Senate rejects limits on tours in Iraq
4-vote failure seen as defeat for Democrats
WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans yesterday rejected a bipartisan proposal to lengthen the home leaves of US troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, derailing a measure that war opponents viewed as one of the best chances to force President Bush to accelerate a redeployment of forces.
The proposal, sponsored by Senators James Webb, Democrat of Virginia, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, failed on a 56 to 44 vote, with 60 votes needed for passage - a tally that was almost identical to a vote in July.
A last-minute campaign by the Defense Department and the White House to kill the measure won over Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, an influential voice on defense policy who had voted with Webb and Hagel in July.
Warner's defection deflated any momentum that had been building and effectively ensured the legislation's demise. Just six Republicans supported the proposal, one fewer than the previous count.
The vote offered the most vivid evidence yet that the Bush administration still controls Iraq war policy, despite months of congressional debate, the war's persistent unpopularity, and a summer-long effort by activists to pressure Republicans.
"Our Republican colleagues are more interested in protecting our president than our troops," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said moments before the vote, when defeat appeared certain. "This is Bush's war. Don't make it also the Republican senators' war."
Of all the Iraq measures now pending before the Senate, as part of an annual defense policy debate, Democrats had viewed the Webb proposal as one of the few that could gain broad enough support to become law. The measure would have required that troops be granted home leaves at least as long as their most recent combat deployments before being sent back to war. Its focus on troops and their families, rather than on military strategy, had attracted more GOP backing than Democratic bills that had set withdrawal timetables or had targeted war funding.
After the measure's defeat, senators predicted that other Iraq amendments in the queue, including several with bipartisan sponsorship, would meet a similar fate. "I don't think there's going to be any meaningful change of votes or switching until we get into next year," Hagel said.
A former Navy secretary and decorated Marine combat veteran, Webb quietly courted Republicans, tweaking the bill's language and adding clauses to allay their concerns. Exemptions were added for service members who volunteer to return to battle early. Testimony last week from Army General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, that 130,000 troops will remain in place through next summer, seemed to bolster Webb's case that deployment boundaries must be set.
Military families have bemoaned the stress of the repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
"As this debate is going on, I think it's very important that we just put a safety net under our troops, to tell them, to reassure them that however long they're being deployed, they should be able to have that much time, at least, at home, in order to refurbish, retrain, have time with their families, and mentally get prepared to go," Webb said.
Republicans detected another aim. By limiting the pool of people who would be eligible for deployment, they believed that Democrats were attempting to force the troop reductions that they had failed to bring about legislatively.
Supporters of the Webb plan were visibly deflated. None of the anticipated GOP converts ended up switching their votes. "Senator Warner has enormous credibility and integrity on these questions. He certainly will be influential on anybody that was ambivalent about it," said Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, a cosponsor of Webb's proposal.
