Friday, March 23, 2007
By Nancy Pelosi
Contact: Brendan Daly/Nadeam Elshami, 202-226-7616
Washington, D.C. - Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke on the House Floor today about the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act, which passed by a vote of 218 to 212. Below are her remarks as prepared:
"Mr. Speaker, today is an historic day. The new Congress will vote to end the war in Iraq.
"Any discussion of the war in Iraq must begin with a tribute to our troops. This day, and every day, we thank our troops for their courage, their patriotism, and the sacrifices they are willing to make. For four years, under the most dangerous and demanding conditions imaginable, they have done everything asked of them.
"As Members of Congress, our first responsibility is set forth in the Preamble of the Constitution -- to provide for the common defense.
"As our leading national security experts, Chairmen Skelton, Murtha, and Obey understand that first responsibility, and are deeply concerned about the effect of the war in Iraq on our national security, especially our troop readiness.
"As I have said from the beginning, the war in Iraq is a grotesque mistake.
"As the Iraq Study Group said in December, the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.
"After four years of war, Iraq is in chaos, and the government is not being held accountable.
"The Administration is sending troops into battle that are not mission ready.
"And when they come home, they are not being honored as the heroes they are. The revelations of appalling conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital and VA facilities across the nation remind us once again that our troops have been sent into war with no plan to care for them when they come home.
"Our commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, recently said: 'There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq.' Yet the President's response to escalating levels of violence is to deploy more troops -- a strategy that has been tried without success on three previous occasions.
"In the short time since the escalation began, disturbing facts have come to light, among them.
"The admission by General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he is "not comfortable" with the readiness of Army units in the United States.
"The declaration, whereby the Department of Defense has finally admitted that 'elements of a civil war do exist in Iraq.' In fact, it is even worse than that.
"The conclusion by the special inspector general that the failure of the reconstruction effort in Iraq was caused by a lack of planning, coordination and oversight.
"We must respond to those and other facts about the Iraq War.
"The bill we debate today, the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health and Iraq Accountability Act, does that by providing for our veterans, protecting our troops, rebuilding our military, holding the Iraqi government accountable, and bringing our troops home.
"Rather than sending more troops into the chaos that is the Iraq civil war, we must be focused on bringing the war to an end. We can do that today by passing this bill that transforms the performance benchmarks that have already endorsed by President Bush and Iraqi leaders into requirements.
"That will enable the primary mission of our troops to shift from combat to training. When those benchmarks are met, or when it becomes clear after a reasonable amount of time that they cannot be met, the bill requires that our troops leave Iraq on a schedule that our former colleague, Lee Hamilton, the co-chair of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group calls 'responsible, not precipitate.'
"Benchmarks without deadlines are just words, and, after four years of this war, words are not enough.
"As Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in endorsing this bill, 'It is clear that a different approach is needed if the Iraqis are to be encouraged to make the political accommodations necessary to promote stability and national reconciliation.'
"This bill also calls upon the Department of Defense to adhere to its own readiness standards. Those standards are intended to ensure that before our troops are sent into harm's way, they have the equipment and training they need to enable them to perform their missions successfully.
"The war in Iraq has produced a national security crisis, with military readiness at its lowest level since the Vietnam War. By addressing that crisis, the bill supports the troops and protects the American people.
"The American people have lost faith in the President's conduct of this war.
"Today, the Congress has an historic opportunity: to vote to end the war in Iraq.
"Each Member of the House will make a choice - the world is watching for our decision. Will we renew the President's blank check for an open-ended commitment to a war without end, or take a giant step to end the war and responsibly redeploy our troops out of Iraq?
"The American people see the reality of this war. The President does not. The American people want a New Direction in Iraq. Today the Congress will provide it.
"I urge my colleagues to join me in bringing this war to an end by supporting the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act."
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Sunday, March 25, 2007
War at home for hearts and minds
Conflict in iraq: Battle over spending bill just one of many looming for Pelosi, Bush
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Behind their high-stakes showdown over the direction of the Iraq war, President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have their eyes on the long war -- to win American public opinion.
The Texas Republican and the San Francisco Democrat know the confrontation over whether to tie spending for the war to a timetable for troop withdrawals is just one of many political fights that lie ahead. Both know Congress probably will give Bush the money he needs to keep the war going at least through the end of the year.
For the president, the struggle is to maintain control over the conduct of the war until the end of his term in January 2009. For Pelosi, the aim is to force Bush to capitulate and end the war -- the message she believes voters gave in November when they put Democrats in control of Congress and helped make her speaker.
Democrats believe they took the first significant step in that direction Friday when they narrowly passed a $124 billion bill that provides money for the war through Sept. 30, but sets a timetable that would bring American combat troops home by September 2008.
"The greatest form of naivete in Washington is excessive cynicism," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., after Friday's vote. Frank, a liberal strongly opposed to the war, said he could not have predicted even six weeks ago that a showdown over war spending would be the Democrats' strategy. Its success in the House, he said, is because public opinion has continued to move against the president.
"This is the first real war-powers act that the Congress, either house, has ever passed," Frank said. "This is the first time a house of Congress has said, 'OK, we're going to stand up and assert our constitutional authority to help determine policy.' That hasn't happened before, and we did it.
"Now let's see what happens. And the answer is it depends. For people who despair of democracy, this should be a good thing, because public opinion is driving this."
Pelosi's narrow margin of victory, 218-212 for the war spending bill packed with extra funds for everyone from brain-injured Iraq veterans to Monterey spinach growers, means she is not even close to securing the two-thirds majority she would need to override Bush's promised veto.
And that assumes the bill gets that far. First, the Senate has to vote. There, Democrats control a bare 51-49 majority and are short one member -- Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota -- who is recovering from brain surgery.
The Senate failed less than two weeks ago to get even majority support for a softer resolution that called for -- though did not require, as the House did -- troop withdrawal next year. The Senate this week will debate its war spending bill that contains modified language.
Senate Republicans promise to fight, and even anti-war moderates among them are loath to set a withdrawal deadline. As a result, Democrats are likely to come considerably short of the 60 votes they will need to pass the bill, much less the two-thirds to override a veto.
"This is an incremental strategy" by Democrats, said Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Boston University. "I think they just want to put the Republicans on record saying no to the deadlines. They want to force -- if they could -- the president to veto it. That's a long way off."
The larger aim, he said, is to keep the heat on Bush and the Republican lawmakers whose support he needs.
"It's death by 1,000 cuts to the Iraq war," Zelizer said. "Democrats don't have enough votes just to end the war on the spot, so they continue to chip away, either through deadlines or through threats, and this is the most powerful achievement they have so far."
Frank conceded that Bush will eventually get the war money.
"I certainly will not vote for it without (restrictions) and the great majority of Democrats wouldn't," Frank said. "On other hand, you can't have a total stalemate, so my guess is in the end the money will come from a coalition of Republicans and some Democrats who feel they can't just say no."
Rep. Mike Pence, a conservative Indiana Republican, concurred. "I have every confidence that Congress will pass a clean, bipartisan bill funding the war in Iraq," Pence said.
"The game here is to try to break party discipline in the GOP," Zelizer said. "Every time Pelosi appears a bit stronger and can deliver more Democratic votes, the hope is to convince some of those moderate Republicans to come along."
With money for another year and Republicans backing him, Bush appears likely to prevail for now. But he has taken a high-risk gamble. Ever since he announced Jan. 10 that he would send more troops to Baghdad and ignore the political escape hatch offered by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, the president has made clear his strategy is direct confrontation.
The administration has worked strenuously to shore up its political support. The White House dismissed as toothless the nonbinding resolutions criticizing the troop increase, but battled to hold Republican ranks against them. The administration has issued repeated, strident veto threats on the war spending measures, even knowing they are unlikely to pass the Senate. On the eve of the House vote, Defense Secretary Robert Gates pressured Congress by warning that the Pentagon needs the war money by April 15, or dire consequences might follow.
The White House is also counting on military and political progress in Iraq. Bush on Friday cited "some signs of progress," insisting that it is Congress' duty not to undermine those gains.
"These Democrats believe that the longer they can delay funding for our troops, the more likely they are to force me to accept restrictions on our commanders, an artificial timetable for withdrawal and their pet spending projects," Bush said. "This is not going to happen."
Bush and the Republicans who support him are relying on Congress' unwillingness to cut off money for troops in combat. Many politicians on both sides of the aisle firmly believe voters will punish any member who does so. Republicans are counting on a voter backlash against "handcuffing" military commanders.
That's why Rep. John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee who helped devise many of the restrictions on troop deployments in the House bill, emphasized that it would provide more equipment and other support for the troops.
Republicans know the public wants the troops to come home. But they also believe Americans are unwilling to accept a military failure. "How many of you have ever asked any of your constituents, 'Do you want to lose in Iraq?' " Rep. Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican who spent nearly seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, asked his colleagues.
Both sides read the polls. One from Newsweek on March 17 represents the clear trend: 64 percent disapprove of Bush's Iraq strategy; 61 percent believe the United States is losing on the ground in Iraq; 64 percent oppose the troop increase; and 59 percent favor congressional legislation to withdraw the troops next year.
Barring a stunning political turnaround in Iraq in the next few months, such numbers make it unlikely that public opinion will reverse by fall on news of progress in civil reconstruction.
"As 2008 keeps getting closer and closer, Republicans are going to continue to get more nervous -- both those running for the White House and for re-election," Zelizer said. "That's as much a deadline as a withdrawal deadline."
To a degree that politicians are unaccustomed, votes on the Iraq war matter, Frank said. "What's Norm Coleman doing, what's Gordon Smith doing, what's Suzy Collins doing?" he asked, naming a few of the 21 Republican senators running for re-election next year.
Polls will tell if voters want to punish Democrats or Republicans for their votes, Frank said. "That's called democracy. Fear of losing elections is a very valid thing."
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Peter S. Lopez ~aka Peta
Peter S. Lopez ~aka Peta
Email= sacranative@yahoo.com
Don't pick lemons.
See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos.
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