The Democratic-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee dismissed President Bush’s plans to increase troops strength in Iraq on Wednesday as “not in the national interest,” an unusual wartime repudiation of the commander in chief.
The vote on the nonbinding measure was 12-9 and largely along party lines.
you don’t say?
“We better be damn sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel
Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), D-Del., the panel’s chairman, said the legislation is “not an attempt to embarrass the president. … It’s an attempt to save the president from making a significant mistake with regard to our policy in Iraq.”
Hagel’s remarks were among the most impassioned of the day, and he was unstinting in his criticism of the White House. “There is no strategy,” he said of the Bush administration’s war management. “This is a pingpong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans; they’re real lives.”
Bush did get a word of support from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, one of the 2008 Republican presidential hopefuls.
But Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record), D-Ill., … said, “I think all of us are talking about a phased redeployment which would leave American troops in the region to send a strong message, not only to the Iraqi government that we want to help them, but also to neighbors, like Iran, that we’re not abandoning the field.”