| QUOTE |
| House OKs timetable for troops in Iraq By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer 11 minutes ago WASHINGTON - A sharply divided House voted Friday to order President Bush to bring combat troops home from Iraq next year, a victory for Democrats in an epic war-powers struggle and Congress' boldest challenge yet to the administration's policy. Ignoring a White House veto threat, lawmakers voted 218-212, mostly along party lines, for a binding war spending bill requiring that combat operations cease before September 2008, or earlier if the Iraqi government does not meet certain requirements. Democrats said it was time to heed the mandate of their election sweep last November, which gave them control of Congress. "The American people have lost faith in the president's conduct of this war," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif. "The American people see the reality of the war, the president does not." The vote, echoing clashes between lawmakers and the White House over the Vietnam War four decades ago, pushed the Democratic-led Congress a step closer to a constitutional collision with the wartime commander in chief. Bush has insisted that lawmakers allow more time for his strategy of sending nearly 30,000 additional troops to Iraq to work. The roll call also marked a triumph for Pelosi., who labored in recent days to bring together a Democratic caucus deeply divided over the war. Some of the party's more liberal members voted against the bill because they said it would not end the war immediately, while more conservative Democrats said they were reluctant to take away flexibility from generals in the field. Republicans were almost completely unified in their fight against the bill, which they said was tantamount to admitting failure in Iraq. Link |
| QUOTE |
| The White House warned on Thursday that the opposition Democrats' plan to link the Iraq war budget with a timetable for military withdrawal had "zero chance" and would face a presidential veto. The spending and war-cutoff bill under consideration "has zero chance to be enacted into law," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. "It's bad legislation. The president is going to veto it and Congress will sustain that veto." The Democratic-controlled Congress is holding a debate Thursday ahead of a vote Friday on the controversial 124 billion dollar measure for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. President George W. Bush has urged lawmakers to approve the budget commitment in full and without restrictions on how it can be spent. Top Democrats want to link approval of the money to a mandated withdrawal of US forces from Iraq by August 31, 2008. The party's left wing wants legislators to approve the funding only on condition that the troops begin to withdraw this year. Snow described the bill as "fatally flawed." "It ties the hands of our generals. It does so by putting politicians and staffers in charge of the kinds of things that need to be determined on the battlefield. That is a formula for failure," he said. |
| QUOTE |
| Chalking this one up as a lesson on what not to do in the future could be a useful one for those contemplating any invasions of other nations. |
| QUOTE (RancerDS @ May 1 2007, 09:04 PM) |
| Doesn't matter what the timetable is, there isn't going to be a "victory". SO they ought to bring home the troops. Chalking this one up as a lesson on what not to do in the future could be a useful one for those contemplating any invasions of other nations. |
| QUOTE (Lorpius Prime @ May 2 2007, 12:26 AM) |
| "Looks like they're just going to kill each other. Oh well, not our problem." |
| QUOTE ("Che Guevara") |
| The problem is that the US government wastes money and troops for a war that seems trivial when you compare to other things that happen in the world. In Darfur, a military intervention would be justified, because the killing is much worse over there than it is in Iraq. |