Neo-cons try to rally, bully
Republicans By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In the face of a critical
Senate debate on future US strategy in Iraq,
neo-conservatives and other hawks are trying to
rally increasingly skeptical - and worried -
Republicans behind continued support for President
George W Bush's five-month-old "surge" strategy.
They are arguing that the "surge" - the
deployment of an additional 30,000 US troops to
try to pacify Baghdad to encourage political
compromise among the major groups in Iraq - has not
been
given sufficient time to work and that abandoning
it now would amount to snatching defeat from the
jaws of victory.
But the recent defection
of several hitherto loyal, if privately critical,
senior Republican senators has thrown the hawks -
both inside and outside the administration - into
something of a panic, if only because anti-war
Democrats appear to be inching steadily toward the
kind of majority that Bush can no longer simply
ignore. Indeed, the New York Times on Monday
reported that the administration is itself
increasingly divided over what to do, with some
officials, notably Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
"quietly pressing" for beginning a gradual
withdrawal of combat troops consistent with the
recommendations last December of the Iraq Study
Group (ISG), of which he was a member until his
nomination to the defense post last November.
While the White House, through the
personal diplomacy of Bush's National Security
Adviser Stephen Hadley, has been spending an
extraordinary amount of time "listening" to the
skeptics in hopes of keeping them from crossing
the aisle on key war-related measures due to be
voted on over the next two weeks,
neo-conservatives allied outside the
administration are taking a harsher tack.
"They are pre-9/11 [September 11, 2001]
Republicans," wrote William Kristol, the editor of
the Weekly Standard, about Senators Richard Lugar,
George Voinovich, Pete Dominici and John Warner,
the four most senior Republicans who have called
for a change of course in Iraq over the past week.
"They have been followers of conventional
opinion [during their 20-plus-year Senate
careers], not leaders," he went on. "Now they are
following conventional wisdom again, in their
stately way, in turning against the Iraq war."
And the lead editorial in Monday's Wall
Street Journal argued: "Republicans may think they
can distance themselves from all this, but they'll
get no credit from voters if they contribute to an
ugly outcome in Iraq. A divided Republican caucus
that undercuts America's military efforts while
chasing the mirage of bipartisan comity will only
make their own election defeat [in November 2008]
more likely."
Both warnings came as the
Senate begins what is expected to be a debate that
could stretch until Congress' August recess on the
nearly US$650 billion 2008 Defense Authorization
bill to which Democrats hope to attach a series of
Iraq-related amendments that are fiercely opposed
by the hawks.
At least two Democratic
amendments, both backed by Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid, will call for withdrawing all US
combat forces from Iraq by some time in the spring
or summer of next year. They also more narrowly
define the mission of the remaining troops - still
likely to number in the tens of thousands - as
training Iraqi forces, helping to secure
international borders, striking al-Qaeda and other
terrorist targets, and protecting US facilities
and personnel there.
Similar amendments
were approved by the Senate this year but
ultimately failed because of parliamentary
maneuvers or a Bush veto that could not be
overcome by the small Democratic majority.
(Two-thirds of each congressional chamber are
needed to override a presidential veto.)
Another likely amendment, co-sponsored by
Senators Hillary Clinton and Robert Byrd, would
repeal Congress' 2002 authorization for the use of
force in Iraq and require Bush to seek a new
authorization defining the specific mission and
strategy of US forces there before additional
money could be spent on the war.
Yet
another, sponsored by Senator James Webb, would
require that active-duty troops be given at least
the same amount of time to rest at home as they
are deployed to a war zone - a provision that
would make continuation of the current of "surge"
of a total of some 165,000 army troops and marines
in Iraq impossible to sustain.
While the
White House believes it can keep enough
Republicans in line on these amendments to defeat
their adoption, it is worried that one or two of
them could attract as many as 60 votes and thus
highlight the erosion in support for its strategy
over the past month.
A strong anti-war
showing would increase pressure to reverse course
even before the mid-September report that General
David Petraeus, the military commander charged
with implementing the "surge", is expected to
submit to Congress. Until last week's defections,
the surge would not come under serious challenge
until after Petraeus delivered his assessment.
The hawks, however, are also very
concerned that another amendment, the product of
several weeks' work by as many as a dozen centrist
Democrats and Republicans, including several of
the Republican defectors, may be approved by a
veto-proof margin.
That amendment would
declare the recommendations of the ISG, which was
co-chaired by former state secretary James Baker
and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, to
be official US policy.
Those
recommendations, which included a withdrawal of US
combat forces by the end of next March, US
diplomatic engagement with Syria and Iran, and
intensified efforts to achieve a two-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are
considered anathema by the hawks, especially
pro-Likud (Israel's center-right party)
neo-conservatives who launched a major propaganda
campaign against the ISG even before it released
its study seven months ago.
Lugar, the
ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, explicitly endorsed key ISG
recommendations in a major policy address two
weeks ago in which he warned that failure to
initiate a drawdown of US combat forces in Iraq
"very soon" could pose "extreme risks for US
national security [because] ... it would greatly
increase the chances for a poorly planned
withdrawal from Iraq or possibly the broader
Middle East region that could damage US interests
for decades".
Lugar's remarks were hailed
at the time by Warner, who predicted that a number
of other Republicans were likely to voice similar
concerns in the upcoming debate over the defense
bill. Warner, whose former chairmanship of the
Armed Services Committee has made him particularly
influential on defense issues with his fellow
Republicans, has since become the subject of
intense White House lobbying.
After his
speech, Lugar became a focus of neo-conservative
wrath, with Kristol describing his address as a
"case study in pseudo-thoughtfulness, full of
cheek-puffing and chin-pulling" and Thomas
Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI) accusing him of sounding "more like an
investor rebalancing his portfolio, selling Iraq
and buying Israel-Palestine, than a man thinking
about strategy in war".
In their view, the
surge has resulted in major military gains in
recent weeks, even if the political reconciliation
that it was supposed to promote has been nowhere
in sight, a point made emphatically by Lugar,
Warner and other Republican critics.
"The
tragedy of these efforts is we are on the cusp of
potentially being successful in the next year in a
way that we have failed in the three-plus
preceding years," retired army General Jack Keane,
one of the surge's architects who made much the
same point at a special AEI forum on the surge
here on Monday, told the neo-conservative New York
Sun last week. "But because of this political
pressure, it looks like we intend to pull out the
rug from underneath that potential success."
In its own editorial on Monday, the Sun
called the possible approval of legislation
setting a withdrawal timetable "the most
astounding act of perfidy in the history of
Congress".
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