House Dems Ready for Showdown on Iraq
March 8, 2007 — -- The days of symbolic, nonbinding resolutions behind them, Democratic leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives this morning dug in their heels and set the stage for an aggressive debate over the future of the war in Iraq.
At a press conference, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., and House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Chairman Jack Murtha, D-Pa., introduced the $96 billion in supplemental spending for the Iraq War with major strings attached.
These include, most notably, that the Iraqi government meet President Bush's benchmarks for reform under penalty of immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, as well as a timeline -- regardless of benchmarks met -- for ending all U.S. troop deployment in Iraq.
"No matter what," Pelosi said, "by March 2008, redeployment begins."
And by August 2008, it will be completed, according to this bill.
"The proposal that we are talking about today will essentially redirect more resources to the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan," said Obey, "fighting the right war in the right place."
The bill would also require that the Bush administration meet Pentagon standards for troop readiness in terms of unit readiness, length of time they can be deployed in Iraq and length of time they can stay at home before they are sent back to Iraq. The bill, however, grants Bush the authority to depart from Pentagon guidelines if he provides a report explaining why.
But the White House already is threatening to veto the bill. A statement from Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, objected to the bill's "arbitrary troop withdrawal deadline."
"Gen. [David] Petraeus, not Speaker Pelosi, should be setting military strategy and timetables for troop movement," Perino's statement said. "Speaker Pelosi should not be limiting the options of our military leaders to win the global war on terror. Their plan unintentionally runs the risk of aiding the enemy by identifying specific ways to trigger rigid and artificial timelines for withdrawal."
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have had trouble getting their members -- which range from far-left, anti-war liberals to conservative Democrats from states Bush won handily in 2004 -- to coalesce around one plan. And this morning House Democratic leaders seemed unclear of all the deadline details of the bill they were introducing.
Nonetheless, this is the first real effort of the new Democratic Congress to end U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq, but it will be an ugly and complicated fight.
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