Bush takes the fight to Democrats on Iraq war

Denouncing Democrats from coast to coast for trying to limit his freedom of action in Iraq, President Bush is betting -- as he often has -- that when it comes to national security, confrontation works better than conciliation.

“A strategy that encourages this enemy to wait us out is dangerous,” Bush told troops Wednesday at this Army training post in the Mojave Desert, his latest salvo at the congressional effort to force a military withdrawal from Iraq.

He added, “It’s dangerous for our troops, it’s dangerous for our country’s security, and it’s not going to become the law.”

In Washington, Republicans and Democrats expect that the president will win this battle in the short run; that after weeks or months of debate, Congress will eventually provide billions of dollars for the war in Iraq with only mild conditions attached.

“Ultimately, politically, we have to give him [the] money,” Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, predicted in an interview on NBC this week.

But Bush and his opponents in Congress appear to be working on different calendars.

The president is striving to buy a few more months of time for his new military strategy -- the “surge” of additional troops into Baghdad’s neighborhoods -- to show that progress can be made in stabilizing Iraq.

“The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock,” Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, said in an interview on PBS’ “NewsHour” Wednesday. “So we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit ... and perhaps put a little more time on the Washington clock.”

But Democrats say that even if Bush wins the legislative battle in the short run, they think they have the winning political strategy in the long run, given that growing majorities of the public and in Congress favor setting a target date for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

“This is a moving picture, not a still frame, and with every day the situation fails to improve in Iraq, the support for withdrawal is stronger,” said a Democratic Senate aide who asked not to be identified by name because his comments were not authorized by party leaders.

Recent polls found public support for setting a withdrawal date near the 60% mark, an increase over the findings in earlier surveys.

Last month, the House and Senate voted separately to approve about $103 billion in new funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but to require Bush to move toward withdrawing most U.S. combat troops from Iraq.

The House bill sets a deadline of Aug. 31, 2008, for withdrawing all combat troops; the Senate bill sets a nonbinding target of March 31, 2008.

Bush has said he will veto any bill that includes a timetable for withdrawal, arguing that it will make it impossible for his military plan to succeed.

“Just as the strategy is starting to make inroads, a narrow majority in the Congress passed legislation they knew all along I would not accept,” he said at Ft. Irwin. The bills pushed by the Democrats “impose an artificial deadline for withdrawal from Iraq. Their bills substitute the judgment of Washington politicians for the judgment of our military commanders.”

He stressed to his audience of soldiers, many in training for deployment to Iraq and assembled for lunch inside a vast gymnasium, his oft-repeated bottom-line argument for the war in Iraq -- that it is necessary to protect the U.S. against terrorists.

“We’re after Al Qaeda,” he said. The strife in Iraq “is not a civil war; it is pure evil. And I believe we have an obligation to protect ourselves from that evil.”

White House counselor Dan Bartlett said the speech was part of a “drumbeat” that Bush intends to continue through next week, after which the two houses of Congress are set to try to reconcile their differing funding bills.

Bush’s attempt to stymie the Democratic push for a withdrawal from Iraq has two stages, Bartlett said.

First, he hopes to make it difficult for the two houses to reach a compromise by putting pressure on centrist Democrats and Republicans, whose votes were key in the Senate, to reject any of the tougher provisions in the House bill.

Bartlett noted that the Senate bill passed by a bare majority, 51 to 47, with the help of two Republicans, but antiwar liberals in the House -- who made up a significant part of the chamber’s Democratic majority -- consider the Senate bill too soft.

If Congress does reach a compromise, Bush plans to follow through on his veto threat -- and then to press lawmakers to pass a second bill without significant restrictions.

He said that in his administration’s view, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) “can’t tell you how they can even pass a bill” that would reach Bush.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, replied that he was confident the two houses could agree on a joint measure.

“I bet we have a better idea how to pass [a compromise] than Bush has of figuring out a policy for success in Iraq,” he said.

Still, a Bush veto would again put the spotlight on the Democrats.

Aside from Rangel, several party leaders -- including Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois and Jack Reed of Rhode Island -- have also said they think it would be politically impossible to delay funding the troops for long if, as seems almost assuredly the case, Democrats fall short of cobbling together the two-thirds majorities needed to overturn a veto.

“I don’t think that we will see a majority of the Senate vote to cut off funding at this stage,” Obama, who has made his opposition to the war a major theme of his presidential campaign, told the Associated Press last week. If Bush vetoes a compromise withdrawal bill, he added, “We have to come back, and we have to say: ‘All right, we will constrain you in a different way.’ ”

His comments in that interview earned him some angry complaints from antiwar supporters (“Obama Caves to Bush,” the liberal Daily Kos website said in a headline) and some quiet unhappiness among Senate Democratic leaders, congressional aides said.

Reed said he hoped the White House would consider working with Congress on a measure that could include benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet, but without a binding timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops.

For now, White House officials said they were not interested in that kind of outcome, but they were also careful to avoid slamming the door on negotiations in the future.

At Ft. Irwin, soldiers who listened to Bush’s speech said they were confident that some kind of funding would come through.

“I don’t know about Congress,” Pfc. Lloyd Parker of Brooklyn said. “But I think everything will be put in order.”

“Our families and loved ones would not let us go to Iraq bare,” Spc. Israel Molina of Chicago added.

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doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

johanna.neuman@latimes.com

McManus reported from Washington, Neuman from Ft. Irwin.