It appears as if President George Bush will get most of he wants in terms of a Iraq war funding bill that won’t have a withdrawal deadline — most of he wants for now, that is:
President Bush appears poised to win months more of funding for troops in Iraq. But if conditions don’t improve there by fall, he could lose support from a battalion of congressional Republicans.
Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, while still debating details, say they are likely to pass a bill that would tie war spending to a set of benchmarks for Iraq’s progress but no deadlines for troop withdrawal, which caused Bush to veto a funding bill this week. They would then address the war in other debates this summer and let political pressure mount on the GOP.
“This is going to be a step-by-step process, continuing to isolate” the president, said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the House Democratic Caucus chairman. “The key to that is to basically get Republicans who say, ‘We’re not going to do this anymore.’ “
In a sense, then, what is unfolding is truly likely to be a last “surge”: the last major military “surge” plan that can be implemented with existing support – and the White House getting more likely than not its last surge of party-loyalty-based GOP Congressional support. The Chicago Tribune report goes on to say this:
Privately and publicly, some House Republicans and their staff say defections could come as early as September, when Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of American troops in Iraq, returns to brief Congress on the progress of Bush’s “troop surge” of nearly 30,000 to quell insurgent fighters.
Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said the briefing will be a different sort of “benchmark” for a Republican caucus that has so far stood nearly united behind the president against troop withdrawals.
“That [unity] will change very abruptly and very quickly in September if the report is not good,” he said. “People are going to be looking at their next election. Their next election will be right around the corner, and the war will be the big issue.”
It’s going to be self-preservation time. And the Republican debate this week (see highlights below) was notable for the fact that most candidates avoided mentioning Bush’s name or tying themselves too closely to him. They preferred to portray themselves as political descendants of Ronald Reagan. Expect this trend to continue if the war doesn’t improve by the fall.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.