Bush Vows Veto if Funding Bill Includes Troop Withdrawal Language

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

March 28, 2007 – President Bush said today he will veto any bill that reaches his desk containing a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. "It makes no sense for politicians in Washington, D.C., to be dictating arbitrary timelines for our military commanders in a war zone 6,000 miles away," Bush said.

In a speech to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association meeting here, Bush said politicians on Capitol Hill are playing politics, and he condemned efforts to put non-emergency items in the emergency supplemental war funding request.

Both the Senate and House have passed versions of the supplemental measure, and both versions call for troop withdrawal.

Bush said the bills neglect the fact that initial responses from Baghdad indicate the new security plan for the city is working. The Iraqi people are feeling safer and are turning in those who mean harm, he added. "The Iraqi people are beginning to gain confidence," the president said.

Bush said the bills also ignore that the plan, begun with such promise, has only about half of its troops in place so far. The Baghdad security plan calls for an extra 21,500 U.S. combat troops. Just over three brigades have arrived so far, with full operational capability not expected until the end of May.

The bill would damage U.S. efforts in Iraq in some basic ways, the president said. It imposes unnecessary restrictions on U.S. commanders in Iraq and places rigid conditions on the Iraqi government, he said.

"It would mandate a precipitous withdrawal of American forces if every one of these conditions is not met by a date certain," he said. "Even if they are met, the bill would still require that most American forces begin retreating from Iraq by March 1st of next year, regardless of conditions on the ground."

If the bill becomes law, "our enemies in Iraq would simply have to mark their calendars," Bush said.

The House bill cuts funding for the Iraqi security forces if Iraqi leaders do not meet certain deadlines. He said House leaders cannot say the Iraqis must do more and then take away the funds needed for the missions.

Finally, the House bill would add billions of dollars in domestic spending completely unrelated to the war, Bush said.

The president called the Senate bill no better than the House version. The Senate bill also sets a date for U.S. withdrawal and cuts funds for Iraqi security forces. The Senate bill also has add-ons not related to military operations.

"Here's the bottom line: the House and Senate bills have too much pork, too many conditions on our commanders and an artificial timetable for withdrawal," he said. "And I have made it clear for weeks (that) if either version comes to my desk, I'm going to veto it."

In all likelihood, Bush said, his veto would be sustained, so he called on Congress to revamp the bill because "the clock is ticking for our troops in the field." Current funding for forces will begin to run out in mid-April, the president said.

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Gates, Pace Talk About Iranian Involvement in Iraq

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

Feb. 15, 2007 – The U.S. military's goal in laying out the case against Iranians helping U.S. enemies in Iraq is to "stop these people from killing our troops, period," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said here today. Gates and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke during a Pentagon news conference.

The Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that carries out terrorist attacks outside Iran and trains fundamentalist Islam terrorist groups outside the country, is believed to be in Iraq, supplying insurgents with weapons and training.

The secretary gave his strongest denial to date that the United States is seeking a fight with Iran. "For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran," he said. "We are not planning on a war with Iran. What we are trying to do is, inside Iraq, disrupt the networks that put these weapons in the hands of those who kill our troops. That's it."

Gates and Pace addressed the issue following a Baghdad briefing Feb. 11 that was unclear about Iranian government involvement in shipping improvised explosive devices - especially the very deadly weapons called explosively shaped projectiles - into Iraq.
Pace commented on the situation this week while on a visit to Australia, saying he wanted the briefing to be very precise in separating what is fact and what are assumptions or conclusions based on those facts.

"We know there are explosives and weapons being used inside Iraq that were manufactured in Iran," Pace said in Australia. "We know that on two occasions, while aggressively attacking the IED network, that we have policed up Iranians. Those Iranians are Quds Force members."

At the Pentagon today, Pace said confusion over whether the United States believes the highest levels of the Iranian government are involved may have resulted from unclear differentiation between fact and analysis at the Baghdad briefing.

Gates said his guidance for the briefing was to focus on facts. "I think it was ... very important to present the facts as we know them," Gates said. "To the degree I had any involvement, it was to say I want factual statements. I don't want adjectives, I don't want adverbs, I want declarative sentences, and make it exactly clear what we know and what we don't know."

Gates said no one knows how high up in the Iranian government the knowledge of these activities goes.

"We assume that the leadership of the IRGC knows about this," Gates said. "Whether or not senior leaders in Iran know about it, we don't know."

Gates said that regardless of the level of involvement in the Iranian government, the situation is cause for worry. It's a problem, he said, if senior Iranian leaders know about the IED operations in Iraq. But if Iran's leaders don't know, he explained, it's still a problem.

"Either they do know and have approved it, or they don't know and the IRGC may be acting on their own in Iraq," Gates said. "So the honest answer is basically the same answer I gave you a couple of weeks ago. We don't know how high it is."

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