United States President George Bush on Tuesday night stepped up his conflict with the Democrats in the US Congress, vetoing their attempt to set a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq and saying: ”Our troops and their families deserve better.”
In a TV statement, Bush accused the Democrats of imposing a ”rigid and artificial” requirement on US troops to withdraw from Iraq. ”It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing,” he said, adding that it would allow the insurgents to take over the country.
Bush’s veto was only his second since he entered the White House in 2001. Last year, he vetoed a Bill freeing up federal funding for stem-cell research.
The president objected to the Bill framed by the newly resurgent Democrats in Congress because it requires American forces to begin pulling out by the start of October with the goal of a withdrawal six months later.
Bush said a legislative timetable would also put the military in Iraq in an impossible situation. ”American commanders in the middle of a conflict zone would have to take orders from politicians 6 000 miles away in Washington DC.”
Bush let it be known that he had signed the veto with a pen given to him by Robert Derga, father of a marine, Dustin, who was killed in Iraq two years ago.
A few hours earlier the Democratic leadership displayed their thespian skills when they signed the Bill in front of television cameras. It is unusual for congressional leaders to make such a public spectacle at this stage in the legislative process, but the Democratic leadership was determined to ensure maximum impact from the day’s events.
They timed the $124-billion measure to fall on the anniversary of Bush’s speech in 2003 on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in which he declared hostilities in Iraq to be over, standing in front of a banner declaring ”mission accomplished”. Hillary Clinton said: ”Today is the fourth anniversary of what I consider to be one of the most shameful episodes in American history.”
The Democrats were also careful to emphasis their ongoing support for US forces in Iraq despite their aim of pulling troops out of the country. The party’s leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said the Bill ”honours the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform”, adding that it also respected ”the will of the American people to end the war in Iraq”.
Resources
Speaking before Bush exercised his executive power, Harry Reid, leader of the Democrats in the Senate, said the veto meant ”denying the American forces the resources and the strategy that they need”. He accused the president of putting the troops into the centre of a civil war.
Both Reid and Pelosi will be at the White House on Wednesday afternoon to begin discussions with the president over what to do next. Both main parties agree that the US military must be given its additional funding, but the form of a possible compromise remains unclear.
The Democrats lack sufficient votes to muster the two-thirds majority of both Houses of Congress needed to overturn the veto. In that knowledge, they have indicated they might agree to an alternative Bill that would fund the troops while introducing benchmarks the Iraqi government must meet.
Failure to hit the benchmarks would trigger US troop withdrawals. However, any reference to withdrawal is likely to be resisted again by the Bush administration.
The wielding of the presidential veto came as the US military and the Iraqi government were on Tuesday seeking to establish whether the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, had been killed in a shoot-out in Anbar province.
A Pentagon spokesperson said it was treating reports with caution because previous ones had proved to be inaccurate.
The US last year identified al-Masri as the successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq who was killed in June. The US has a reward of $5-million for information leading to al-Masri.
An Iraqi insurgent umbrella group denied he had been killed. In a statement on the internet, the group, the Islamic State of Iraq, said Masri ”is alive and he is still fighting the enemy of God”.
According to the US, al-Masri is the pseudonym for Abu Hamza al-Muhajir (40), who joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1982. It was led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was to become Osama bin Laden’s deputy. — Guardian Unlimited Â