Senate Panel Opposes Troop Increase in Iraq
January 24, 2007
By JEFF ZELENY
nytimes.com
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 — One day after President Bush implored Congress to give his Iraq strategy a chance to succeed, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution today denouncing the White House’s plan to send more troops to Baghdad, setting up the most direct confrontation over the war since it began nearly four years ago.
The full Senate is poised to consider the nonbinding, yet strongly symbolic, repudiation of Mr. Bush as early as next Wednesday. Democratic leaders agreed to tone down the language in the resolution, hoping to make it more acceptable to Republicans in an effort to send a strong, bipartisan rebuke to the White House.
“This is not designed to say, “Mr. President, ah-ha, you’re wrong,” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat and chairman of the committee. “This is designed to say, ‘Mr. President, please don’t go do this.’ ”
Even as the White House delicately worked to persuade some Republicans to consider the president’s approach, the Bush administration also suggested Congressional action would not interrupt the plan to dispatch more than 20,000 American troops to Iraq.
In a television interview on CNN, Vice President Dick Cheney declared: “It won’t stop us.”
The Foreign Relations Committee approved the resolution on a vote of 12-to-9, with Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, joining 11 Democrats in supporting the measure. But even Republicans who opposed the resolution, including Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, expressed deep doubt about whether the troop increase could succeed and suggested it was time for a new direction.
The committee rejected amendments that would have strengthened or softened the resolution, which described Mr. Bush’s plan to increase troops as contrary to the national interest. Some Republicans expressed reluctance to support the legislation because they feared it could be seen as a political attack on Mr. Bush, but they left themselves open to backing a similar plan offered by Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican.
The Foreign Relations Committee tends to carry a more centrist outlook than the Senate as a whole, but Democrats say they believe that at least eight of the 49 Republican senators might join with nearly all Democrats in embracing a resolution — Mr. Biden’s or Mr. Warner’s — critical of the president’s troop increase plan.
Senator George V. Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, said he was disappointed that the administration had failed to extend an olive branch to Congress. He said he told a White House official at the State of the Union address on Tuesday that the stalemate in Iraq was threatening to consume the Bush presidency.
“It’s time to recognize that if you keep going the way you are, you are never going to achieve what you want to achieve,” Mr. Voinovich said. “And beyond that, it’s going to fall over on your domestic initiatives and make your presidency uneventful and not have meaning.”
Hours after the hearing on Wednesday, the effort led by Mr. Warner was gaining ground, with six Democrats and three other Republicans signing on as co-sponsors of his proposal, which also bluntly opposes sending more troops to Iraq. Mr. Warner was declining offers from Democratic leaders to merge his proposal with theirs, saying he wanted to keep his plan as neutral as possible, so it could attract wide bipartisan support.
“It’s not a question of who is the most patriotic or who is trying to set up a confrontation with the president,” Mr. Warner said, speaking from the floor of the Senate. “To have a vote all on one side or all on the other side will not help.”
While details of the two resolutions vary somewhat, their message is the same: many members of Congress do not support the plan to expand the military operation in Iraq.
The White House is uncharacteristically shying away from an overt lobbying effort to thwart the Iraq resolutions, as it might do more harm than good. Instead, the administration is leaving it mainly to the Republican leadership, including the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Senator Trent Lott, the Republican whip, to work with members to draft an alternative.
Still, the White House has sought to head off overwhelming votes against the president in both the Senate and the House. Since Mr. Bush delivered his Iraq speech on Jan. 10, the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and his deputy, J.D. Crouch, have held meetings with members of both parties to try to ease skepticism about the new Iraq policy.
Officials, well aware that a majority of senators are likely to vote in favor of the Warner resolution, say those meetings will continue in the days leading up to the vote and beyond. But the remarks from Mr. Cheney today suggested the White House was not focused on the resolutions.
“We are moving forward,” Mr. Cheney said in the interview on CNN. “The Congress has control over the purse strings. They have the right, obviously, if they want, to cut off funding. But in terms of this effort, the president has made his decision.”
A preview of next week’s full-fledged debate on Iraq unfolded today in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with senator after senator recounted the stories of soldiers from their own states who had died in Iraq. Under the new Democratic majority, the committee has held nearly daily hearings on Iraq, evoking memories of hearings a generation ago over the Vietnam War.
Senator Jim Webb, a Democrat of Virginia who fought as a Marine in Vietnam and was secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, urged his colleagues not to draw a correlation between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. Such comparisons, he feared, could force people away from backing the Iraq resolutions.
“I think there are parallels and there were many people at this table who opposed the Vietnam War, but some of those parallels are superficial,” Mr. Webb said. “We’re losing the support of a lot of people who supported the Vietnam War and who have problems with this if we try to lump it together.
Mr. Hagel, who also served in Vietnam, has derided the president’s Iraq strategy as the worse foreign policy since Vietnam. Yet today, Mr. Hagel took a different approach as he addressed fellow Republicans — from the administration or the Congress — who have questioned the motives of those who have spoken critically of the war.
“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?” Mr. Hagel said, his voice booming. “If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company |
