Panel Opposes Bush’s Plan for Iraq
By Anne Flaherty THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — The Democratic-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee dismissed President Bush’s plans to increase troops strength in Iraq on Wednesday as “not in the national interest,” an unusual wartime repudiation of the commander in chief.
The vote on the nonbinding measure was 12-9 and largely along party lines.
“We better be damn sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, the sole Republican to join 11 Democrats in support of the measure.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the panel’s chairman, said the legislation is “not an attempt to embarrass the president. … It’s an attempt to save the president from making a significant mistake with regard to our policy in Iraq.”
The full Senate is scheduled to begin debate on the measure next week, and Biden has said he is willing to negotiate changes in hopes of attracting support from more Republicans.
House Democrats intend to hold a vote shortly after the Senate acts.
Even Republicans opposed to the legislation expressed unease with the revised policy involving a war that has lasted nearly four years, claimed the lives of more than 3,000 U.S. troops and helped Democrats win control of Congress in last fall’s elections.
“I am not confident that President Bush’s plan will succeed,” said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, senior Republican on the committee.
But he said in advance he would vote against the measure. “It is unclear to me how passing a nonbinding resolution that the president has already said he will ignore will contribute to any improvement or modification of our Iraq policy.”
“The president is deeply invested in this plan, and the deployments … have already begun,” Lugar added.
He suggested a more forceful role for Congress, and said lawmakers must ensure the administration is “planning for contingencies, including the failure of the Iraqi government to reach compromises and the persistence of violence despite U.S. and Iraqi government efforts.”
Separately, Vice President Dick Cheney said passage of a Senate resolution would not change the administration’s new strategy in Iraq.
“The Congress has control over the purse strings. They have the right, obviously, if they want, to cut off funding,” Cheney said in an interview with CNN.
“But in terms of this effort, the president has made his decision. We’ve consulted extensively with them. We’ll continue to consult with the Congress. But the fact of the matter is, we need to get the job done.”
Hagel’s remarks were among the most impassioned of the day, and he was unstinting in his criticism of the White House.
“There is no strategy,” he said of the Bush administration’s war management. “This is a pingpong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans; they’re real lives.”
A Vietnam veteran, he fairly lectured fellow senators not to duck a painful debate about a war that has grown increasingly unpopular as it has gone on.
“No president of the United States can sustain a foreign policy or a war policy without the sustained support of the American people,” Hagel said.
At least eight Republican senators, including Hagel, say they now back legislative proposals registering objections to Bush’s decision to boost U.S. military strength in Iraq by 21,500 troops.Excerpts from Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting, at which senators voted 12-9 to approve a nonbinding resolution disapproving of President Bush’s troop buildup in Iraq:
* “This amendment is designed to let the president know that there are many in both parties, Democrats and Republicans, who believe that change in our mission to go into Baghdad in the midst of a civil war, as well as surging troops to lay the groundwork for a new Iraqi political solution, is the wrong way to go, and in fact I believe will have the opposite — emphasize the opposite — effect that the president intends.”
— COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN JOSEPH BIDEN, D-DEL.,
on the resolution he co-sponsored
* “This is not a defeatist resolution. This is not a cut-and-run resolution. We are not talking about cutting off funds, not supporting the troops. This is a very real, responsible addressing of the most divisive issue in this country since Vietnam. Yes, sure, it’s tough. Absolutely. And I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line on this. What do you believe? What are you willing to support? What do you think? Why were you elected? If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes.”
— SEN. CHUCK HAGEL, R-NEB.,
co-sponsor of the resolution and the only Republican on the committee to vote for it
* The problem with nonbinding Senate resolutions is “they are subject to broad misinterpretation in the world community, and the silence specifically one way or another of whether we would or whether we would not has the serious repercussions for our troops and for our enemies to be seriously misinterpreted.”
— SEN. JOHNNY ISAKSON, R-GA.,
who opposed the resolution
* “We are past the point where we can simply take it on good faith from the president that this will work. And we are past the point where we can simply take it on good faith that the Maliki government is prepared to take the steps it needs to take in order to succeed. … This is not a situation in which we have been impatient. The American people have shown enormous resolve.”
— SEN. BARACK OBAMA, D-ILL.,
who voted for the resolution
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