4-02-07, 9:13 am

'Please do not withhold funding for our troops because you are afraid to show progress in Iraq,' Iraq war veteran and former Marine to President Bush's own weekly address. Horne is also senior adviser to , a non-partisan political action committee that supports Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans for elected office who want to bring the wars to an end.

Horne said that he went to Iraq believing President Bush's claims about the war, that they would have enough troops and equipment to accomplish the task they were assigned, and that they would return home quickly.

But once he got there, Horne stated, it soon became obvious that 'there was little we could do militarily' to halt sectarian violence.

It also became apparent that the Bush administration and the former Republican-controlled Congress had no intention of changing the situation. 'No one in Washington,' Horne argued, 'made benchmarks for success that would motivate Iraqis to resolve their differences and bring us home.'

'The commander-in-chief has failed to properly lead the troops,' Horne added, 'and previous Congresses failed to ask the tough questions or demand accountability.'

With the new Congress, however, this situation has changed. The supplemental bills just passed in Congress, Horne said, 'provide something previous Congresses did not: accountability from the administration.'

'The only person,' Horne concluded, 'who could keep funding from reaching the troops would be the president.' Horne warned Bush not to veto the bill and described it as 'undermining the troops.'

In his statement in support of the congressional timetables for withdrawal, John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World said, “In March 2003, the Bush administration estimated that the war in Iraq would cost around $50 billion. This month, on the fourth anniversary of the war, we have reached nine times that amount. A conservative estimate is that the U.S. will have spent more than $1 trillion dollars before the war in Iraq is over. Costs to U.S. strategic interests, moral authority, and international prestige are incalculable.”

A briefing paper authored by Jim Fine, foreign policy legislative secretary for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, wrote that his organization 'will be working with the conferees in an effort to keep a date for troop withdrawal in the final bill and to add a requirement to carry out the regional and internal diplomacy recommended by the Iraq Study Group.'

The next step for both bills is for members of each house to meet to hammer out a final version of the bill in what is called a conference report. The conference committee has a lot of latitude in the crafting the final bill that will be sent to the White House.

There is some concern that while passage of timetables for withdrawal are a dramatic step towards bringing the war to an end, Congress isn't yet ready to confront the president on the issue.

United for Peace and Justice, in an action alert sent out to its members over the weekend, stated that the passage of the bills signaled a shift in the conversation about the war from 'if' it should end to 'when' it will end.

Noting concerns that a compromise bill may be weakened in conference, the UFPJ alert argued, 'we must insist that what comes out of the conference committee sets a firm end date for our military presence in Iraq. As weak as these bills are, the compromise version must not be weakened behind closed doors. We will not tolerate political machinations when U.S. and Iraqi lives are at stake.'

UFPJ, which opposes the supplemental bills because they contain new funding for war, now called on its supporters to write, call and visit their members of Congress over the current congressional recess and insist that a timetable for withdrawal be kept in the final version of the bill sent to the president. The alert also urged that constituents press their representatives to support immediate withdrawal and to block efforts to launch attacks on Iran.

At the same time, there appears to be growing dissent in the ranks of congressional Republicans over Bush's war policy. NBC foreign policy correspondent Andrea Mitchell told Chris Matthews this weekend that moderate Republican Senators have told her they are ready to dump the Bush administration's escalation policy.

Indeed, a significant sign of the White House's growing isolation, is that Republican Senators refused to filibuster the Senate version of the supplemental as they had done to the non-binding resolution criticizing Bush's escalation of the war in February. This failure to filibuster means they probably did not have the votes to accomplish it, and that they decided that shifting the burden of vetoing funding tied to a timetable for withdrawal to Bush was the least worst position they could take on this issue without an outright rebellion in their ranks.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at