So much for consensus. Fissures in the Democratic Party over Iraq will be on display Wednesday when the Senate takes up two proposals to withdraw U.S. forces, touching off an election-year showdown between Republicans and Democrats.
“Setting a deadline to redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq is necessary for success in Iraq,” Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said in remarks planned for his introduction of a proposal that would require U.S. combat forces to begin leaving the war zone immediately and be out of Iraq completely by July 1, 2007.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and most of his rank-and-file colleagues don’t exactly agree.
They back a separate nonbinding resolution that would not set such a hard-and-fast deadline. It would simply call for _ not require _ the administration to begin a phased redeployment of U.S. forces this year.
“It’s not a cut-and-run strategy. It does not set a fixed timetable or an arbitrary deadline for the redeployment of our troops,” said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. To that end, Levin said, “We believe it represents where a majority of our caucus is.”
While neither Democratic proposal is expected to win enough votes to be attached as an amendment to an annual military measure pending in the Senate, both are drawing ridicule from Republicans.
They lumped Democrats into two groups _ what they called the “cut and run” crowd backing the Kerry position and the “cut and jog” folks supporting the other proposal.
Still, Kerry’s proposal, co-sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., has attracted at least six other Democratic backers, reflecting a growing sense among some senators that the administration must tell the increasingly frustrated public when the conflict will end.
“The Senate’s finally catching up,” said Feingold, who last summer was the first Democratic senator to call for a withdrawal timetable.
Despite the conflicting proposals, Senate Democrats downplayed differences over Iraq within their ranks.
“We all agree there should be a change in the course of the war. We all agree that there should be redeployment starting sooner rather than later,” said Reid, D-Nev.
As Democrats see it, the only issues they don’t agree on is exactly when to start withdrawing troops _ immediately or not _ and whether there should be a “date certain” when all troops must be out of Iraq.
Republicans relish the forthcoming debate on Iraq and are seeking political advantage as they try to hang onto control of the House and Senate in the November elections.
“Leaving Iraq to the terrorists is simply not an option. Surrendering is not a solution,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Tuesday. “We cannot retreat. We cannot surrender. We cannot go wobbly. The price is far too high.”
Countering, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., assailed the GOP’s support of Bush’s “stay the course” strategy amid soaring war costs and death tolls.
“I guess their position is we’re there forever,” Reed said.
Senate Democrats sought to write a “consensus” resolution that could get wide support among Democrats after Kerry and Feingold, potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidates, separately said they would introduce proposals for a quick withdrawal of troops. The hope was that Democrats could stand united on Iraq.
The Senate debate comes a week after the GOP-controlled Senate and House engineered back-to-back votes on Iraq that forced lawmakers in both parties to go on record on the war.
In the end, both chambers of Congress soundly rejected timetables for pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq _ foreshadowing the likely fate of the two Democratic proposals.
© 2006 The Associated Press
