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Using Olive Branch, Cheney Lashes Foes

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Times Staff Writer

Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday sought to tamp down what has become a bitter and personal fight in Washington over the Iraq war, offering praise for a senior House Democrat who had called for the full withdrawal of troops and saying that an “energetic debate” over the war was part of a healthy society.

But at the same time, Cheney offered fresh attacks on Democratic senators who had accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the threat of Iraq’s weapons programs to build support for the invasion. He called those accusations “dishonest and reprehensible.”

“American soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq go out every day into some of the most dangerous and unpredictable conditions. Meanwhile, back in the United States, a few politicians are suggesting these brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood,” Cheney said in an address to a conservative think tank. “This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety. It has no place anywhere in American politics, much less in the United States Senate.”

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Still, even while calling those accusations “not legitimate,” Cheney’s speech signaled a softer tone from the White House. It came as members of both parties sought to step back from the name-calling that erupted last week after Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who is respected in both parties for his leadership on military affairs, on Thursday dropped his support for the war and called for an immediate, phased withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The White House had initially attacked Murtha, issuing a statement that associated him with filmmaker Michael Moore and “the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party.”

But in his speech Monday before the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney called Murtha “a good man, a Marine, a patriot.”

And Murtha, who last week had noted pointedly that Cheney used deferments to avoid service in Vietnam, amended his own comments, saying on CNN: “I said that heated, and I feel bad about that actually, because, you know, Dick Cheney -- he was in Congress for 10 years. He really has served this country. And he’s been a public servant when he would have been making a lot more money outside.”

Cheney, in arguing that “disagreement, argument and debate” over the war were welcome but that claims that Bush misled the nation were “not legitimate,” appeared to be signaling that the White House wanted to quell some of the bitterness of the Iraq debate while aggressively responding to attacks on Bush’s truthfulness. Public opinion surveys indicate the president’s honesty has come under new skepticism.

“The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight, but any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false,” Cheney said. Quoting Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), he continued: “It is a lie to say that the president lied to the American people.”

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The Democratic emphasis on prewar intelligence has returned some of the spotlight to Cheney, because it was the vice president who often led the way in making the case that Iraq’s then-president, Saddam Hussein, presented a threat to the United States. Shortly before the war began, for example, Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the administration believed that Hussein had, “in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” U.S. troops have found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The recent debate over Iraq also has shown that few Democrats support Murtha’s call for a withdrawal.

For instance, even as Murtha stated his case again Monday, declaring on CNN that the war “cannot be won militarily,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in Rye Brook, N.Y., that it would be “a big mistake” to pull troops out of Iraq. “I think that would cause more problems for us in America,” she said, according to the Associated Press.

In one of many Democratic reactions to Cheney’s speech, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) repeated the allegation that the Bush administration had “misused intelligence in its rush to war,” and said Cheney had missed an opportunity with his speech to “come clean with the American people.”

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), in remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Monday, “By misrepresenting the facts, misunderstanding Iraq and misleading on the war, this administration has brought us to the verge of a national security debacle.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, called on the Bush administration to end its attacks on critics and to start “answering legitimate questions.”

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Reviewing the course of the recent debate, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East on Monday criticized the “impatient” demands of politicians for positive results in Iraq.

Speaking to a small group of reporters at the Pentagon, Gen. John P. Abizaid of U.S. Central Command repeatedly declined to address directly Murtha’s call for an immediate withdrawal. Yet Abizaid said he was frustrated that there seemed to be less patience for the Iraq mission inside Washington’s Beltway than in the rest of the country.

“When I talk to civilian audiences, I don’t detect the same degree of impatience,” he said.

Abizaid said he was optimistic that next year, the U.S. military would be able to shift a larger burden of the counterinsurgency mission to a growing Iraqi army and that the upcoming elections would install a permanent government that could stabilize a fractured political system inside the country.

Although some U.S. commanders have said recently they expect a significant drawdown of U.S. forces after the December elections, Abizaid declined to provide any details about plans for a troop reduction.

Meanwhile, leaders of Iraq’s Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish political factions ended three days of contentious talks in Cairo on Monday with a call for a pullout of foreign troops from the country but with no agreement on a timetable.

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Cheney’s comments welcoming debate about the war and praising Murtha marked the second day that the White House appeared to soften its rhetoric.

Bush, in a Veterans Day speech at a Pennsylvania Army depot, had suggested that some critics of the war were undermining U.S. troops in Iraq.

“They deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them,” Bush said then. “Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough.”

But on Sunday, Bush said during a stop in China as he neared the end of a swing through four Asian countries: “People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq. I heard somebody say, well, maybe so-and-so is not patriotic because they disagree with my position. I totally reject that thought.”

Cheney, in his remarks Monday to the think tank, said he did not have “any problem with debating whether the United States and our allies should have liberated Iraq in the first place.” He said, “Nobody is saying we should not be having this discussion, or that you cannot reexamine a decision made by the president and the Congress some years ago.”

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Times staff writers Paul Richter, Greg Miller and Mark Mazzetti contributed to this report.

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