Book Details U.S. Pressure On Allies Before War

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A01

UNITED NATIONS -- In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.

The rough-and-tumble diplomatic strategy has generated lasting "bitterness" and "deep mistrust" in Washington's relations with allies in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, wrote Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's ambassador to the United Nations, in his book "A Solitary War: A Diplomat's Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons," set for publication next month.

"In the aftermath of the invasion, allies loyal to the United States were rejected, mocked and even punished" for their refusal to back a U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein's government, Muñoz wrote.

But the tough talk dissipated as the war effort worsened and President Bush came to reach out to many of the same allies that he had spurned. Muñoz's account suggests the U.S. strategy backfired in Latin America, damaging the administration's standing in a region that has long been dubious of U.S. military intervention.

Muñoz details key roles by Chile and Mexico, the Security Council's two Latin members at the time, in the run-up to the war. Then-U.N. ambassadors Juan Gabriel Valdés of Chile and Adolfo Aguilar Zínser of Mexico helped thwart U.S. and British efforts to rally support among the council's six undecided members for a resolution authorizing the U.S.-led invasion.

The book portrays Bush personally prodding the leaders of those six governments -- Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico and Pakistan -- to support the war resolution, a strategy aimed at demonstrating broad support for U.S. military plans, despite the looming French threat to veto the resolution.

In the weeks preceding the war, Bush made several appeals to Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and Mexican President Vicente Fox to rein in their diplomats and support U.S. war aims. "We have problems with your ambassador at the U.N.," Bush told Fox at a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Los Cabos, Mexico, in late 2002.

"It's time to bring up the vote, Ricardo. We've had this debate too long," Bush told the Chilean president on March 11, 2003.

"Bush had referred to Lagos by his first name, but as the conversation drew to a close and Lagos refused to support the resolution as it stood, Bush shifted to a cool and aloof 'Mr. President,' " Muñoz wrote. "Next Monday, time is up," Bush told Lagos.

Senior U.S. diplomats sought to thwart a last-minute attempt by Chile to broker a compromise that would delay military action for weeks, providing Iraq with a final shot at demonstrating that it had fully complied with its disarmament requirements.

On March 14, 2003, less than one week before the eventual invasion, Chile hosted a meeting of diplomats from the six undecided governments to discuss its proposal. But U.S. ambassador John D. Negroponte and then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell moved quickly to quash the initiative, warning their governments that the effort was viewed as "an unfriendly act" designed to isolate the United States. The diplomats received calls from their governments ordering them to "leave the meeting immediately," Muñoz writes.

Aguilar-Zínser, who died in 2005, was finally forced out of the Mexican government after publicly accusing the United States of treating Mexico like its "back yard" during the war negotiations. Valdés was transferred to Argentina, where he served as Chile's top envoy, and Muñoz, a Chilean minister and onetime classmate of Condoleezza Rice at the University of Denver, was sent to the United Nations in June 2003 to patch up relations with the United States.

In the days after the invasion, the National Security Council's top Latin American expert, John Maistos, invited Muñoz to the White House to convey the message to Lagos, that his country's position at the United Nations had jeopardized prospects for the speedy Senate ratification of a free-trade pact. "Chile has lost some influence," he said. "President Bush is truly disappointed with Lagos, but he is furious with Fox. With Mexico, the president feels betrayed; with Chile, frustrated and let down."

Muñoz said subsequent ties remained tense at the United Nations, where the United States sought support for resolutions authorizing the occupation of Iraq. He said that small countries met privately in a secure room at the German mission that was impervious to eavesdropping. "It reminded me of a submarine or a giant safe," Muñoz said in an interview.

The United States, he added, expressed "its displeasure" to the German government every time they held a meeting in the secure room. "They couldn't listen to what was going on."

Muñoz said that threats of reprisals were short-lived as Washington quickly found itself reaching out to Chile, Mexico and other countries to support Iraq's messy postwar rehabilitation. It also sought support from Chile on issues such as peacekeeping in Haiti and support for U.S. efforts to drive Syria out of Lebanon. The U.S.-Chilean free trade agreement, while delayed, was finally signed by then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick in June 2003.

Muñoz said that Rice, as secretary of state, called him to ask for help on a U.N. resolution that would press for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. The United States had secured eight of the nine votes required for adoption of a resolution in the Security Council. Muñoz had received instructions to abstain. "I talked to [Lagos], and he listened to my argument, and we gave them the ninth vote," he said.

Senate panel critiques prewar claims by White House

'Nobody is going to be happy' with the long-delayed report's mixed verdict on whether the Bush administration misused intelligence to argue for war with Iraq, an official says.
By Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

10:59 PM PDT, March 9, 2008

WASHINGTON — After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a detailed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.

The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.

But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.

The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence assessments in circulation at the time.

Because of the nuanced nature of the conclusions, one congressional official familiar with the document said: "The left is not going to be happy. The right is not going to be happy. Nobody is going to be happy."

The report helps culminate a series of investigations that the committee has carried out in connection with the war in Iraq. The "statements report" was stalled repeatedly, in part because of the complexity of the task but also because of partisan disagreements among senators.

The findings are likely to be a source of political discomfort for the White House by reviving the controversy over the Bush administration's case for war. That issue has largely faded from view on Capitol Hill at a time when the White House is sparring with Congress over other intelligence-related issues: CIA interrogation tactics and the scope of the government's wiretapping authority.

The report could also become political fodder for the presidential race, which has focused on the differing positions of the remaining candidates on the decision to invade Iraq.

Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee had initially pushed for the report to focus not only on the prewar claims of the Bush administration but also on statements made by members of Congress, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who is vying for her party's presidential nomination.

"The statements report is clearly the most political of all the reports the committee has done," said a senior committee aide. "It's inherently problematic to try to climb inside the heads [of policymakers] and know what they knew at the time."

Officials said the report is divided into categories that focus on prewar claims about Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, as well as its supposed ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Each section includes a catalog of as many as 20 prewar claims, as well as a summary conclusion on whether the assertions were generally warranted.

"The whole purpose of this exercise is to answer questions about whether the administration was honest in its use of intelligence when it made the case for war," said a senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In many cases, statements that were later proven wrong -- such as President Bush's assertion in September 2002 that Iraq "possesses biological and chemical weapons" -- were largely in line with U.S. intelligence assessments at the time.

Prewar assertions about Iraq's nuclear program were more problematic because they were supported by some intelligence assessments but not others.

"They were substantiated," a congressional official said, "but didn't convey the disagreements within the intelligence community."

In August 2002, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that "Saddam [Hussein] has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." But by that time, the State Department's intelligence bureau was challenging the assumption that Iraq's nuclear program had been reactivated.

White House suggestions that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda were at odds with intelligence assessments that voiced skepticism about such a relationship.

The report marks the culmination of a multipart investigation that the committee launched in February 2004. The only remaining task is an investigation into the activities of a Pentagon office led by Douglas J. Feith, then undersecretary of Defense for policy and one of the architects of the Iraq war.

Congressional officials said the panel is nearing completion of a report on that subject that will focus largely on a secret post-Sept. 11 meeting between two Defense Department officials who worked for Feith and an Iranian exile, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who had been a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and was regarded by the CIA as unreliable.

The report focusing on the Bush administration's prewar statements is set to be delivered to members of the committee this week, officials said. But it could be weeks away from public release because members may push for changes, and much of the material cited in the report has yet to be approved for declassification by U.S. intelligence officials.

Dissatisfied with the scope of the report, Republicans on the panel are expected to attach a section outlining their objections and calling attention to prewar claims by prominent Democrats, including Clinton.

In an October 2002 speech on the Senate floor, Clinton said that if left unchecked, Hussein "will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."

greg.miller@latimes.com

Venezuela sends troops to Colombia border

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

BOGOTÁ: Hundreds of Venezuelan troops moved toward the border with Colombia on Tuesday, where trade was slowing amid heightening tension after Colombia's cross-border strike on a rebel base in Ecuador.

The Organization of American States scheduled an emergency afternoon meeting in Washington to try to calm one of the region's worst political showdowns in years, between Colombia and Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, and his allies.

Colombian and Ecuadorean officials, meanwhile, traded accusations in the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

The escalation of tensions was set off over the weekend when Colombia troops crossed the border with Ecuador and killed Raúl Reyes, a top commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, whose rebels had set up a camp there.

Chávez, who sympathizes with the leftist rebels, condemned the killing and angrily ordered about 9,000 soldiers - 10 battalions - to Venezuela's border with Colombia. He warned President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia that any strike on Venezuelan soil could provoke a South American war.

Colombia's defense minister said Monday that he would not be provoked into mobilizing troops in response.

President George W. Bush said the United States would stand by Colombia and criticized Venezuela's government for making "provocative maneuvers." Colombia has received about $5 billion in U.S. aid to fight drugs and leftist rebels since 2000.

Alberto Muller Rojas, a retired Venezuelan general and former top Chávez aide, said the troops were being sent to the border region as "a preventative measure."

Soldiers boarded buses and trucks at the Paramaracay base in central Venezuela on Tuesday morning, and battalions also were moving out from the northern state of Lara, its pro-Chávez governor, Luis Reyes, said.

The Venezuelan military has been tight-lipped about troop movements. Venezuela's armed forces include about 100,000 troops, Muller Rojas said. Colombia's U.S.-equipped and trained military has more than twice as many.

Uribe said his government would ask the International Criminal Court to try Chávez, alleging that he had financed "genocide" committed by the FARC. Uribe alleged that a laptop computer the Colombians said belonged to Raúl Reyes contained a reference to a $300 million Venezuelan payment.

The biggest losers from the killing of Reyes appeared to be the hostages that the FARC rebels have held for years, pending a swap with rebel prisoners.

Ecuador and France said they had been communicating with Reyes, trying to secure a hostage release, when Colombia's air force crossed the border to bomb his jungle camp. Along with Reyes, 20 other rebels were killed.

"I'm sorry to tell you that the conversations were pretty advanced to free 12 hostages," Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, said in a nationally televised address. "All of this was frustrated by the war-mongering, authoritarian hands" of the Colombian government.

A French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Pascale Andréani, confirmed that France had been in contact with Reyes and that "the Colombians were aware of it."

Colombia said documents in Reyes's laptop indicate that Correa's internal security minister met recently with a FARC envoy to discuss deepening relations with Ecuador and even replacing military officers who might oppose that.

Publicly, there had been no indication of even preliminary progress in securing the release of any of the 40 hostages the FARC wants to swap for hundreds of jailed guerrillas. Those hostages include three U.S. military contractors and a former Colombian presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, who also has French nationality and who has become a cause célèbre in Europe.

The raid Saturday followed last week's release by the FARC of four hostages to Venezuela's justice minister, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín. The minister said the raid proved the "intent of the fascist Colombian government is to hamper the handover of hostages, because that is the path of peace."

Another victim of the crisis may be border trade, valued at $5 billion a year, most of it Colombian exports sorely needed by Venezuelans who are already suffering milk and meat shortages. Ecuador also depends on about $1.8 billion in trade with Colombia.

Venezuela said it would stop new exports and imports. At one closed border crossing, in Paraguachon, Venezuela, the authorities stopped trucks lined up Tuesday morning. But traffic was flowing normally at another crossing, in El Amparo, where a handful of Venezuelan troops stood watch as usual, the customs office was open, and traffic passed freely.

Two Winnable Wars

By Anthony H. Cordesman
Sunday, February 24, 2008; B07

No one can return from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, as I recently did, without believing that these are wars that can still be won. They are also clearly wars that can still be lost, but visits to the battlefield show that these conflicts are very different from the wars being described in American political campaigns and most of the debates outside the United States.

These conflicts involve far more than combat between the United States and its allies against insurgent movements such as al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban. Meaningful victory can come only if tactical military victories end in ideological and political victories and in successful governance and development. Dollars are as important as bullets, and so are political accommodation, effective government services and clear demonstrations that there is a future that does not need to be built on Islamist extremism.

The military situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are very different. The United States and its allies are winning virtually every tactical clash in both countries. In Iraq, however, al-Qaeda is clearly losing in every province. It is being reduced to a losing struggle for control of Nineveh and Mosul. There is a very real prospect of coalition forces bringing a reasonable degree of security if decisions such as Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's announcement Friday to extend his militia's cease-fire six months continue over a period of years.

Military victory is far more marginal in Afghanistan. NATO and international troops can still win tactically, but the Taliban is sharply expanding its support areas as well as its political and economic influence and control in Afghanistan. It has scored major gains in Pakistan, which is clearly the more important prize for al-Qaeda and has more Pashtuns than Afghanistan. U.S. commanders privately warn that victory cannot be attained without more troops, without all members of NATO and the International Security Assistance Force fully committing their troops to combat, and without a much stronger and consistent effort by the Pakistani army in both the federally administered tribal areas in western Pakistan and the Baluchi area in the south.

What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war. Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020.

If the next president, Congress and the American people cannot face this reality, we will lose. Years of false promises about the speed with which we can create effective army, police and criminal justice capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot disguise the fact that mature, effective local forces and structures will not be available until 2012 and probably well beyond. This does not mean that U.S. and allied force levels cannot be cut over time, but a serious military and advisory presence will probably be needed for at least that long, and rushed reductions in forces or providing inadequate forces will lead to a collapse at the military level.

The most serious problems, however, are governance and development. Both countries face critical internal divisions and levels of poverty and unemployment that will require patience. These troubles can be worked out, but only over a period of years. Both central governments are corrupt and ineffective, and they cannot bring development and services without years of additional aid at far higher levels than the Bush administration now budgets. Blaming weak governments or trying to rush them into effective action by threatening to leave will undercut them long before they are strong enough to act.

Any American political leader who cannot face these realities, now or in the future, will ensure defeat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Any Congress that insists on instant victory or success will do the same. We either need long-term commitments, effective long-term resources and strategic patience -- or we do not need enemies. We will defeat ourselves.

The writer holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He recently returned from the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This War Is Not Like the Others — or Is It?

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

AS the nations of Europe leapt to arms in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson’s mind turned to President James Madison and the war with England in 1812.

“Madison and I are the only two Princeton men who have become president,” Wilson observed ominously in a letter, noting that tensions with Great Britain over its naval blockage of Germany recalled earlier disputes with England about freedom of the seas. “The circumstances of the War of 1812 and now run parallel. I sincerely hope they will not go further.”

His fears were unfounded. Great Britain became an ally in World War I, Wilson’s alma mater notwithstanding. But his knack for reading — or misreading — historical parallels hardly stands out in the annals of American presidents and public officials.

President Bush sent historians scurrying toward their keyboards last week when he defended the United States occupation of Iraq by arguing that the pullout from Vietnam had led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. His speech was rhetorical jujitsu, an attempt to throw back at his critics their favorite historical analogy — Vietnam — for the Iraq war. His argument aroused considerable skepticism from historians and political scientists, who note that the United States’ military action in Vietnam was among the factors that destabilized Cambodia. But Mr. Bush’s statement also revived a perennial question. Whenever a public officials starts to say “the lesson of,” is that a cue to stop listening?

“It is great for sound bites but it is completely misleading,” said Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the United States Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Ala. He wrote a nine-point rebuttal to the analogies in Mr. Bush’s speech. “Reasoning by historical analogy is inherently dangerous,” Professor Record said. “It is especially dangerous in the hands of policymakers whose command of history is weak and who are pushing specific policy agendas.”

The Central Intelligence Agency has worried enough about the pitfalls of drawing historical analogies that two decades ago it spent $400,000 commissioning a course in the subject for senior analysts from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The Kennedy School ran the program until 2001, when the agency itself took it over.

Its creators told students their aims were akin to those of “a junior high school sex-education class”: preparing decision makers for an activity more inevitable than recommended.

“Since they are bound to do what we talk about, later if not sooner, they ought to profit from a bit of forethought about ways and means,” Professors Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May wrote in “Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers,” a book tied to the course.

“A little knowledge,” they wrote, “holds out the prospect of enhancing not alone safety but also enjoyment.”

Professors Neustadt and May advised policymakers considering past precedents to make lists of similarities, differences and unknowns. As a model, they examined the Cuban missile crisis.

Some in the Kennedy administration argued for bombing Cuba to prevent the Soviets from keeping missiles there. Anything less forceful, the hawks argued, would replicate Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement of Hitler at Munich — the analogy that proponents of military force have always used since World War II, including around the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

President Kennedy, however, was unconvinced by the Munich comparison. He argued that bombing Cuba risked the appearance of “a Pearl Harbor in reverse,” with the United States in the bomber’s role, and his views laid the groundwork for the successful naval blockade.

Such happy outcomes, though, are the exception, Professors Neustadt and May conclude.

They note that Johnson administration officials could have considered Thucydides’ account of the ill-conceived Athenian invasion of Syracuse more than two millennia ago. “Surely they had read ‘The Peloponnesian War’ somewhere, sometime, at least in snippets,” the authors wrote.

But no one in the Johnson administration appears to have brought up its parallels to the Vietnam War.

Public officials, political scientists say, usually turn to history to justify policies they’ve already settled on. In the 1980s, for example, Reagan administration officials compared tolerating the Sandinistas to appeasement at Munich, while opponents called Nicaragua another Vietnam.

“People alight on the likeness with an event in the past, and it helps them to understand something when they can associate it with something familiar,” Professor May said in an interview.

Historical analogies in public statements are especially suspect. Talking about Vietnam during the run-up to the war there, for example, United States government officials most often invoked Korea or — with increasing frequency as the escalation began — the appeasement of Hitler, according to a tally by Yuen Foong Khong, a professor of international relations at Oxford. The French retreat from Vietnam in 1954 — a precedent that augured failure — was almost never mentioned.

In private, however, the French defeat came up much more often — far more often than Munich and nearly as often as Korea, Professor Khong concluded in his 1992 book, “Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965.”

Policymakers also sometimes bat away facts that mar their analogies. Before the Vietnam War, for example, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball repeatedly reminded President Lyndon Johnson and his other aides of Vietnam’s overriding differences from both Munich and Korea. Arguing that Vietnam was “sui generis,” Ball predicted that the United States would suffer the same fate as the French in 1954.

Johnson listened, but he and his advisers dismissed Ball’s case nonetheless. France, generals told Ball, had not won a war since Napoleon.

Finally, Ball, recognizing that argument would never settle the battle of analogies, proposed what he called “a trial period” of “controlled commitment.” In a June 18, 1965, internal memo, Ball proposed increasing the number of American troops in Vietnam to 100,000 for three months to “appraise the costs and possibilities of waging a successful land war in South Vietnam and chart a clear course of action.” The results, he argued, would show which comparison was more apt: the Americans in Korea or the French in Vietnam.

Now, Professor Khong said in an interview, Ball’s proposal may itself be a good analogy for the current situation in Iraq, where President Bush has increased troop levels in a test of the military’s ability to pacify the country.

Next comes a debate over the meaning of the test results, Professor Khong said, which may be why both sides are reaching furiously for analogies to support their positions.

Republican Senators Call for New War Authorization

By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, July 13 — Two leading Republican senators said today that President Bush should seek a new war authorization and present a plan to Congress by Oct. 16 outlining contingency plans in Iraq. Those plans, which would include reducing American forces, should begin by the end of the year.

Senators John W. Warner of Virginia and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, both of whom have criticized the administration’s troop buildup plan, introduced a measure expected to be considered next week when the Iraq war debate resumes. The senators said it was critical to move beyond the current clash between Congress and the White House and begin making plans to be implemented after the military releases its progress report in September.

“I continue to counsel the president and his administration to move now to construct a more sustainable policy in Iraq that reduces our troop commitments and transitions away from the missions of interposing ourselves between sectarian factions,” Mr. Lugar said in a statement.

Mr. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Mr. Warner, a former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, are viewed among Republicans as respected and reasoned voices on the war debate. They had both agreed to withhold judgment until the interim report on Iraq that was presented Thursday to Congress.

One of the main elements of their amendment, which was filed shortly after noon today, would require the president to seek a new rationale for the war authorization by the time Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, delivers a report in September on the progress of the troop buildup. The measure also would require the president to review and update the National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq no later than Sept. 4.

“Many of the conditions and motivations that existed when we authorized force almost five years ago no longer exist or are irrelevant to our current situation,” Mr. Lugar said. He went on, saying the 2002 war authorization is “obsolete and requires revision.”

The proposal is one of a litany of plans offered by senators during a scheduled two-week debate over the Iraq war. But anticipation for the Warner-Lugar plan has quietly built all week, particularly among the Republicans who have called for a new course in Iraq. The senators said lawmakers from both parties have expressed an interest in endorsing the plan, although it remained an open question whether it went far enough for several Democratic critics.

“Senator Warner and I recognize that there is broad disagreement in Congress on what I have called the ‘binary choice between surge and withdrawal,’ ” Mr. Lugar said. “Nevertheless, we also have sensed a palpable desire in this body to achieve greater bipartisanship.”

The Senate was already scheduled to consider a variety of proposals next week, including one by Senators Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, seeking to de-authorize the original war authorization. That proposal, though, is not favored by the Democratic leadership because several senators who voted against the 2002 authorization are reluctant to endorse a new one.

The Senate recessed for the weekend early Friday afternoon and is scheduled to resume the Iraq war debate on Monday.

The leading Democratic proposal under consideration, sponsored by Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, calls for combat troops to begin leaving Iraq within 120 days with a deadline of April 30 to withdraw most troops except for those needed for a limited mission. The legislation does not specify, however, how many troops would be required to leave.

2 Iraqi Journalists Killed as U.S. Forces Clash With Militias

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, July 12 — Clashes in a southeastern neighborhood here between the American military and Shiite militias on Thursday left at least 16 people dead, including two Reuters journalists who had driven to the area to cover the turbulence, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.

The two Reuters staff members, both of them Iraqis, were killed when troops on an American helicopter shot into the area where the two had just gotten out of their car, said witnesses who spoke to an Agence France-Presse photographer who arrived at the scene shortly after their bodies were taken away.

The Reuters employees were Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, a photographer, and Saeed Chmagh, 40, a driver.

“When we reached the spot where Namir was killed, the people told us that two journalists had been killed in an air attack an hour earlier,” said Ahmad Sahib, the Agence France-Presse photographer, who had been traveling in a car several blocks behind Mr. Noor-Eldeen but was delayed by the chaos in the area. He said he was in touch with Mr. Noor-Eldeen by cellphone until his colleague was killed.

“They had arrived, got out of the car and started taking pictures, and people gathered,” Mr. Sahib said. “It looked like the American helicopters were firing against any gathering in the area, because when I got out of my car and started taking pictures, people gathered and an American helicopter fired a few rounds, but they hit the houses nearby and we ran for cover.”

The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.

“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.

The military command offered condolences to the families of the civilians who were killed during the combat action, the statement said.

Officials at the Interior Ministry and at a Baghdad bank drastically revised their account of a large robbery at the Dar Es Salaam bank on Wednesday, saying that there had been confusion about how much of the stolen money was Iraqi dinars and how much was United States dollars. The robbers made off with 282 million Iraqi dinars, equal to about $225,000, and $366,000 American dollars; on Wednesday the police reported that $282 million had been stolen.

In Baghdad, violence racked the southern neighborhood of Saydiya, where the police picked up 17 of the 28 bodies found in the capital on Thursday. The neighborhood has become a battleground over the past several months, with Sunni Arab extremists controlling many of its streets and killing people who refuse to help them.

Shiite Mahdi Army militiamen allied with the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr have been attacking the area as well, residents said. They described sometimes arriving home after work and being unable to approach their front doors because of gunfights in the streets.

A suicide bomber attacked a wedding in Tal Afar, a town 30 miles north of Mosul, killing four people and wounding six, said Brig. Gen. Mohamed al-Wakaa of the Mosul police. The groom was an Iraqi policeman. A car bomb targeting a police patrol in central Mosul killed one policeman and wounded eight, General Wakaa said.

And in central Iraq, gunmen opened fire on a police checkpoint on the road near Samarra, killing four policemen and two Iraqi soldiers.

In Diwaniya in southern Iraq, American helicopters fired on six men burying a roadside bomb, killing five of them, said Maj. Marc Young, a spokesman for the Multinational Force-Iraq. A hospital worker in the city said the five men were connected to the movement allied with Mr. Sadr. Later in the day, Mr. Sadr’s supporters walked through the streets mourning the death of their colleagues, chanting anti-American slogans and promising revenge, said witnesses who watched the procession.

An American soldier was killed Thursday east of Baghdad while involved in combat operations, the military said in a statement.

The two journalists who were killed Thursday had been gathering information for a report on weightlifting early in the day, and then they heard that something was happening in the Ameen neighborhood and drove there to learn more about it, according to a Reuters official.

According to a Reuters report after the incident, some people at the scene said that American troops fired into the area from a helicopter, and a police report stated that the American attack killed the two journalists and nine other people.

Mr. Noor-Eldeen, who was not married, was originally from Mosul and first worked for Reuters there, moving on to Baghdad after receiving threats. Mr. Chmagh had worked for Reuters since before the United States-led invasion in 2003 and had four children. He also supported his sister’s family after her husband was killed by insurgents.

“Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh’s outstanding contribution to reporting on the unfolding events in Iraq has been vital,” said the chief executive of Reuters, Tom Glocer, in a statement.

“They stand alongside other colleagues in Reuters who have died doing a job that they believe in,” he added. Six Reuters employees have been killed in Iraq since the invasion.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees made an urgent plea on Thursday for money to help it increase aid for Iraqi refugees, whose numbers continue to rise. Nearly two million Iraqis are displaced within the country and nearly two million more have left, fleeing primarily to neighboring countries. About 2,000 Iraqis a day flee their homes, according to the United Nations appeal.

Qais Mizher and Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Diwaniya, Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra and Diyala.

As the War Debate Heats Up, Stagnant Air Is in the Forecast

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 13, 2007; A01

He lamented, in his own way, that he is unloved these days and reflected on the "war fatigue" that has gripped his country. He looked forward to the day, not so long from now, when he will retire to his Texas ranch and tell himself that he did the right thing.

Yet no matter how battered he seems, no matter how unpopular he may be in the polls, President Bush still holds the commanding position in his showdown with Congress over Iraq. Even with Republican defections, as votes in both houses made clear this week, opponents do not have anywhere near the veto-proof majorities needed to wrest leadership of the war.

The almost-certain result, according to strategists in both parties, will be at least two more months of anger and posturing but no change in direction. A weakened president is desperately playing for time while a Democratic opposition mounts its case against him and Republican lawmakers agonize over how long to stick with him. Bush will keep pressing his strategy in Iraq in hopes that it produces more than the meager results his White House reported yesterday while his foes keep scoring political points and not much else.

"The town is gridlocked," said Kenneth M. Duberstein, who served as chief of staff in the Reagan White House. "There is no give at the White House or on the Hill. The Senate doesn't have 60 votes to do anything. So, at least for the foreseeable future, which may be September, the only result is stalemate. That may benefit the president, and if you listen to the Democrats, they think it benefits them."

Both sides have stuck to their familiar positions. Bush has long seen a virtue in refusing to relent to pressure and operating as he sees fit regardless of Congress, while the Democrats, until January, had spent the Bush presidency essentially in the minority, lobbing criticism but with no responsibility for governing. Neither side shows even passing interest in forging a bipartisan consensus, preferring instead to bend the other to its will.

"In many ways, everybody's trapped," said Clinton White House chief of staff Leon E. Panetta, who served on the Iraq Study Group as it produced a bipartisan plan largely discarded at first by both sides. "The president in many ways is trapped in the realities of what's taking place. The Congress is trapped because, while they want to change strategy, they don't have the votes. And both sides are trapped by the fear of the consequences of what happens if they do make a change."

The defections of core Republican senators such as Richard G. Lugar (Ind.) and Pete V. Domenici (N.M.) in the past couple of weeks alarmed the White House and prompted a series of hastily called meetings and strategy sessions to shore up its eroding base. But as the days passed, Bush advisers calmed down and recognized that they can preserve their policy for now. "As long as we can sustain a veto, we have got some leverage on this process," one White House aide said.

That became evident in votes this week. Seven Republican senators abandoned Bush on Wednesday to vote for a measure requiring more rest time for troops between combat deployments, but the bill still fell four votes short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster and 11 short of the 67 needed to override a veto. Just four House Republicans voted yesterday for a timetable for withdrawal, leaving pullout proponents nearly 70 votes from a veto-proof majority.

Still, the clock is ticking for Bush, and it seems to be speeding up. Just two weeks ago, White House aides bemoaned the political missteps that made September a deadline of sorts for demonstrating the success of the president's troop increase. Too soon, they complained. Now September looks like the holy grail as Bush and his team find themselves practically begging fellow Republicans to hang on until then.

The strategy pursued by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is to keep scheduling votes to pressure Republicans, who, in turn, would pressure the White House to change its war policy. "The president hasn't seen the last of these votes," said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. "We'll look forward to additional votes in September."

Patrick Griffin, who was President Bill Clinton's chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill, said the current stalemate is just a step in a process that inexorably will force Bush to change his policy. "This isn't going to go away," he said. "Eventually, something's going to stick, or something's going to change. Either he's going to lean into this, or more people are going to shift positions."

Yet Democrats appear uninterested in reaching out to Republicans, preferring to keep party differences on the war clear heading into the 2008 elections and fearing that any proposal moderate enough to attract GOP support could anger the antiwar wing of their party. "I'm not supportive of where the president is, but they haven't engaged any of us here," said an angry Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.). "They're just trying to score political points."

At the center of this remains Bush, pummeled yet defiant, rejected yet still in charge. From the lectern in the newly reopened White House briefing room yesterday, he alternated between being grim and relaxed, unpopular commander of an unpopular war one moment and light-hearted pol the next.

"Do we ever use 'kinder and gentler'?" he asked after cutting off a reporter. "No," he said, rejecting his father's mantra with a smile.

At another point, he stopped to answer a shouted question after starting to leave the room, something he rarely does. "This is amazing," he declared. "The new me!"

But it did not really seem like a new Bush. Most of his arguments sounded familiar -- the need to persevere in Iraq against the radicals who would spread chaos, the search for signs of progress on the ground in the face of unremitting violence, the faith that success is still in reach. He tried to show he was willing to take on all comers, even calling upon nemesis Helen Thomas for the first question.

Yet, there were moments of reflection for a typically unreflective president. It was hard not to wonder whether he was talking about himself as he mused about the "ugly war" and how the American people have wearied of it. "You know, they're tired of the war," he said. "There is a war fatigue in America. It's affecting our psychology."

And then there was the concession that while he still commands policy, he no longer commands the affection of his nation. "I guess I'm like any other political figure -- everybody wants to be loved," he said. "Just sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don't enable you to be loved."

Leaning on the lectern, Bush anticipated the day when the responsibility would no longer be his and expressed his hope for vindication. "When it's all said and done . . . if you ever come down and visit the old, tired me down there in Crawford, I will be able to say, 'I looked in the mirror and made decisions based upon principle, not based upon politics,' " he said. "And that's important to me."

Staff writers Michael Abramowitz and Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.

A Firm Bush Tells Congress Not to Dictate Policy on War

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JEFF ZELENY

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 in Baghdad 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.

Senate Votes Against Debating Iraq War Resolution

After a difficult, tightly managed debate, the U.S. Senate just voted 56-34 against proceeding to a vote on S. 574, a Senate bill expressing, as the House did, disapproval of a House-passed Iraq war resolution. Democrats tried to move to vote on that measure by invoking cloture on debate, i.e., cutting off Senators' opportunities to filibuster.

In addition to all Senate Democrats, seven Republican Senators - Senators Coleman, Collins, Hagel, Smith, Snowe, Specter, and Warner - voted in favor of the motion.

Ten Republican Senators did not vote and presumably were not present, most notably Senator McCain, who is out trying to run for President. It seems that these Republicans must have been certain that the vote would go their way.

I doubt very much that this will be the last time that Democrats try to push for a similar vote. They've done it before and only got two Republicans. But in the end, if they cannot peel off three more Republican Senators to reach 60, Democrats will never get to a vote on the substance of these crucial measures.

As Senator Schumer said today, this debate and vote would have been the first steps toward eventually ending the war in Iraq. It did not happen today, but I believe this vote was positive.

First, it identified those Republican Senators who will consistently support a move to vote for a resolution of this strength. This allows Democrats to make the next chess moves toward a debate and vote on Iraq. Will Democrats have to take Senator Gregg's desired amendment to "support the troops" into account? To get to 60 votes, Democrats might have to.

Second, it put pressure on Senator McCain to support his position on the war in Iraq. As we move toward the general elections, Senator McCain will have to explain why he did not vote when he supposedly supports the President's plans for increasing troop numbers in Iraq so strongly.

And third, it allowed Democratic Senators to say they are moving the legislative agenda the voters chose in November -- a change of course in Iraq -- into effect. I think they are trying hard, even if it is difficult to move this kind of legislation through the Senate.