Also see below:     
Isolated Bush Faces Rebellion Over Iraq    [

    Bush's Plan for Iraq Runs Into Opposition in Congress
    By Thom Shanker and David S. Cloud
    The New York Times

    Friday 12 January 2007

    Washington - President Bush's call to increase the American military commitment in Iraq ran into intense Congressional opposition Thursday from Democrats and from moderate Republicans who expressed profound skepticism.

    A day after the president set out a new strategy for bringing stability to Iraq, the White House found few allies on either side of the aisle when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The reception she received suggested that Mr. Bush's prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday had done little to build political support for sending additional troops to Baghdad.

    "I think what occurred here today was fairly profound, in the sense that you heard 21 members, with one or two notable exceptions, expressing outright hostility, disagreement and or overwhelming concern with the president's proposal," the committee's new Democratic chairman, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, said at the conclusion of Ms. Rice's testimony.

    Republicans were more supportive in the House, where the new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Armed Services Committee. But Democrats were scathing in their criticism, and in both the House and the Senate, Democratic leaders moved ahead with plans to oppose Mr. Bush's plan through nonbinding resolutions.

    While saying they do not plan any immediate effort to try to thwart the Bush plan by cutting off funds, some Democrats said they would continue to consider placing limitations on the administration when Congress considers a war spending measure later in the year.

    Despite the decision by many members of his party to break with the White House over the troop increase, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he would use parliamentary tactics to try to thwart the Democratic effort to adopt the Senate resolution opposing the plan.

    In Baghdad, Iraq's Shiite-led government responded tepidly to Mr. Bush's announcement that he would send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq to bolster the effort to curb rampant sectarian violence.

    Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki failed to appear as scheduled at a news conference and did not make any public comment. [Page A15.]

    Meanwhile, President Bush and his top cabinet officials spent Thursday traveling and testifying in support of his new Iraq strategy.

    Early in the day, in an emotional ceremony at the White House, Mr. Bush awarded the Medal of Honor to the family of Cpl. Jason Dunham, a marine from Scio, N.Y., who was killed in Iraq in 2004 when he threw himself on a grenade to save the rest of his unit. The president began crying during the ceremony. It was the second Medal of Honor proceeding to come out of the Iraq war.

    Afterward, he traveled to Fort Benning, Ga., where he spoke to Army soldiers about the Iraq plan. He said his approach would not produce an immediate reduction in violence but represented "our best chance for success." Some of the troops based at Fort Benning have already served twice in Iraq and are scheduled for a third deployment.

    Ms. Rice appeared on morning news programs before joining Mr. Gates at a news conference in the White House. Both then moved to Capitol Hill for a first substantive showdown with the new Democratic majority and an encounter with the shifting politics of the war.

    At the House Armed Services Committee hearing, it was standing-room-only, with some spectators sprawled on the floor and others spilling out the door.

    In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican who has been critical of the administration's handling of the war, drew applause when he described the president's proposals as a "dangerous foreign policy blunder," and vowed to oppose them. Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and a vigorous opponent of the war, spoke of it as "quite possibly the greatest foreign policy mistake in the history of our nation."

    Expressing doubt about whether Iraqis "are done killing each other," Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, said, "Why put more American lives on the line now in the hope that this time they'll make the difficult choice?"

    Several Republicans questioned the Bush plan without rejecting it outright, but their call for greater detail made it clear they remained unconvinced. Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire agreed that approving new legislation in Iraq on sharing oil revenue would be central to weaving estranged Sunni Arabs into the political process, but he said no United States government official could describe the law to him.

    "It's the most remarkable law that no one has ever seen," he said.

    Away from the Congressional hearings, White House and Pentagon officials held a series of private meetings with lawmakers on Thursday in an attempt to blunt the criticism, especially from Republicans.

    Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new American commander in Iraq, waved off reporters as he shuttled between the offices of Republican Senators John W. Warner of Virginia and Jeff Sessions of Alabama. "Please, guys. Can I just make the rounds up here?" he said, declining to answer further questions.

    During their testimony, Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice declined to specify a time limit on the troop increase and were cautious about predicting rapid improvements in security in Baghdad, where most of the additional troops will be positioned, saying progress is likely to come gradually.

    "I think that we all know that the stakes in Iraq are enormous and that the consequences of failure would also be enormous not just for America and for Iraq, but for the entire region of the Middle East and indeed for the world," Ms. Rice said.

    The deployment schedule, in which more than 20,000 fresh soldiers and marines would roll into Iraq over several months, was intended to give the president time to reconsider the increase should the Iraqi government fail to provide its share of security forces as promised, Ms. Rice said.

    "I have met Prime Minister Maliki," she said. "I was with him in Amman. I saw his resolve. I think he knows that his government is, in a sense, on borrowed time, not just in terms of the American people, but in terms of the Iraqi people."

    Still, she spoke directly about Mr. Maliki's failure to come through on his past promises to bring additional Iraqi troops into Baghdad. "They haven't performed in the past and so the president is absolutely right, and we have all been saying to them, 'You have to perform,'" she said.

    Mr. Gates would not say when asked whether the planned American troop increases over the next few months could be withheld if additional Iraqi units promised for Baghdad failed to materialize.

    "We are going to have a number of opportunities to go back to the Iraqis and point out where they have failed to meet their commitments," he said, adding, "I think our assumption going forward is that they have every intention of making this work."

    Pressed repeatedly by members of both parties about what steps the Bush administration would take if Iraq continued to balk, he added, "We would clearly have to relook at the strategy."

    Mr. Gates said the Pentagon was revising rules governing mobilization of Army National Guard and Reserve members so troops who had already done a tour in Iraq in the past five years could now be sent back to Iraq if their units was remobilized. But the new policy would aim to shorten the time Guard members were mobilized to a maximum of a year.

    He also announced a large permanent increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, a repudiation of the approach of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who argued for keeping ground force levels low and insisted that authorization for any additional troops be done temporarily.

    Under Mr. Bush's plan, the active duty Army total manpower over the next five years would grow to 547,000, an increase of 39,000 over the current level. In addition, the Marine Corps would grow to 202,000, an increase of 23,000. The expansions would have to be approved by Congress.

    Democrats in both the House and Senate would not rule out eventually putting limitations on financing for the war if Mr. Bush continued on a course they contended defied the will of Congress and the American public. But they say that possibility, which could open them to Republican attacks, will have to be faced later when an emergency spending request and Pentagon spending are considered in the spring and summer.

    Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the Democratic chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that sets military spending and a leading party critic of the war, is exploring ways to attach conditions to a Pentagon measure.

    Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said "a wide variety of ideas are bubbling forth," for how the party should respond to the president. But beyond voting on a resolution to symbolically oppose the Iraq plan, he said it remained unlikely that Democrats could block the troop increase to Baghdad.

    "If you were going to have a so-called surge, part of that is supposedly by keeping people there longer," Mr. Obey said. "It's pretty hard to shut off funds for troops who are already there, so it gets very, very complicated."

    Late Thursday, James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group, whose report in November the Bush administration largely spurned, said in a statement that some of its recommendations were reflected in Mr. Bush's plan and urged the White House to give "further consideration" to the panel's remaining ideas.

    At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Mr. Biden issued a sharp warning to the administration after Mr. Gates discussed recent raids against Iranians in Iraq, including one in Erbil early Thursday, and described them as part of a new effort "to root out the networks" involved in bringing Iranian-supplied explosive devices into Iraq.

    Mr. Biden responded by saying that the vote to authorize the president to order the use of force to topple Saddam Hussein should not be used as a vehicle for mounting attacks inside Iran, even in pursuit of cells or networks assisting insurgents or sectarian militias.

    "I just want the record to show and I would like to have a legal response from the State Department if they think they have authority to pursue networks or anything else across the border into Iran and Iraq that will generate a constitutional confrontation here in the Senate, I predict to you," Mr. Biden said.

    Also, the State Department announced on Thursday that Timothy Carney, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as a senior civilian American authority in Iraq for three months in 2003, is the new coordinator for Iraq reconstruction.

    --------

    Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

    Go to Original

    Isolated Bush Faces Rebellion Over Iraq
    By Ewen MacAskill iand Julian Borger
    The Guardian UK

    Friday 12 January 2007

Congress to reject plan. Public against extra troops.

    President George Bush faced increasing isolation last night after his much-vaunted new strategy for Iraq met with overwhelming public and political opposition.

    Mr Bush and his most senior staff embarked on a huge public relations exercise to sell the plan to send an extra 20,000 troops to Iraq, aware of formidable opposition in Congress which already promises an embarrassing vote next week rejecting the new strategy.

    In contrast to the deference the president enjoyed in his first six years in office, he is confronting for the first time a combination of reinvigorated Democrats and rebellious Republicans. Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, said: "In choosing to escalate the civil war, the president virtually stands alone."

    Mr Reid said he had the votes of about 10 dissident Republican senators, and predicted that the passage of a resolution, with bipartisan support, would mark "the beginning of the end of the war".

    The wave of scepticism and outright hostility that greeted the president's new strategy to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq with a beefed-up US force marks a significant change in America's attitude to Iraq. A Washington Post-ABC poll carried out after Mr Bush's televised address on Wednesday showed that 61% opposed the plan, while just 36% backed it. In another poll by Associated Press and Ipsos, 70% of Americans said they were against sending more troops.

    Tony Blair yesterday welcomed the decision to send more troops to Iraq, saying it "makes sense", but reaction otherwise was overwhelmingly negative.

    Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is to fly to the Middle East today to try to win support for the plan from allied Arab governments, though the immediate reaction in the region reflected the widespread scepticism in America.

    There was concern in many Middle East capitals at the apparent threat of escalating the conflict to include Iran and Syria. Mr Bush, in his speech, warned that the US would "seek out and destroy networks" of insurgents moving into Iraq or based in these neighbouring countries. While US commanders insisted yesterday that this did not signal an intention to go into Iran or Syria, Ms Rice confirmed that all options were open.

    The Bush administration was at pains to stress the initiative had come from the Iraqi government, led by Nouri al-Maliki. But Ms Rice, in an unguarded moment, picked up on an open television microphone yesterday morning, expressed concern that her forthcoming visit to Iraq might be perceived as dictation of policy from Washington. "I don't want to descend on the Maliki government and look like we, you know, just sort of beat their brains out," she said.

    In a taste of the new confrontational approach on Capitol Hill, Ms Rice received a grilling when she appeared before the Senate foreign affairs committee to explain the plan. The Democratic senator and 2008 presidential hopeful Joe Biden told her Mr Bush's plan was "a tragic mistake". Meanwhile, Democratic and Republican congressmen were lining up in TV studios to denounce the deployment of an extra 21,500 US troops to Iraq.

    Mr Bush flew to army headquarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, after an emotional White House ceremony at which he handed over a posthumous medal to the parents of a marine who threw his body on a grenade. In a speech the president, who ignored recommendations from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group for a phased withdrawal, insisted that the plan would work. In a shift of strategy, the US is planning to go into previous no-go zones in Baghdad, in particular the Shia militia stronghold of Sadr City.

    Mr Bush said the influx of more American troops, together with Iraqi forces, would be enough to "clear, build and hold" militant areas. He warned that the new strategy "is not going to yield immediate results. It's going to take a while."

    The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, stressed that the new deployment may not, as had been widely believed, be short term. "It's viewed as a temporary surge, but I think no one has a really clear idea of how long that might be," Mr Gates said.

    He also announced that to help with the strain imposed by Iraq on the US in meeting its worldwide commitments, the overall strength of the army would be increased by 92,000. He added that, whatever the differences over the decision to go to war in 2003, "there seems to be broad agreement that failure in Iraq would be a calamity for our nation of lasting historical consequence".

    The vote on the new strategy will be the first collision between the White House and Congress since the Democrats secured control of both houses in November. Although the congressional vote is purely symbolic, the increasingly confident Democrats may move beyond that to try to block funding for extra troops. Such a tactic would have been virtually unthinkable even a week ago. Republicans loyal to Mr Bush may try to block the vote by embarking on a filibuster.

    Among the Republicans who may join the Democrats in support of the resolution is Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam war veteran, who called the plan "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam". He said: "This is a dangerously wrong-headed strategy that will drive America deeper into an unwinnable swamp at great cost. It is wrong to place American troops in the middle of Iraq's civil war."

    Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois who is among the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination and a long-term opponent of the war, caught the mood of the Democrats when he said: "We are not going to babysit a civil war."

    Hillary Clinton, the other Democrat frontrunner, who has been careful so far not to be too critical of the war, said Mr Bush "will continue to take us down the wrong road - only faster".

    Democrats, who control the Senate with 51 of 100 seats, would need 60 votes to clear a possible Republican procedural roadblock.

    Qualified support for Mr Bush came from Senator John McCain, the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, who has long lobbied for extra troops. "I do not guarantee victory or success with this new strategy," Mr McCain said. "If we do fail there's going to be chaos in the region and I believe that we would pay an even heavier price in American blood and treasure."

    The British government said President Bush's announcement would not affect its own plans to hand over authority in southern Iraq to Iraqi forces and pull out British troops this year, but Mr Blair claimed the divergent plans did not represent a US-UK rift over policy. "It is really important that we don't either give that impression or have that misunderstanding," the prime minister told West Country TV in Plymouth.

    The defence secretary, Des Browne, acknowledged that a crackdown by American troops on Shia militias in Baghdad could have a knock-on effect in the south, triggering Shia reprisals, but he said there were plans to deal with such an upsurge.

    He expected Basra to be transferred to full Iraqi control this year, enabling British troops to start pulling out.

    "It is my expectation that we will be able to see that process through and that over the course of the coming months and this year that we are now expecting to see a reduction of troops by a matter of thousands," he said.