Despite growing criticism of US policy in Iraq, US President George W. Bush has warned Democrats not to "test my will" after he vetoes a bill withdrawing US troops from Iraq.
Bush invited Democrats and leaders of his Republican Party to discuss a way out of their standoff soon after he strikes down the bill, approved by Congress this week, which ties US$124 billion in war funds to a troop withdrawal that would start on October 1.
But he pledged to strike down any subsequent attempt by the Democratic-led Congress to set a deadline for a pullout.
PHOTO: AP
`Test my will'
"If the Congress wants to test my will as to whether or not I'll accept the timetable for withdrawal, I won't accept one," he told a news conference at his retreat in Camp David, Maryland, on Friday.
"So if they want to try again that which I have said was unacceptable, then of course I'll veto it," Bush said.
"But I hope it doesn't come to that. I believe we can work a way forward. And I think we can come to our senses and make sure that we get the money to the troops in a timely fashion," he said.
Passed
The bill passed 218-208 in the House of Representatives on Wednesday and 51-46 in the Senate on Thursday and has a non-binding target of completing the troop pullout by March 31, 2008.
Bush could veto the legislation early next week with the aim of quickly getting a new bill on his desk acceptable to both sides as soon as possible to provide the money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The showdown between Bush and Congress comes in the context of Americans' mounting disapproval of the four-year-old war and Bush's strategy to deploy additional troops to Iraq to quell violence bordering on civil war.
The New York Times reported yesterday that the Bush administration did not plan to make its first formal assessment of whether a US troop "surge" now under way in Iraq is producing results until September.
Citing unnamed senior administration officials, the newspaper said many top Bush advisers now anticipated that even by then any gains will be limited.
The Democrats regained control of Congress in November elections largely on voter anger over the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 on the basis of now discredited intelligence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and the violence that has cost more than 3,300 US lives.
In a damning new book, reported on Friday by The New York Times, former CIA director George Tenet says there was no serious debate within the US administration ahead of the Iraq invasion.
Scapegoated
Tenet, who led the CIA in the runup to and after the war launched to eliminate the alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, also says he was scapegoated by the White House when no WMDs were found in Iraq.
In his book At the Center of the Storm, to be published on Monday, Tenet defends his own role in the decision to attack Iraq while blasting Vice President Dick Cheney and other US officials, the New York Times reported on Friday after it obtained a copy of the book.
"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," Tenet writes.
He also said, according to the Times, that the Bush administration never undertook a "serious discussion" about the option of containing Iraq without resorting to an attack.
The US military came in for sharp criticism on Friday by one of its own.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling said that generals had failed to prepare the military for counter-insurgency warfare, kept silent when the country went to war with too few troops, and botched the post-invasion occupation.
"In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war," Yingling wrote in an essay published in the Armed Forces Journal.
"These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps," he wrote.
The deputy commander of the army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Yingling has served two combat tours in Iraq, and before that tours in Bosnia and the 1991 Gulf War.
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