Senate Passes Bill Seeking Iraq Exit; Veto Is Expected

One senior House aide summarized the problem succinctly: The president does not want the bill Democrats have passed, and Democrats might not be able to pass the bill the president wants.

Yesterday the Senate sent President Bush a $124 billion war spending measure that he is promising to veto as it includes a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. Now, within the Democrats, the battle will begin.

With the veto coming, some Democrats argue that the bill should simply be stripped of the timelines that have drawn Mr. Bush’s ire and sent back with the benchmarks and troop readiness rules intact. Others say Congress has made its antiwar statement and should now give the president the money without conditions.

Another wing, including House Democrats who are influential on military policy, prefers providing money for the troops for a few months while keeping pressure on the White House through other Pentagon-related legislation. Still others want to turn the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group into law.

Each alternative carries its own risk because Democratic leaders might not be able to muster the votes for passage of an alternate bill because a substantial bloc of Democrats opposes providing more money without some demand for a withdrawal.

What is undeniable is that the Democrats have now delivered Bush the most significant challenge yet to his "surge" policy in Iraq and have, in the words of Harry Reid, "Carried forth the wishes of the American people.” This is undeniably true.

Opinion polls yesterday showed that 55% of Americans now believe that the Iraq war is lost, saying that they now feel victory is no longer possible. A pitiful 22% believe that America is moving in the right direction with a whopping 66% saying that the country is moving in the wrong direction. These are the worst figures for fifteen years. Nor does there appear to be any support for Bush's "surge" or any belief that the "surge" is turning things around in Iraq. 49% think things in Iraq have become worse in the last three months with only a tiny 12% sharing Bush's optimism that the surge is working. Worse for the White House, 56% favour the Democratic solution of pulling out the troops whilst 37% favour Bush's plan to give things more time.

Bush has always said that a President can't run a country on opinion polls, but he has also said that the public will punish the Democrats if they oppose his plans and fail to support the troops on the battlefield; on that he appears to be totally wrong.

The public have aligned themselves strongly behind the Democratic position on this and it would appear that support for this war is now haemorrhaging.

Nor are these results unique to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

Recent public opinion polls show the Democrats, with a push for a timeline for leaving Iraq, have struck a chord. A New York Times-CBS News poll found that those surveyed favored a timeline for withdrawal in 2008 by a wide margin, 64 percent to 32 percent. The poll of 1,052 people conducted April 20-24 also found public support for Congress to have the final say on troop levels in Iraq, 57 percent to 35 percent.

The White House lost no time in proving that they are way behind the public on this.

“Eighty days after President Bush submitted his troop funding bill, the Senate has now joined the House in passing defeatist legislation that insists on a date for surrender, micromanages our commanders and generals in combat zones from 6,000 miles away, and adds billions of dollars in unrelated spending to the fighting on the ground,” said Dana Perino, the administration spokeswoman.

The joke here is that the commanders and generals on the ground have always been micromanaged from the White House. We should not forget that Army Gen. John P. Abizaid opposed more troops being sent to Iraq for Bush's surge and that he had to be replaced. So much for not micromanaging the war from 6,000 miles away.

Nor did he only replace Abizaid, he also had to remove General George Casey for the same reason. He opposed the troop increase. Why is that not micromanaging the war from 6,000 miles away?

Bush has long pretended that he is allowing the generals to run the Iraq war but this is only true as long as they agree with him, as soon as they don't agree with his latest shift in policy they have to go.

Nor should we forget that this Bush administration have only arrived where they are now because they micromanaged the war - even before the invasion - and insisted that they knew better than the generals how many troops would be needed to carry out the invasion and occupation.

Paul Wolfowitz said that general Shinseki's comments that a couple of hundred thousand troops would be needed to stabilise Iraq after the invasion were "wildly off the mark". I wonder if Wolfowitz, with the chaos that is now swirling through Iraq, would ever have the courtesy to admit that Shinseki was right and he was wrong.

The civilians in the White House have always contended that they knew better than the generals on the ground which is why the Iraq war is in the state that it is in, so it's beyond irony for Bush and Co to accuse the Democrats of "micromanaging the war from 6,000 miles away".

I have no idea what the Democrats will do if Bush vetoes the bill and I'm not sure the Democrats do either. But they should not be swayed by arguments that the public will punish them for opposing this White House, and they certainly should pay no attention to charges that they are attempting to "micromanage the war from 6,000 miles away" from a man who has been doing that very thing with disastrous consequences for the past four years.

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Tags: Senate, Congress, Iraq war funding bill, troop withdrawal, Presidential veto, Democrats, Republicans, Bush, Iraq war, surge