The huge sums requested by the White House to occupy and rebuild Iraq sharply inflamed partisan tensions on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, with Republican leaders accusing Democrats of undermining the military and sowing division by criticizing the Bush administration's postwar policies.
Democrats, emboldened by internal polls showing a growing public unease with the administration's US$87 billion spending request, have strongly amplified their disagreements with the White House in recent days.
Senator Edward Kennedy , who said late last week that President Bush's Iraq policy was a "fraud," on Tuesday went to the Senate floor to describe the policy as a "colossal failure" unworthy of what he said was an US$87 billion blank check.
Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, said the US$20.3 billion the president wanted for reconstruction in Iraq would have a hard time passing without a stronger justification.
Republicans lashed back in the strongest terms yet. Tom DeLay, the House Republican leader, accused Kennedy of uttering "hate speech" and said he needs to apologize to the country for accusing Bush of what amounts to treason. Senate leaders said the criticism threatened the nation's military mission.
"Those comments, while freely exercised in freedom of speech, they strike at the hearts of the military families," said Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, referring specifically to Kennedy. "And the impact that has on our ability to maintain a strong and viable armed forces -- I think some of those comments have no place in the dialogue of the Congress of the US."
The increasingly harsh words among lawmakers do not necessarily reflect the degree of support for the Iraq spending bill, which large majorities of both parties say they will approve after several weeks of hearings and questioning.
Rather, the US$87 billion request has become a surrogate for the long-standing political divisions between the two parties. By contrasting the amounts allotted for schools, hospitals and roads in Iraq with infrastructure crumbling at home, Democrats are really making a case against Bush's tax cuts and economic policies. Many Republicans, at the same time, share the unease over the size of the bill for Iraq, but say they have to support their party leader when polls show the president's approval levels declining.
"You have to admit with some members there was sticker shock at US$87 billion," DeLay said on Tuesday. "They're trying to grapple with that."
A memo distributed to congressional Democrats by Democracy Corps, an opinion-research firm run by several former members of the Clinton administration, said that 60 percent of the public opposes the US$87 billion request, while 54 percent believe the president does not have a plan to win the peace and bring troops home.
The memo, written by John Podesta, former president Bill Clinton's chief of staff, and Stanley Greenberg, his pollster, urges Democrats to wage a battle over the spending request as a way of changing the public debate.
Bolstered by these numbers, Democrats are becoming increasingly vocal about the costs of Iraq. House Democrats released a study on Tuesday asserting that the long-term cost of remaining in Iraq would be much greater than the administration has said -- US$237 billion if troops remain in Iraq through 2006, and US$309 billion if troops remain through 2008.
Daschle said that if the US$20.3 billion in reconstruction money could be broken off from the military portion of the request and voted on separately, a plan already rejected by Republicans, it would not pass the Senate. And Republican Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip, forcefully rejected the argument of Iraq administrator Paul Bremer that the money must be spent quickly to avoid further unrest in Iraq.
"Every time I hear in the administration, `If you don't do this immediately, dire consequence are going to follow,' we do things immediately and dire consequences follow," Hoyer said. "I am not very sanguine about Bremer or the administration's representations, which have proved to be egregiously incorrect for the most part."
Bremer testified on Monday that the money would provide only the most fundamental and essential services for Iraq. But even Republican officials said they were surprised by the breadth of the public works projects the administration is proposing. One Republican official noted with amazement that amid all the housing and water projects was US$19 million to build a WiFi wireless internet network for the Iraqi post office that mobile computer users could join.
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