WASHINGTON: Fearful of a Republican rebellion over Iraq that his own aides believe could force him to change course, President George W. Bush said Tuesday that the United States would be able to pull back troops “in a while,” but called on Congress to wait until September to debate the future military presence there.
The president, speaking to an economics club in Cleveland, sharply rejected a new round of efforts by Senate Democrats, as part of a two-week debate on a military spending bill, to force the withdrawal of American troops.
“We can accomplish and win this fight in Iraq,” Bush said, urging an increasingly restive Congress to wait until top U.S. military and diplomatic officials report back from Iraq in September before revisiting the war debate.
His message was carefully calibrated, emphasizing that Bush is open to shifting course – without stating precisely when.
Key Republican defections reportedly have some White House officials fearful of a collapse of support for the war. With a new poll showing record public opposition to the war, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, speaking on ABC television, warned strongly against any supposition that the president’s grip on the war was slipping and against “accepting this panic mode thing that I’ve heard reported.”
“That’s bunkum,” he said. “That’s just flat wrong.” Things, he said, are not “falling apart.”
He and other administration officials seemed intent on making clear that Bush would support no hasty withdrawal.
A convergence of events has the war debate peaking again. Under a congressional mandate, Bush must provide a progress report on Iraq no later than Sunday. Administration officials, including Snow, say it will be a mixed assessment, with violence persisting and some of the benchmarks set by the White House far from being reached.
Meantime, Senate Democratic leaders on Tuesday opened a new debate on limiting the U.S. presence in Iraq. One proposal would require soldiers and marines to be given more leave time between deployments in Iraq – equal at least to their time served there – in a move that would limit the available pool.
But the president did receive one strong vote of support Tuesday: Senator John McCain, whose Republican presidential campaign has suffered because of his strong backing for the war, returned from Iraq and made clear he still vigorously supported U.S. military efforts there, ending speculation he might join a growing list of Republican defectors.
The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki “is not functioning as it must,” he said from the Senate floor. But “the progress our military has made should encourage us.”
“The terrorists are in this war to win it,” McCain said. “The question is: Are we?”
The president, speaking in Cleveland, made clear that he had no intention of backing down from his current plan, which sent thousands more troops to Iraq in the first half of this year in an effort to quell violence, particularly in Baghdad, to create conditions for greater political progress.
In remarks before a speech, he said he would remind his listeners that “troop levels will be decided by our commanders on the ground, not by political figures in Washington, D.C., and that we’ve got a plan to lead to victory.”
But even as Bush insisted on the need for more time, public patience has waned. A USA Today/Gallup Poll released Tuesday indicated that 62 percent of Americans believe it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq. It also said that Bush’s public approval rating had slipped to a record low of 29 percent.
Several lawmakers agreed Tuesday that the Iraqi government had made too little progress, but they differed sharply about the remedy.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, proposed legislation to order Bush to begin pulling out troops in 120 days and end combat by April 30, 2008, leaving some troops behind for counterterrorism operations, to train Iraqi security forces and to protect the U.S. presence.
“There is much too little pressure on Iraqi leaders to do what they have to do,” Levin told reporters.
It remains an open question whether the series of Democratic proposals, including those calling for timelines and troop withdrawals, will gain the 60 votes needed for initial passage in the Senate.
Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, and his new Iraq coordinator, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, were both on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to lobby senators, while Defense Secretary Robert Gates was fielding phone calls from lawmakers.
Snow, appearing on ABC, played down the import of the president’s impending report on Iraq. The troop increase was barely in place, he said. It was too soon to make long-range judgments. The report, he said, “gives you a snapshot at the very beginning of a new way forward.”
Snow said that Americans would not “see a report that says everything has been met at the outset, because obviously it hasn’t.
“But there are going to be some benchmarks that we’ve met,” he said, “some that we can’t quite judge at this juncture.”
He cautioned against portraying the current delicate situation as “some drama where all of a sudden people are defecting and things are falling apart, and the dam’s bursting.”
“This is a war,” Snow said. “This is not a political game.”
The defections of some prominent Republican war supporters – including Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, Senator George Voinovich of Ohio and, on Monday, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine – have greatly complicated the administration’s calls for patience.
But McCain, freshly back from Iraq, said that there was little choice but to persist and prevail there.
McCain, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, thus stuck with his past outspoken support of the war effort. Had he joined the other defectors, it could have been a serious blow to the administration’s cause. As his presidential campaign has encountered fund-raising difficulties, there was speculation that he might at this time begin to separate himself from the unpopular war.
“I know that senators are tired of this war, tired of the mounting death toll, tired of the many mistakes we have made in this war and the great efforts it requires to reverse them,” McCain said. “I understand this fatigue, and yet I maintain that we, as elected leaders with a duty to our people and the security of their nation, cannot let fatigue dictate our policies.”
[International Herald Tribune]
