CQ TODAY PRINT EDITION
April 7, 2008 – 8:31 p.m.
Surrogates to Set Tone on War Debate
By Josh Rogin and Adam Graham-Silverman, CQ Staff
The Senate’s three presidential candidates will capture much of the attention at Tuesday’s Iraq hearings, but Democrats will try to frame the latest debate over the war before Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama even have the chance to speak.
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Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Amb. Ryan C. Crocker are slated to testify before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, on which Clinton and Obama, respectively, sit as junior members. As a result, most Democratic members of those panels will speak well before their party’s two presidential candidates.
Those Democrats — some of whom have endorsed either Clinton or Obama, with others still uncommitted — will seek to present a unified anti-war front, particularly at the morning hearing of the Armed Services panel, where John McCain of Arizona, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, is a senior member and will be among the first lawmakers to speak. McCain’s GOP colleagues are likely to reinforce his comments.
With McCain all but certain to defend President Bush’s troop increase policy and counsel more patience from the American public, Democrats will need to articulate early on why Clinton’s and Obama’s calls for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq are an example of wise leadership.
Clinton and Obama will look to their Democratic colleagues, too, to reinforce their campaigns’ messages: that the Iraq War has hurt the U.S. economy, the war on terrorism and the readiness of the U.S. military.
With Senate Democrats still lacking the 60 votes needed to legislate changes to Bush’s war strategy, lawmakers from both parties acknowledged that they will use the hearings Tuesday and Wednesday to set the stage for the general election debate over Iraq.
“We will have the debates that help to define the choices appropriately to the American people, but we’re also realistic about where the votes are,” said John Kerry , D-Mass., a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his party’s 2004 presidential nominee. “The American people are going to speak on this in November.”
Similar Democratic Plans
Clinton and Obama have roughly the same plan for Iraq, calling for troop withdrawals to begin shortly after they take office, with the goal of having most combat troops out by the end of 2009.
But they walk a fine line in trying to appear tough on the war while avoiding GOP criticism that their positions constitute defeatism.
Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Clinton and Obama are likely to strike different tones.
“I think that the challenge is probably toughest for Sen. Obama, who is perceived as the candidate who would push for the quickest withdrawal, but also the candidate with the least direct foreign policy experience,” Alterman said. “Pleasing his constituencies and being critical, but not seeming rash or naïve, is a tough needle to thread.”
Surrogates to Set Tone on War Debate
Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Clinton, said that she would focus her questions on “the lack of political progress in Iraq, the rising influence of Iran . . . and the strain on our military caused by the continuing presence of large numbers of troops in Iraq.”
Other Democrats said they would attempt to move the focus of the hearings away from the administration’s claims of short-term progress and toward the bigger picture on Iraq and the war on terrorism.
The Iraq War’s cost and impact on the U.S. economy will be a constant refrain for Democrats at the hearings.
Jack Reed , D-R.I., who has not committed to either candidate, said he will ask Petraeus and Crocker why Iraq is not funding its own reconstruction from the reported $30 billion it has in U.S. banks and $42 billion it receives in oil revenue.
“To think that we’re still sending money there while they’re sitting on their resources is, to me, very difficult to comprehend,” Reed said.
GOP Looks to Boost McCain’s Position
Republicans, meanwhile, plan to characterize Democrats as failing to recognize a broad trend toward stability and political reconciliation in Iraq and to accuse them of politicizing Tuesday’s testimony.
McCain, ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, is poised to speak early in Tuesday’s hearing, allowing him to set down a marker for his party.
He previewed that marker in a Monday speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., where he hailed the achievements of Bush’s war strategy and characterized Democratic calls for a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops as perilous and shortsighted.
“What they are really proposing . . . is a policy of withdraw and re-invade,” McCain said, referring to Clinton and Obama. “For if we withdraw hastily and irresponsibly, we will guarantee the trouble will come immediately.”
McCain will call on the nation to support Petraeus’ expected recommendation for an indefinite pause in troop drawdowns after the rollback of Bush’s increased troop levels this summer. That would leave about 140,000 troops in Iraq until 2009.
McCain’s GOP allies are expected to tout reports of progress in Iraq and attack Clinton’s and Obama’s positions by painting a doomsday scenario for Iraq if U.S. forces depart prematurely.
Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl , R-Ariz., said Republicans believe the Iraqi government has achieved 12 out of 18 benchmarks that Bush established last year to track Baghdad’s political progress. He based that on an assessment by Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Surrogates to Set Tone on War Debate
But lawmakers were certain to dispute such claims of progress. House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton , D-Mo., said last week that Iraq had completely met only three benchmarks.
Democrats also were expected to cite a report released Monday by the U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-funded think tank, warning that Iraq’s political progress is “so slow, halting and superficial, and social and political fragmentation so pronounced, that the [United States] is no closer to being able to leave Iraq than it was a year ago.”
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