Democrats Aim to Reframe Iraq Debate

By implication the bi=partisan approach will involve dropping any reference to specific withdrawal dates. The Democrats are just flailing around with no tough strategy at all, a complete cave-in. Why would anyone vote for them and think that they were getting a real alternative. One of these decades perhaps the US two party, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum system will break down. The strident partisan debate in the US always strikes me as surreal. It is as if there were a tremendously significant difference between the two parties instead of marginal differences. The differences are a form of "branding" but with essentially similar products that need to be distinguished to be marketed.

NY Times, September 5, 2007
Democrats Aim to Reframe Iraq Debate
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — As Congress reopened for business on Tuesday,
the
Democratic leadership promised to force a change in President Bush’s
war
strategy, and lawmakers maneuvered to frame the debate over Iraq ahead
of reports next week by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C.
Crocker.

“Many of my Republican friends have long held September as the month
for
the policy change in Iraq,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the
Democratic
majority leader, said in his opening speech on the Senate floor.
“It’s
September.”

“The calendar hasn’t changed,” he said. “It’s time to make a
decision.
We can’t continue the way we are.”

Mr. Reid’s speech, which included sharp criticism of President Bush,
reflected an aggressive effort by the Democrats to shape the discourse
over the war before General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker testify.

Aides said Senator Reid was trying to signal a new willingness to
compromise across party lines when he called on Republicans to join in
finding a way “to responsibly end this war.” Such a deal would
almost
certainly require Mr. Reid to drop his demand for a fixed deadline for
withdrawal, which brought the Senate to an impasse on the war in July.

In a hearing later in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, war
critics seized on a new report by the Government Accountability Office
showing virtually no political progress by the Iraqi government as the
latest evidence that the president’s military strategy was failing.

It is too soon to say how far either side in the deeply divided
Congress
is willing to bend, and the hearing before the Senate committee, which
is not as sharply partisan as the full Senate, offered few clues.

The report on Iraq that was presented there, while scarcely a glowing
assessment, was noticeably rosier than a draft version that began to
circulate last week, which found that Iraq had fallen short on 13 of
the
18 standards for progress, partly meeting two. The Pentagon disputed
that finding, saying it was too cut-and-dried a depiction of a fluid
and
complex situation.

The final version, released Tuesday, found that 3 of 18 benchmarks had
been met and 4 others had been partly met. It was written by David M.
Walker, comptroller general of the United States, who testified at the
hearing.

“It is hard to draw any assessment except that there is a failing
grade
for a policy that is still not working,” said Senator John Kerry,
Democrat of Massachusetts, who ran the hearing in the absence of the
committee chairman, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who is
running for president and will go to Iraq this week.

Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, suggested that the
report
did not include data from August and that more recent numbers presented

a more positive picture. “The data in August, I think, would be very
clear about the reduction in violence,” Mr. Coleman told Mr. Walker.

But some Republican committee members, including the ranking member,
Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, said they accepted the report as an
independent accounting of the Iraqi government’s performance to date.

And Mr. Lugar, one of the Senate’s top experts on foreign affairs,
raised some broad and probing questions about the overall prospects for

success in Iraq, including the possibility that Iraqis did not really
want a unified government.

“Do Iraqis want to be Iraqis?” Mr. Lugar asked. “Is there a sense
of
those 25 million people that they want to be one nation, as opposed to
some Iraqis wanting to dominate the whole lot?” He added, “If the
answer
to that question is that, fundamentally, Iraqis have not come to the
conclusion they want to be Iraqis, then we have an awesome problem.”

Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, there were growing signs — some subtle,
others shrill — that lawmakers were growing frustrated with
partisanship
and increasingly eager for a change of direction in Iraq that would
signal progress to American voters.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader,
who
urged in his opening speech on Tuesday that Congress wait for General
Petraeus and “listen to what he says without prejudice,” also
sounded a
note of bipartisanship. At a separate news conference he said that he
envisioned a long-term American military presence in the Middle East
but
perhaps not in Iraq.

“I would like to see us with at least some level of bipartisan
agreement
that we need a long-term deployment somewhere in the Middle East in the

future for two reasons: Al Qaeda and Iran,” he said.

And in a letter to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the minority
leader, John A. Boehner, 11 lawmakers — six Republicans and five
Democrats — urged cooperation in developing a new war strategy.

“We ask that you, our leaders, work together to put an end to the
political infighting over the war in Iraq, and allow the House to unite

behind a bipartisan strategy to stabilize the country and bring our
troops home,” the members wrote.

The letter was publicized after Representative Boehner, Republican of
Ohio, issued a strongly worded statement criticizing the G.A.O. report.

He called it “an unfair way to judge our troops’ progress,”
adding, “The
report was designed to guarantee an unsatisfactory result.”

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat and the House
majority leader, issued an equally biting statement, saying the report
“confirms what the large majority of Americans already know: the
president’s stay-the-course policy in Iraq is not working.”

The renewed push-and-pull over Iraq occurred as Congress returned from
a
four-week recess that was in many ways more tumultuous than relaxing.

At his news conference, Mr. McConnell spent much of the time taking
questions about Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho, who announced his
resignation after the disclosure that he pleaded guilty to a disorderly

conduct charge after being arrested by a police officer cracking down
on
sexual activity in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.

The absence of Mr. Craig, who did not return to Washington even though
his resignation is not effective until Sept. 30, and the expected
return
Wednesday of Senator Tim Johnson, Democrat of South Dakota, who had
been
recovering from a brain hemorrhage that he suffered last December,
effectively widened the Democrats’ slim majority, though they are
still
well shy of the 60 votes needed in the Senate for most bills to move
forward.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting