No matter who wins on Nov. 7, the 109th Congress will be meeting after the election in a lame-duck session with Iraq on its mind and on its conscience.
War policy looms large as the generals and the politicians have examined the deadly deterioration of conditions in Baghdad.
Congress has given the Bush administration all the support it has asked since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but more and more that generosity seems misdirected. October will go down as the deadliest month in at least two years and pressure is building on the administration to find an exit strategy. American public opinion is looking positively European.
With violence between Sunni and Shiite escalating and death squads roaming the country, White House communications director Dan Bartlett was dispatched Monday to the morning talk shows to defend the president’s position in the face of growing GOP anxiety.
A New York Times report over the weekend said the administration is drafting a plan to give Iraqi leaders benchmarks for disarming militias and meeting other goals. Bartlett evinced some flexibility Monday but foreclosed any timetable for withdrawal, saying that it is “very important that we stay in Iraq and we win in Iraq.”
It seems clear that the administration now wants Iraqis to take on more responsibility. Attacks by opposing fighters in Baghdad rose 22 percent this month, even as extra U.S. troops moved in to the capital to bolster security. At least 81 Americans have been killed this month, the most since Nov. 2004. No wonder Iraqi officials are so nervous about the U.S. police debate.
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh said Monday, “There is too much of a pessimistic tone to this debate – even I would say in certain circles a defeatist tone.” In all, more than 2,796 U.S. military have been killed since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Many tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed.
Last week, British army chief Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt told a newspaper that Britain should get its soldiers out of Iraq “sometime soon” because “our presence exacerbates the security problems.”
Democrats have been increasingly critical of the Bush war policy, and now Republicans are stirring, too. In a recent campaign debate, loyalist Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas said, “If I had known then what I know now about the weapons of mass destruction, which was a key reason that I voted to go in there, I would not vote to go into Iraq the way we did.” Rethinking U.S. policy will occupy the remainder of the 109th Congress and then the 110th.
