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US House to vote on war funding bill

Members of the US House of Representatives planned a vote yesterday on a new Iraq bill. It is hotly contested by the White House, opposed by nearly all Republicans and unlikely to survive in the Senate.

The bill would provide the military with US$42.8 billion to keep operations going through July, buy equipment and train Iraqi and Afghan security forces. Congress would decide shortly before its August recess whether to release an additional US$52.8 billion for war spending through September.

White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters US President George W. Bush would veto the House bill if it reached his desk.

While House Democratic leaders wanted to pass the new war funds bill by late yesterday, support was being measured and some aides said the vote could slip to today or next week.

Under the bill Bush would get a US$42.8 billion down payment. Then, after getting White House war progress reports in July, Congress would cast votes late that month on whether to release an additional US$52.8 billion to continue fighting in Iraq through September, or to use the money to withdraw most of the troops by the end of this year.

Bush wants all the money for fighting the war now and without conditions.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate panel the two-step funding idea would create budget nightmares in the Pentagon. "The bill asks me to run the Department of Defense like a skiff and I'm trying to drive the biggest supertanker in the world," he said.

Cognizant of the opposition, House Democratic leaders appeared firm in their resolve to get the bill passed, which could give them a stronger negotiating position after the Senate passes a different measure, probably next week.

A bipartisan group of senators, many of them centrists, were meeting privately in an attempt to come up with a war-funding bill that could attract a solid majority of the 100-member Senate, according to Senator Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat.

Nelson, who opposes setting deadlines for withdrawing troops, would instead tie about US$2.3 billion in reconstruction funds for Iraq to progress in stabilizing the country.

Meanwhile, Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican, teamed up with Senator Evan Bayh, a Democrat, in introducing legislation that could end US combat in Iraq around April next year if Iraq fails to meet military and political goals for stabilizing the country.

Snowe returned this week from a visit to Iraq, where she said she found the "good news mixed, but the bad news deeply disturbing."

Republicans, nervous about the sinking popularity of the war and the president, this week began talking about a September or October timeframe for seeing success in Iraq or demanding a new plan.

Eleven Republican congressmen met privately with Bush and his senior aides on Tuesday for what one described as an "unvarnished conversation" about the state of the Iraq war, NBC Nightly News reported on Wednesday.

The delegation, headed by Mark Kirk of Illinois and Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, told Bush: "We need candor. We need honesty," and that the White House had lost its credibility on the war, NBC reported.

According to the report, Bush responded that he did not want to pass the war off to another president, particularly to a Democratic president, underscoring he understood how serious the situation was.
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