Congress tells Bush to bring troops home

WASHINGTON – In an act unparalleled since the Vietnam War, Congress passed legislation Thursday that directs the president to begin bringing home U.S. troops from Iraq and extricating America from the midst of a bloody civil war.

The historic 51-46 Senate vote for a $124 billion war-spending bill – which followed House passage of the measure Wednesday – thrust a withdrawal timeline on a fiercely resistant White House that has promised to veto it.

The bill came even as the top U.S. commander in Iraq appealed for more time, saying the United States is “just getting started.”

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, on his first return to Washington since he took over, said Thursday at a Pentagon news conference that the war “is going to require enormous commitment, and commitment over time.”

The widely respected commander declined to say how long he believed the current troop levels will be needed. He warned, “This effort may get harder before it gets easier.”

Bush has repeatedly criticized Congress for interfering with military decisions and has pledged to veto the spending measure as soon as it reaches his desk next week.

Democratic lawmakers acknowledge that they will not have the votes to override a veto, but they defiantly have promised to pass more legislation to try to bring the divisive, 4-year-old war to a close.

“Under the Constitution, Congress has a duty to question the war policies of this or any president,” said 89-year-old Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., who began serving in Congress before the Vietnam War. “We must listen to the voices of the people. And the American people have sent a very clear message to Washington. It is time to start to bring our troops home from Iraq. The Congress has responded.”

The White House quickly condemned the vote, although Bush himself offered no public comment. “The president is determined to win in Iraq. I think that the bill that they sent us today is mission defeated,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said. “This bill is dead before arrival.”

Bush has perhaps never looked more isolated.

Despite weeks of speeches deriding Democrats for meddling in the war, the president did not swing a single vote in Congress. And recent polls show that popular support for withdrawing troops actually increased while Bush was aggressively attacking the Democrats for their timeline.

The complex measure Democrats pushed through both chambers of Congress funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and provides billions of dollars for veterans’ health care, Gulf Coast states’ relief and other nonmilitary programs. It does not cut off funding for military operations in Iraq.

Its limits on the military are not unprecedented. Lawmakers have dictated how and when American forces could operate abroad over the last three decades, including in Central America, Somalia and the Balkans. But by explicitly setting the terms for an end to U.S. involvement in a war, this Congress has gone further than any since the Vietnam War era.

At that time, lawmakers imposed limitations on what the armed forces could do, ordering troops out of Cambodia after President Nixon’s controversial 1970 incursion. But Congress did not ban U.S. military operations in Southeast Asia until after the Paris peace accords were signed in 1973. Lawmakers also did not cut funding until all U.S. forces had been withdrawn.

In contrast, in the current situation Democrats have pushed through a far more confrontational plan that would require the president to wind down the war. They did this after taking power in an election widely viewed as a referendum on Bush’s conduct of the war.

The president and his congressional allies have lambasted the measure as a disastrous congressional intrusion into military policy that would embolden America’s enemies and abandon Iraqis to a bloodbath.

But every Democrat voted for the measure, as did two GOP senators – Oregon’s Gordon Smith and Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel. Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, voted with the Republican minority.

Three senators, including Arizona’s John McCain, missed the vote. This is the fourth major Iraq-related vote missed by McCain, a presidential candidate who has been a leading champion of the president’s Iraq policy.

Democratic leaders acknowledged that the next steps in this evolving showdown between the White House and Congress were unclear.