Bush, Cheney vow to forge ahead on deployment

WASHINGTON -- Faced with substantial opposition both in Congress and among the American public to their Iraq plans, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney vowed yesterday to forge ahead with the deployment of more than 21,000 additional troops.

In an interview broadcast last night on CBS's "60 Minutes," Bush said he has the authority as commander in chief to move ahead with the deployment, regardless of what the Democrat -controlled Congress does in opposition.

"In this situation I do, yeah," Bush said. "I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it. But I've made my decision. And we're going forward."

Stephen Hadley, national security adviser, said yesterday that the money is in place to begin moving additional troops to Iraq.

"We have authority in the -- we have money in the '07 budget, which has been appropriated by the Congress, to move these troops to Iraq, and the president will be doing that," he said on ABC's "This Week."

The addition of 21,500 troops in Iraq, announced by Bush last week in a nationally televised speech, is part of an administration strategy aimed at quelling the sectarian violence in Iraq and at salvaging an unpopular war effort that the president has said is not succeeding.

Bush said on "60 Minutes" that the only option besides boosting troop levels would be to withdraw, a move supported by some Democrats but one he called tantamount to defeat.

"I began to think, well, if failure is not an option and we've got to succeed, how best to do so? And that's how I came up with the plan I did," Bush said.

That plan has run into fierce opposition among Democrats and a growing number of Republicans, while a clear majority of the public advocates a withdrawal of US troops from the bloody conflict. Some congressional critics are advocating a nonbinding resolution to reflect their conviction that more troops will not provide the answer in Iraq.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition" that such a resolution, drawing bipartisan support, "would be a strong message to the president, to put pressure on the Iraqis to reach a political solution."

Earlier, Cheney said on "Fox News Sunday" that a resolution would not influence how the administration executes its policy.

"Congress, obviously, has to support the effort through the power of the purse, so they have got a role to play and we certainly recognize that," Cheney said. "But also, you cannot run a war by committee."

The vice president also took a swipe at critics of Bush's plan for not offering a different strategy to win a war that he calls pivotal to future US interests.

"I have yet to hear a coherent policy out of the Democratic side, with respect to an alternative to what the president's proposed in terms of going forward," he said.

"You don't like to micromanage the Defense Department, but we have to, in this case, because they're not paying attention to the public," said Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who helps oversee military funding. Murtha was interviewed on ABC's "This Week."

Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and other Democrats want to start a phased withdrawal of troops, along with stepped-up diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors, to speed up the transfer of responsibility to Iraqis.

"It's a complete absurdity to be pursuing the notion that somehow troops are going to resolve the security issue," Kerry said on CNN's "Late Edition."

Bush, Cheney, and Hadley emphasized that the rise in troop numbers will be coupled with new efforts to get Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq to take tough action necessary to improve security in the country.

"I told him it's time to get going," Bush said of Maliki, who in the past has blocked US troops from engaging fighters loyal to militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Maliki has often bent to the demands of Sadr, who has a powerful Shi'ite militia in Iraq as well as a decisive number of seats in the Iraqi Parliament.

Asked if Sadr is an enemy of the United States, Bush said, "If he is ordering his people to kill Americans, he is."

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.