Leading Democrats Announce Their Plan For Iraq

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13, 2006 — -- Democrats who turned voter frustration with President Bush and the war in Iraq into majorities in both houses of Congress welcomed their new colleagues to Capitol Hill orientation today and said they would respond to the voter discontent.

Leading Senate Democrats revived a plan for the "phased redeployment" of American troops out of Iraq, even though the plan did not get unanimous support among Democrats when it was first introduced in June.

Meanwhile, Bush spent time behind closed doors with members of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel of former statesmen appointed by Congress to give the situation in Iraq a fresh pair of eyes.

At a photo op with eight of the new Democratic Senators-elect (and Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, too), Democratic Leader Harry Reid took a question on the Iraq Study Group and used it to plug phased redeployment.

"I am happy he is meeting with the Iraq Study Group," Reid said. "Anything he gets in his head about new ideas is a good thing. We have to redeploy. Does that mean pull everybody out now? Of course it doesn't."

What phased withdrawal would mean, according to Sen. Carl Levin, who after January will be the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is that the president would tell the Iraqi government that U.S. troops would start slowly redeploying out of Iraq, into an advisory role while they are in-country, and with a lot fewer of them there.

"Most Democrats share the view that we should pressure the White House to commence the phased redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq in four to six months -- to begin that phased redeployment, and thereby to make it clear to the Iraqis that our presence is not open-ended and that they must take and make the necessary political compromises to preserve Iraq as a nation," Levin said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves.

"They, and they alone, are going to decide whether they're going to have a nation or whether they're going to have an all-out civil war," he said. "We have given them the opportunity, at huge cost of blood and treasure, to have a nation, should they choose it. But it is up to them, not us, not our brave and valiant troops --