Congressional Democrats pushed back hard Thursday against President Bush’s speech on Iraq, accusing him of delaying further troop withdrawals so that he can hand off the conflict to the next president.
Democrats welcomed Bush’s call to reduce troop deployments from 15 months to 12 months, but they said he should go further and embrace a proposal by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) under which soldiers would spend at least a year at home before they could be called back to active duty in Iraq.
Webb’s deployment proposal came up three votes short last year, and many Democrats have discussed reviving the issue when Congress takes up the latest war supplemental in the coming weeks.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called Bush’s deployment plan “one step forward and two steps back.”
On the one hand, Reid said, “The administration is finally heeding the call of congressional Democrats and military leaders to decrease troop deployments to 12 months." On the other hand, he said that Bush’s support for Gen. David Petraeus’ plan to pause troop withdrawals “has signaled to the American people that he has no intention of bringing home any more troops.”
"Instead, Reid said, “he is leaving all the tough decisions to the next administration. President Bush has an exit strategy for only one man – himself on January 20, 2009.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) struck a similar note.
“We need better answers from the president,” said Pelosi. “He is just dragging this out to put it at the doorstep of the next president.”
Both Pelosi and Reid warned that the war has stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin and has distracted the United States from targeting Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
The leaders were joined at the press conference by several soldiers who had served in Iraq as well as other veterans’ advocates. “The bottom line is we are effectively out of troops,” said Bobby Mueller, the president of Veterans for America. “It is just staggering how we have devastated our front-line units.”
