NYT : A Firm Bush Tells Congress Not to Dictate War Policy

A Firm Bush Tells Congress Not to Dictate War Policy

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JEFF ZELENY | Published: July 13, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 12 — President Bush struck an aggressive new tone on Thursday in his clash with Congress over Iraq, telling lawmakers they had no business trying to manage the war, portraying the conflict as a showdown with Al Qaeda and warning that moving toward withdrawal now would risk “mass killings on a horrific scale.”

Hours later, the Democratic-controlled House responded by voting almost totally along party lines to require that the United States withdraw most combat troops from Iraq by April 1.

The 223-to-201 House vote, in which just four Republicans broke with their party, came as the White House continued its intense effort to stem a growing tide of Republican defections on the war. Officials from the White House — beginning with the president himself — have been reaching out to party members all week, trying to persuade them to wait until September to pass judgment on Mr. Bush’s current military strategy of sending more troops to quell the sectarian fighting and pursue insurgents.

The Senate has so far fallen well short of the 60 votes needed to approve a troop withdrawal, but more votes are expected there next week. And while Democrats have failed to win enough Republican votes to force a change in policy, Democratic leaders say they remain hopeful. Even some Republicans conceded Thursday that it could be difficult for Mr. Bush to hold the party together for much longer.

At a morning news conference where he released a mixed progress report on his troop buildup, Mr. Bush repeatedly invoked the threat of Al Qaeda as a reason to stick with his strategy, saying the group he referred to as Al Qaeda in Iraq “has sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden.”

The president acknowledged that public opinion might be against him — he said that “sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don’t enable you to be loved” — but suggested that Congress was overstepping its constitutional role by trying to force a change of policy on him.

“I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war,” Mr. Bush said. “I think they ought to be funding the troops.”

It is the first time since the Vietnam War that the legislative and executive branches have fought so bitterly over the president’s authority as commander in chief. Around the Capitol on Thursday morning, televisions were tuned into the White House news conference, as lawmakers and their aides passed around the White House’s status report on Iraq.

Lawmakers in both parties bristled at the president’s suggestion that Congress was overstepping its role in the war debate. Among them was Senator George V. Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio who has called for a change of direction in Iraq.

“We have a role to express our opinion in regards to the way he does anything,” Mr. Voinovich said in an interview. “He should welcome our point of view because it does reflect the point of view of the people who elected us to office.”

Mr. Bush wants Congress to wait until September, when the top military commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and the top civilian official, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, deliver a fuller assessment of progress of the troop buildup. But the president also said he was not “going to speculate on what my frame of mind will be,” at that time, and he would not say how he might react if the September report is as mixed as the one delivered Thursday.

The report assessed the Iraqi government’s progress in meeting 18 benchmarks set by Congress on military, economic and political matters. It found the Iraqis had made satisfactory progress in meeting eight benchmarks, including committing three brigades for operations in and around Baghdad, and spending nearly $7.3 billion in Iraqi money to train, equip and modernize its forces.

But the Iraqis made unsatisfactory progress in meeting another eight benchmarks, including passing an oil revenue-sharing law and preparing for local elections that could help reconcile the country’s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions. On two benchmarks, progress was too mixed to be characterized.

The report bluntly criticized the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, saying the government continued to permit political interference in some military decisions. Though the report claimed that Mr. Maliki was not involved, it singled out the Iraqi Office of the Commander in Chief, which reports directly to Mr. Maliki, saying there was evidence that the office formulated “target lists,” primarily of Sunnis.

And Mr. Bush himself offered only lukewarm support for Mr. Maliki at Thursday’s news conference, declining to echo the praise he put forth in Jordan last November, when he proclaimed Mr. Maliki “the right guy for Iraq.” Asked if he still felt that way, the president responded, “I believe that he understands that there needs to be serious reconciliation, and they need to get law passed.”

As Mr. Bush offered his interpretation of the report, administration officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, were working behind the scenes, offering to interpret the document for Republican senators. Among those called was Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, who is working with Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, to draft a proposal calling for a change in the military mission in Iraq.

Mr. Warner said the report was disappointing. “That government is simply not providing leadership worthy of the considerable sacrifice of our forces,” he said of the Iraqis, “and this has to change immediately.”

Despite such warnings, administration officials, who just two weeks ago feared Republican support for the troop buildup might collapse, say they think they will be able to hold the party together until September. One senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the feeling inside the White House was that while Americans want to get out of the war, they have enough doubts about withdrawing to give Mr. Bush leeway to pursue his strategy at least for another two months.

“There’s something in the American psyche that says this is important,” the official said, “and for all the criticism about how we got into it, we’d better be careful about where we go from here.”

Mr. Bush has been making the case, as he did again Thursday, that the troop buildup, which was completed only last month, cannot be fully evaluated until September. He said Congress itself had dictated that schedule in an emergency spending bill passed earlier this year, and he urged lawmakers to stick to it. Mr. Bush said the military gains cited in the report would ease the way for progress in creating a viable, effective Iraqi government.

But even among Republicans, patience is wearing thin, and the White House has not spelled out why it believes that Iraq will look substantially different in just eight weeks.

At the news conference, Mr. Bush was asked why — after failing to anticipate the sectarian divisions that would tear the country apart after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government — Americans should believe he has the vision for victory in Iraq. The president responded by appearing to lay blame for mistakes in the war directly on one of his military commanders at the beginning of the war, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who led the invasion more than four years ago.

“Those are all legitimate question that I’m sure historians will analyze,” he said, adding that he had asked at the outset of the war whether his military commanders needed more troops. “My primary question to General Franks was: ‘Do you have what it takes to succeed, and do you have what it takes to succeed after you succeed in removing Saddam Hussein?’ And his answer was, ‘Yeah.’ ”

Critics of Thursday’s White House report said it overstated the Iraqis’ progress. In sections of the report dealing with efforts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, for example, two different benchmarks were given satisfactory grades while offering little evidence that reconstruction was anywhere close to improving the delivery of electricity, water, sanitation or other services.

In 2006, for example, the Iraqi ministries were criticized for failing to spend all but a small fraction of the billions in oil revenues the Iraqi government had set aside for reconstruction. But American officials said in an interview on Thursday that spending had only modestly accelerated toward the end of 2006 and into early 2007, and that the Iraqi government had not provided precise figures for this year.

David S. Cloud contributed reporting from Washington, and James Glanz from New York.