Democrats Signal a Wider Battle Lasting the Rest of President's Term

[Doondoo]

After enjoying great deference in the conduct of national security for his first six years in office, President Bush now faces an assertive opposition Congress that has left him on the defensive. The nonbinding resolution passed by the House yesterday on a largely party-line vote seems certain to be the first of a series of actions that will challenge Bush for the remainder of his presidency.

At stake is not just Bush's decision to send an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq, the plan specifically renounced by the resolution. By extension, the 246 to 182 vote passed judgment on Bush's overall stewardship of the war in Iraq and, more broadly, on his leadership in the world. At a time when the president is confronting Iran over its nuclear enrichment program, the House vote demonstrates that he has far less latitude to take aggressive action than he might have had in the past.

"This is an important moment," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and is now a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And it's an important moment not only about what's in the past, or even in the present, but also what might be happening in the future."

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her close adviser, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), are devising a strategy to tie Bush's hands by placing conditions on future funding for the war, such as requiring any units sent to Iraq to meet certain standards for training, equipment and rest between deployments. Because those conditions might be hard to meet, they could slowly constrict Bush's ability to keep up troop levels.

But yesterday's vote signaled peril for the Democratic congressional leadership as well. Despite deep Republican discontent with the course of the war, Democrats were unable to persuade more than 17 members of the president's party to register that dissatisfaction with their votes. If Democratic leaders could not build a broader bipartisan coalition for a symbolic vote, it may prove much harder to attract Republican support for proposals to limit Bush's options in Iraq.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021602049.html