realize the message of the
Baker-Hamilton report, that only a political
process is going to solve the problem," said Joe
Volk, director of the Friends Committee on
National Legislation. "You can't keep voting
billions and billions of dollars in additional
funds for the same failed policy when you know
that it has failed."
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