Senate Democrats in Bid to Limit U.S. Role in Iraq
WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 — Senior Senate Democrats, stepping up their confrontation with President Bush over Iraq policy, are preparing legislation that would limit the role of United States troops there to counterterrorism efforts and prohibit them from interceding in sectarian violence.
Senate officials said Thursday that the proposal now being drafted would be a new turn in their attempts to force the White House to halt its troop buildup in Baghdad. They described it as more substantive than the nonbinding resolution of opposition to the increase that stalled in the Senate last Saturday.
The officials would speak only if not identified because the central proposal was still being drafted and needs to be presented to all Senate Democrats when they return from a weeklong recess next Tuesday.
They said the proposal was intended to essentially overturn the 2002 resolution granting Mr. Bush the authority to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and limit the military to combating Al Qaeda in Iraq, keeping Iraq from becoming a haven for terrorists and training Iraqi forces. The proposal’s goal, officials said, would be to allow combat forces not engaged in those duties to be removed from Iraq next year.
The chief authors are Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Carl Levin of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. The plan is to try to attach the proposal to an antiterrorism bill the Senate expects to begin considering Tuesday.
Lawmakers and senior aides said that such a plan was unlikely to pass Congress, and even if it did, it would certainly be vetoed by President Bush. But Democrats say their intention is to keep pressure on both Mr. Bush and Congressional Republicans who are facing a public frustrated with the war. Democrats say that other Iraq proposals are likely to emerge as well.
Senate Democrats say they prefer the emphasis on the mission of American troops over a plan by some House members to try to limit United States military involvement by putting restraints on troop deployments based on readiness and equipment availability.
Senate Democrats have been discussing such an approach in recent weeks and decided to forge ahead after Senate Republicans were able to block a vote on the resolution criticizing the troop buildup even though 56 senators, including 7 Republicans, voted last Saturday to debate the resolution.
In meetings with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and other Democratic leaders, officials said a consensus emerged that trying to redefine the 2002 resolution was the best approach. Officials said lawmakers and senior aides were still refining the exact language that would be used and were uncertain whether the new proposal would explicitly repeal the initial Iraq war resolution, amend it or take another avenue. “We haven’t crossed that bridge yet,” one official said.
But he and others said they believed the initiative made good political and policy sense because the circumstances had changed so much since the 2002 vote, with Saddam Hussein executed and the search for weapons of mass destruction coming up empty.
Senator Biden foreshadowed his approach in a speech last week when he said that the “the best next step is to revisit the authorization Congress granted the president in 2002 to use force in Iraq. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“We gave the president that power to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and, if necessary, to depose Saddam Hussein,” he said. “The W.M.D. were not there. Saddam Hussein is no longer there. The 2002 authorization is no longer relevant to the situation in Iraq.”
Republican leaders have already said they expected the new Democratic effort to be blocked. But Democrats said they saw it as the next step to building a case against Mr. Bush’s war effort and that Republicans could be drawn to it if the war continued to go badly.
They said they believed that the initiative had the capacity to attract broad support from Democrats even though members of the party were splintered over how aggressively to confront Mr. Bush over the war. Officials said they were heartened that the Democratic senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, two strong war opponents, seemed open to the idea of embracing the new proposal by Senators Levin and Biden.
Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, would not discuss the plans that Democrats have for moving forward on Iraq policy next week, saying no final decisions had been made on how to proceed.
Senate Democrats in Bid to Limit U.S. Role in Iraq - New York Times
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