posted November 17, 2005 10:16 PM            

No matter how the White House chooses to spin it, the United States Senate cast a vote of no confidence this week on the war in Iraq. And about time.

The actual content of the resolution, passed on a vote of 79 to 19, was meaningless. The Senate asked the administration to provide regular reports on progress in Iraq, and took the position that next year should be "a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty." It was a desperate - but toothless - cry of election-bound lawmakers to be let off the hook for a disastrous military quagmire.

Republican leaders, who supported the proposal, argued that the vote was a repudiation of a Democratic motion to set possible withdrawal deadlines for American troops. But the proposal would never have gone to the floor if members of President Bush's party had not felt the need to go on the record, somehow, as expressing their own impatience with the situation.

The ultimate Iraqi nightmare, which continually seems to be drawing closer, is a violent fracturing of the country in which the Kurdish north and Arab Shiite southeast break away, leaving the west, dominated by Arab Sunnis, an impoverished no man's land and a breeding ground for international terrorism. While this page was completely wrong in our presumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, we - and virtually everyone outside the Bush administration - warned about this danger from the beginning. Only loyalists who had bought the fantasy about dancing Iraqis throwing flowers before American tanks dismissed it as unlikely.

The consequences of such a breakup would be endless and awful: civil war, the persecution of minority populations in the new states, an alliance between the Shiites and Iran, and a complete breakdown of American moral and military influence in the Middle East.

No one wants that to happen, but Americans must ask themselves every day whether the troops who are risking their lives in Iraq are doing anything more than postponing the inevitable.

The one frail hope for a better outcome lies with the ongoing struggle to create a democratic central government in Iraq. We are encouraged by the high participation in elections, including the enormous increase in the number of Sunni voters in the last balloting, and by the declared willingness of leading Iraqi officials and sectional politicians to make political concessions to keep the country patched together. It is very possible that most of the voters are simply casting ballots on behalf of supremacy for their own religious or ethnic factions, and that the officials are only going through the motions, hoping to keep the United States minimally satisfied while they move toward their own self-serving goals. But at this moment, both the people and their leaders are clearing at least the lowest possible bar for measuring their progress.

A precipitous withdrawal at this point would be counterproductive. And while a timetable is certainly an option, the people who need deadlines are the Iraqis. Their government must be put on notice that the United States expects Iraq to show speedy, measurable progress in taking control of its own security, and that it must demonstrate that it is not just stalling for time when it comes to guaranteeing democracy and human rights.

The current constitution is unsatisfactory. It shortchanges the Sunni minority and fails to provide Iraqi women the guarantee that they will not wind up worse off under the new government than they were under Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leaders have promised to change it after next month's elections. Washington needs to carefully scrutinize how quickly and how fully they honor that promise.

The Shiite-dominated government will be getting an early test of its commitment to building a just and inclusive society in how it responds to this week's horrifying allegations that policemen who are members of a powerful Shiite militia have been abducting Sunni Arab men and torturing them in a secret prison in the heart of Baghdad.

President Bush has lost the confidence of the American people, and his own party, when it comes to handling Iraq. If he wants to win it back, he must come up with a very clear road map for what he expects, both politically and militarily, from the Iraqi government. If the Iraqis fail to meet those goals, he must demonstrate that the price of equivocation is American withdrawal.

posted November 17, 2005 10:22 PM            

November 18, 2005 - 10:19AM

Nearly three years after most Americans backed President George W Bush's decision to invade Iraq, a divided nation is increasingly demanding a clearer strategy for reducing the US role and bringing the troops home.

A US Senate challenge on Bush's Iraq policy this week was only one largely symbolic step in a complicated, politically charged process and there is little expectation that it presages a quick withdrawal of all 153,000 American troops.

But the Senate resolution sent a message that Iraqis must assume more responsibility for securing their fractured country by the end of 2006 and that Bush's administration must be clearer in its goals and the means to achieve them.

The call from the Republican controlled Senate came amid an aggressive White House counter-offensive against critics of the administration's use of pre-war intelligence, now discredited, which alleged Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

A leading hawkish Democrat in the House of Representatives, John Murtha, a former war supporter, stoked the debate further when he called for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Americans for a long time were reluctant to challenge Bush's handling of Iraq, accepting his argument that the war was a central component of the US war on terrorism declared after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

But with public support for the president plummeting and US troop casualties mounting, lawmakers facing voters in mid-term elections next year have felt freer to speak out.

A Gallup poll this week showed 63 per cent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling of Iraq policy.

A Gallup poll in March 2003 showed 66 per cent would approve going to war to enforce Bush's demands of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

But, the former CIA analyst told Reuters: "We're not going to just close up everything and leave Iraq. The politicians who say bring the troops home understand that's unrealistic."

Significantly, members of Bush's own Republican Party, not just opposition Democrats, have joined in calling the president to account.

"No matter how the White House chooses to spin it, the United States Senate cast a vote of no confidence this week on the war in Iraq. And about time," the New York Times said in an editorial.

Voting 79 to 19, the Senate resolved that 2006 "should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, with Iraqi security forces taking the lead for the security of a free and sovereign Iraq, thereby creating the conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq".

The resolution, whose purpose was "to clarify and recommend changes" in US policy in Iraq, required progress reports to Congress on the situation there every 90 days.

A Democratic demand for an actual plan for troop withdrawal was rejected. Opponents argued this would embolden the Sunni insurgency in Iraq and had echoes of America's hasty exit from Vietnam in 1975.

Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, has warned against a full-scale US retreat from Iraq, saying that would provoke civil war.

But he has urged a shift in the US approach from killing and capturing insurgents in Iraq to protecting the besieged local population and creating secure areas where insurgents find it difficult to operate.

Just how the US debate may play inside Iraq is unclear.

The country is due to elect a new government on December 15.

posted November 17, 2005 10:26 PM            

Thursday, November 17, 2005

REPUBLICANS as well as Democrats on Capitol Hill are now registering unhappiness with the seemingly endless conflict in Iraq, along with majorities of Americans generally who tell pollsters they disapprove of President Bush's war policies.

So the president's re-invigorated targeting of Democrats in recent days for criticizing his war-making rationale does not address the totality of his credibility problem. It is increasingly becoming a bipartisan concern.

This was dramatized Tuesday in the 79-to-19 Senate vote for an amendment by Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., demanding regular White House updates on developments in Iraq, particularly the progress of Iraqi government forces toward taking responsibility for their country's security.

That bipartisan action followed an unsuccessful Democratic bid (introduced by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and rejected 58 to 40) for the Senate to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Warner criticized that as a "cut-and-run" proposal.

But the newfound willingness of Republicans in Congress to join Democrats in seeking a White House plan for completing the costly Iraqi intervention and extricating our overtaxed military forces is a significant development, reflecting Bush's overall loss of popularity and public confidence.

It shows that his new politically directed counterattack, portraying war critics as Democratic hacks who send "mixed signals to our troops and the enemy," falls far short of covering the breadth of national disillusionment with the truth of his Iraq claims.

The White House has been trying to peddle a set of "talking points" using statements from the late 1990s by President Bill Clinton and his top security aides about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. The Bush team also has been trying to suggest that the many Democrats who voted to authorize the war based their decision on "the same intelligence" that was available to the White House. Those talking points won't wash.