We Surrender!

Democrats make pre-emptive strike on Iraq reports

By Brian Knowlton

Sunday, September 9, 2007

WASHINGTON: Leading Democrats on Sunday preemptively assailed the expected findings on Iraq due this week from the top U.S. general in Iraq as "dead, flat wrong" and said that President George W. Bush's calls for continued patience there would simply extend an "unconscionable" and "completely unacceptable" policy.

The pointed comments from the Democrats, including Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a presidential hopeful, and Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, seemed designed to undercut the impact of the much-awaited reports from General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad.

"This president has no plan how to win and/or how to leave," said Biden, before whose committee Petraeus and Crocker will testify on Tuesday. He said that Bush was putting American troops "into the middle of a civil war to maintain the status quo," adding, "that is unconscionable, and he's wrong."

Petraeus and Crocker will appear first on Monday before a joint House hearing. They plan a news conference on Wednesday. They are expected to describe uneven military progress and still-unsatisfactory political progress, and to ask for more time.

Petraeus is expected to recommend sending home one of 20 combat brigades in December and perhaps a few more by midsummer, but delaying further force re-evaluations until March.

Sometime before Saturday, Bush is to announce his conclusions about the success of the eight-month-old troop increase that now has more than 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq - and about how long they should stay, and in what capacity.

Democrats, in their television appearances Sunday, were already digging in their heels.

"This administration is playing for delay," Kennedy said on the CBS. He called that "completely unacceptable."

But Republicans laid down their own markers. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that the troop increase was "undeniably working" and that "the only way we're going to lose this war is to have politicians in Washington undercut the surge."

Rather than withdrawing, he said on Fox, "Now's the time to pour it on."

Coming even as the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is being marked, the new Iraq assessments are bound to dominate the news, perhaps explaining the rare forcefulness of the Democrats' criticisms.

They did not attack Petraeus personally - Biden said he respected the general but that his expected analysis was "dead, flat wrong" - but noted, as Kennedy said, that he would effectively be drawing up a report card on his own work.

They repeatedly criticized the statistics showing progress in Iraq and they insisted that success in Iraq depended on political reconciliation that had been promised but failed to materialize.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that while U.S. troops had scored successes in parts of Iraq, it was dangerous to think this could readily be replicated nationwide. "You can take a tactical success and misread it, as we did in Vietnam," he said on ABC.

Biden, too, made a Vietnam allusion, saying he believed "absolutely, positively, unequivocally," that absent a change of course, helicopters would be evacuating Americans from the Green Zone in Baghdad within two years.

The Democrats pointed to new polls showing that most Americans favor a timetable for troop withdrawal and want large numbers of troops withdrawn within a year, if not sooner.

But a New York Times poll has found a slight increase in the number of Americans - 35 percent, up from 29 percent in May - who say the troop buildup is improving the situation in Iraq.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican presidential hopeful, said he understood Americans' frustrations but that a premature withdrawal would have disastrous effects.

"Americans are sad, they're frustrated, they're angry and they want out," he said on ABC. "I want us out, too, but I want us out with honor."

Bush appears open to the recommendation of a small troop withdrawal. Military analysts say, in any case, that the strains on U.S. military manpower make a draw-down by next spring unavoidable.

The Democrats, whose repeated efforts to curtail the U.S. presence have fallen short, now say they are willing to accept a less rigid framework for withdrawal.

Biden acknowledged the political limits on his party, even with the congressional majority it has held since November.

"This is the president's war," he said on NBC. "Unless we get 67 votes to override his veto, there's nothing we can do to stop this war, but we must, we must, we must protect these troops." He was referring to the number of Senate votes required to overturn a presidential veto.

Bush has acknowledged that Iraq had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, though the administration is often assailed for suggesting otherwise. In any case, the war and the terror attacks will occupy some of the same ground this week, if only by dint of the calendar.

John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, suggested last week that the United States was less safe now than before the 2001 attacks, because the administration had allowed Iraq to distract it from the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

"Today, terrorism is worse in Iraq, and it's worse around the world," Edwards said in a speech at Pace University. "It means the results are in on George Bush's so-called global war on terror and it's not just a failure, it's a double-edged failure."

Frances Townsend, the White House Homeland Security adviser, bluntly rejected that notion and also seemed to belittle the bin Laden threat in a way the administration rarely has done.

She called Edwards's comments "irresponsible," "unwarranted" and "unsupported by the facts." She dismissed a videotape of bin Laden released Friday as "propaganda."