Democrats Want Change in Iraq

"Party News"

06/22/2006

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrats want a different direction in Iraq. Republicans back President Bush.

“The public is very happy about the fact that we have not been attacked since 9/11,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, the second-ranking Senate Republican, said, even though polls show voters are weary about the war that’s in its fourth year.

“Americans want an exit strategy,” countered Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “The status quo is a disaster.”

The GOP-controlled Senate was poised to vote Thursday on two Democratic proposals to start redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq this year, a week after both houses of Congress soundly rejected withdrawal timetables.


Both proposals - offered as amendments to an annual military bill - were expected to be defeated, mostly along partisan lines.

“One hundred percent of the Democratic caucus believes it’s time for change. One hundred percent of the Republican caucus believes it’s time to stay the course,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said during debate, voicing the Democratic view of the likely vote outcome as well as the choice facing voters this fall.

Sen. George Allen, R-Va., laid out the stark differences according to Republicans, saying Democrats offer “a vacillating strategic plan for retreat” while the GOP supports “a steady strategic plan for success.”

To counter criticism that no weapons of mass destruction turned up in Iraq even though that was a key argument for going to war, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., released a newly declassified military intelligence report. It said that coalition forces had found 500 munitions in Iraq that contained degraded sarin or mustard nerve agents, produced before the 1991 Gulf War.

Democrats downplayed the intelligence report, saying that a lengthy 2005 report from the top U.S. weapons inspector contemplated that such munitions would be found. A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the weapons were not considered likely to be dangerous because of their age.


Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have staged bitter partisan debates for two weeks, with both sides maneuvering for the political upper-hand in a midterm election year.

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans welcomed the Democratic-engineered debate because it highlighted divisions in the Democratic Party little more than four months before Election Day and as the GOP is trying to overcome polls showing the public favors a power shift in Congress to Democrats.

Democrats, for their part, tried to deflect attention from differences in their party on Iraq, even though the debate was over two separate Democratic proposals on the fate of U.S. troops.

One of those proposals, sponsored by Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, would require the administration to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq by July 1, 2007, with redeployments beginning this year.

The other proposal - which most Democrats and their leadership supports - calls for the administration to begin “a phased redeployment of U.S. forces” by year’s end. The nonbinding resolution would not set a deadline of when all forces must be withdrawn.


The Bush administration says U.S. troops will stay in Iraq until Iraqi security forces can defend the country against a lethal insurgency that rose up after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.

Senate Republicans opposed any timeline. They said a premature pullout and a public pronouncement of any such plan would risk all-out civil war, tip off terrorists, threaten U.S. security and cripple the Iraqi government just as democracy is taking hold.

In turn, almost all Democrats chastised Republicans for walking in lockstep with Bush and they accused him of failing to articulate a plan for the way ahead in Iraq. Democrats said it is time for troops to start coming home and for Congress to send a clear signal that the U.S. presence is not indefinite.

Sensitive to talk of a divided party, Democratic aides circulated a memo from a Democratic pollster suggesting that Republicans are going to pay a price in November for standing with the president’s war policies. But Republicans dismissed that notion.

Democrats also played down concerns, voiced privately by some party strategists, that the Kerry-Feingold call for a “hard-and-fast” deadline is hindering the party’s efforts to project a unified position on Iraq for the fall.

Still, those dismissals did not explain why Democratic leaders spent more than a week trying to write a “consensus” proposal that they hoped would persuade Kerry and Feingold to drop their own, which would set a “date certain” for ending the U.S. combat mission.

In the end, the two potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidates were not swayed and votes on the separate proposals were scheduled.