Senate Challenges Bush on Iraq

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 24, 2007 — -- President Bush practically pleaded with Congress during his State of the Union address Tuesday night to give his new "surge" strategy in Iraq a chance to work. But Wednesday morning the Senate took the first step in officially rejecting the idea of sending more troops there.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to declare that the president's plan is wrong, with Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the chairman of the committee, saying, "We can let the president know in a bipartisan way, 'You're making a mistake.'"

Despite a chorus of Republican voices expressing anguish about the war and the president's new strategy, the vote on the symbolic resolution to block Bush's plan was barely bipartisan. Though it passed by a vote of 12-9, the only Republican to support it was Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Vietnam War veteran and fierce critic of the war.

"There is no strategy," Hagel said. "This is a pingpong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar Province, in Iraq, in Baghdad, are not beans -- they're real lives." Hagel co-wrote the resolution along with Biden and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

All the other Republicans on the committee refused to sign the resolution, but many expressed their deep frustration with the president and opposition to the troop escalation.

"We do not need a resolution to confirm that there is a broad discomfort with the president's plan within Congress," said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind, the committee's ranking Republican.

Republican Sen. George Voinovich even had a personal message for Bush, exasperatedly exclaiming, "Many of us feel you are not listening. You are not listening … it's time to recognize that if you keep going the way you are, you are never going to achieve what you want to achieve."

"I'm more skeptical about what we're doing [in Iraq] than I have ever been before," Voinovich said.

"I think there's been many mistakes on the part of the administration, more than sometimes you can almost imagine," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. But Corker said he wouldn't support the resolution. "I do not believe it is going to affect the administration's course of action one iota," he said.