Obama’s statement recommends a withdrawal pace of one to two combat brigades a month, ending in 16 months.
“That would be the summer of 2010 – more than seven years after the war began. U.S. must apply pressure on the Iraqi government to work toward real political accommodation," Obama’s plan said.
"There is no military solution to Iraq’s political differences, but the Bush administration’s blank check approach has failed to press Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future or to substantially spend their oil revenues on their own reconstruction."
Regional Talks
Obama also has proposed dusting off the recommendations from the Iraq Study Group, which was headed by Bush family confidante James Baker and called for engaging Iran and Syria in discussions on stabilizing the region.
Bush brushed aside the Iraq Study Group’s report in December 2006 and instead followed a neoconservative plan to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq in what was called a “surge.”
Since then, more than 1,000 additional U.S. soldiers have died, but Bush and the neocons claim credit for reductions in levels of violence across Iraq.
Obama is scheduled to meet with Bush at the White House on Monday and it is likely Obama’s plan for Iraq will come up, according to two members of Obama’s transition team.
Last summer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer engineered a $162 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan that funded the war until mid-2009 without a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops, a move that angered many rank-and-file Democrats.
Pelosi apparently did not want to risk a political fight that she thought might jeopardize Democratic seats in Congress or reduce Obama’s chances of winning the White House.
Pelosi also explained, unconvincingly to some, that although she and her Democratic colleagues campaigned during the 2006 midterm elections on a promise to bring about a swift end to the war in Iraq, the party’s razor-thin majorities made it impossible to push through legislation to enact that goal
At a news conference on Wednesday, Pelosi made scant reference to ending the Iraq War, calling it a “priority” but declining to elaborate.
Progressive Democrats and senior members of the Out of Iraq Caucus, including Rep. Maxine Waters and Rep. Lynn Woolsey, are expected to hold up funding for Iraq operations next year unless there are clear benchmarks and timetables for withdrawal attached to spending bills.
Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow and budget scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who has closely tracked spending on the Iraq War, said Congress must change its spending habits.
In an interview, de Rugy said the Congress must end its “addiction” to emergency spending, which deprives lawmakers of the routine opportunity to scrutinize how the Pentagon spends the money.
Last month, the Congressional Research Service, an investigative arm of Congress, said the Bush administration’s reliance on emergency war funding circumvented normal budget constraints, reduced oversight and created opportunities for slipping in pet projects.
Emergency supplemental requests account for nearly all of the $661 billion spent thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“That’s unprecedented,” de Rugy said. “Never before has emergency supplemental spending been used to fund an entire war and over the course of so many years. Other wars were initially funded through emergency supplementals but eventually it went through the regular budget process.”
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