WASHINGTON, 24 April 2007 — Defying a fresh veto threat, the Democratic-controlled Congress will pass legislation within days requiring the start of a troop withdrawal from Iraq by Oct. 1, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday.
The legislation also sets a goal of a complete pullout by April 1, 2008, he said.
In remarks prepared for delivery, Reid said that under the legislation the troops that remain after next April 1 could only train Iraqi security units, protect US forces and conduct “targeted counter-terror operations.”
Reid spoke a few hours after Bush said he will reject any legislation along the lines of what Democrats will pass. “I will strongly reject an artificial timetable (for) withdrawal and/or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job,” the president said.
Bush made his comments to reporters in the Oval Office as he met with senior military leaders, including his top general in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.
Taken together, Reid’s speech and Bush’s comments inaugurated a week of extraordinary confrontation between the president and the new Democratic-controlled Congress over a war that has taken the lives of more than 3,200 US troops.
Reid drew criticism from Bush and others last week when he said the war in Iraq had been lost.
The Nevada Democrat did not repeat the assertion in his prepared speech, saying that “The military mission has long since been accomplished. The failure has been political. It has been policy. It has been presidential.”
Reid said that in addition to the timetable, the legislation will establish standards for the Iraqi government to meet in terms of “making progress on security, political reconciliation and improving the lives of ordinary Iraqis who have suffered so much.”
The measure also would launch diplomatic, economic and political policy changes, Reid said.
Negotiators for the House and Senate arranged a late-afternoon meeting to ratify the timetable that Reid laid out. The demand for a change in course will be attached to a funding bill that is needed to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Reid said Bush was in “a state of denial” over the war, and likened him to another commander in chief four decades ago. “I remember when President Johnson, trying to save his political legacy, initiated the first of many surges into Vietnam in 1965,” he said.
Reid said thousands more US troops died in Vietnam as a result. Now, he said, Bush “is the only person who fails to face this war’s reality — and that failure is devastating not just for Iraq’s future, but for ours.”
Reid also challenged Bush to present an alternative if, as expected, he vetoes the Democratic legislation.
