History > 2007 > USA > Politics > White House

George W. Bush (I)

President George W. Bush

concludes his address to the nation Wednesday evening, Jan. 10, 2007,

from the White House Library,

where President Bush outlined a new strategy on Iraq.

White House photo by Eric Draper

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/
images/20070110-7_g8o0232-745v.html

President's Address to the Nation

The Library

9:01 P.M. EST

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html

Bush Declares Iran’s

Arms Role in Iraq Is Certain

February 15, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
and MARC SANTORA

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — President Bush said Wednesday that he was certain that factions within the Iranian government had supplied Shiite militants in Iraq with deadly roadside bombs that had killed American troops. But he said he did not know whether Iran’s highest officials had directed the attacks.

Mr. Bush’s remarks amounted to his most specific accusation to date that Iran was undermining security in Iraq. They appeared to be part of a concerted effort by the White House to present a clearer, more direct case that Iran was supplying the potent weapons — and to push back against criticism that the intelligence used in reaching the conclusions was not credible.

Speaking at a news conference in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Bush dismissed as “preposterous” the contention by some skeptics that the United States was drawing unwarranted conclusions about Iran’s role. He publicly endorsed assertions that had until now been presented only by anonymous military and intelligence officials, who have said that an elite branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps known as the Quds Force has provided Shiite militias in Iraq with the sophisticated weapons that have been responsible for killing at least 170 American soldiers and wounding more than 600.

“I can say with certainty that the Quds Force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated I.E.D.’s that have harmed our troops,” Mr. Bush said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device. “And I’d like to repeat, I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government. But my point is, what’s worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and its happening?”

The House of Representatives is debating a resolution disapproving of Mr. Bush’s plan to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. [Page A16.] And so Mr. Bush used his appearance to defend that decision as necessary in the face of deteriorating security in Baghdad. Asked about a possible American response to Iranian interference, he said, “We will continue to protect our troops.” With skeptics asking why the intelligence about Iran’s meddling is coming to light now, a number of possibilities have been raised, including the increase in attacks and American casualties in recent months.

American intelligence officials have said they think that top leaders in Iran must have approved of the attacks on the American forces, in part because the Quds Force has historically reported to the country’s top religious leaders. But aides to Mr. Bush, mindful of the criticism about its use of intelligence before the Iraq war, said the White House wanted to be careful not to make that kind of accusation without hard proof.

As Mr. Bush discussed Iran in Washington, the chief American military spokesman in Baghdad provided a more detailed, on-the-record account of how the administration believed the weapons, particularly lethal explosive devices known as explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.’s, got to Iraq. The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, was also careful not to link the actions of the Quds Force directly to Iran’s top leaders. He said American assertions about a link between the weapons and the force were based on information obtained from people, including Iranians, detained in Iraq in the past 60 days.

“They in fact have told us that the Quds Force provides support to extremist groups here in Iraq in the forms of both money and weaponry,” General Caldwell said. He added: “They have talked about how there are extremist elements that are given this material in Iran and then it is smuggled into Iraq. We have in fact stopped some at the border and discovered it there, coming from Iran into Iraq.”

The coordinated messages out of Baghdad and Washington were an effort by the White House to tamp down reports of divisions within the American government about who in Iran should be held responsible for the weapons shipments. A senior Defense analyst said at a briefing in Baghdad over the weekend that the effort was being directed “from the highest levels of the Iranian government.” But Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered a contradictory account this week, telling The Associated Press that while some bomb materials were made in Iran, “that does not translate that the Iranian government, per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this.”

At Wednesday’s news conference, Mr. Bush suggested that it did not matter whether senior leaders were involved. “What matters is, is that we’re responding,” Mr. Bush said. He said that if the United States found either networks or individuals “who are moving these devices into Iraq, we will deal with them.”

Some experts said the question of Iran’s responsibility remained important. “There’s a big difference between saying that there is a rogue element doing things and then asking the Iranian government to rein it in, as opposed to saying this is a calculated deliberate strategy of the Iranian government,” said Vali Nasr, a Middle East scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That has very different implications in terms of how do you hold Iran culpable.”

The administration’s claims about Iran have been met with intense skepticism, from Democrats in Congress and from experts like David Kay, who led the search for illicit weapons in Iraq. Some critics have said the White House is using Iran as a scapegoat for its problems in Iraq, and some have suggested that the administration, which has been trying to pressure Iran into abandoning its nuclear program, is laying the foundation for another war.

On Wednesday, a leading contender for the Democratic nomination for president, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, took to the Senate floor to call on Mr. Bush to seek authorization for any military action against Iran. “We cannot and we must not allow recent history to repeat itself,” she said.

Mr. Bush has said that he has no intention of invading Iran and that any suggestion that he was trying to provoke Iran “is just a wrong way to characterize the commander in chief’s decision to do what is necessary to protect our soldiers in harm’s way.” But experts say that the ratcheting up of accusations could provoke a confrontation. Gary Sick, an expert on Iran at Columbia University, said there was a “danger of accidental war.” He said, “If anything goes wrong, if something happens, there’s an unexplained explosion and we kidnap an Iranian, and the Iranians respond to that somehow, this could get out of control.”

Mr. Bush has also refused to meet with Iran’s leaders, and he said Wednesday that he did not believe that it would be an effective way of persuading the Iranians to give up their nuclear goals. “This is a world in which people say, ‘Meet! Sit down and meet!’ ” he said. “And my answer is, if it yields results, that’s what I’m interested in.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Washington, and Marc Santora from Baghdad.

    Bush Declares Iran’s Arms Role in Iraq Is Certain, NYT, 15.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html

Inquiry on Intelligence Gaps

May Reach to White House

February 10, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Friday that he would ask current and former White House aides to testify about a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general that criticizes the Pentagon for compiling “alternative intelligence” that made the case for invading Iraq.

The chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said that among those called to testify could be Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, a former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Both received a briefing from the defense secretary’s policy office in 2002 on possible links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government.

In its report on Thursday, the acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, found that the work done by the Pentagon team, which was assembled by Douglas J. Feith, a former under secretary of defense for policy, was “not fully supported by the available intelligence.”

It was not clear whether Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby would testify. The White House normally resists having top aides testify before Congress.

The Senate Intelligence Committee may also seek to question the men. Tara Andringa, a spokeswoman for Mr. Levin, said Mr. Levin planned to consult with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of that committee. Mr. Levin is on both committees.

The inspector general’s report found that while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it made dubious interpretations of intelligence reports and shared them with senior officials without making clear that its findings had already been discounted or discredited by the main intelligence agencies.

“The actions, in our opinion, were inappropriate, given that all the products did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intel community, and in some cases were shown as intel products,” Mr. Gimble told the Armed Services Committee in a hearing on Friday.

That set off a two-hour partisan clash. Democrats argued that the report showed intelligence had been manipulated to justify an invasion of Iraq, and Republicans insisted that Mr. Feith’s office did nothing wrong by reaching conclusions that differed from those of the main intelligence agencies and presenting them to higher-ups, who had asked for the re-examination in the first place.

Senator Levin, who has long been a leading critic of Mr. Feith’s role, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” by Mr. Feith. But Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, responded, “I don’t think in any way that his report can be interpreted as a devastating condemnation.”

Mr. Gimble said formal intelligence findings did not corroborate some of the Pentagon’s assertions: that Mr. Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda had a “mature symbiotic relationship,” that it involved a “shared interest and pursuit of” unconventional weapons and that there were “some indications” of coordination between Iraq and Al Qaeda on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The briefers from Mr. Feith’s office should have noted their departures from the formal consensus findings of intelligence agencies, Mr. Gimble said.

Representative Ike Skelton, a Democrat from Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Feith’s office exercised “extremely poor judgment for which our nation, and our service members in particular, are paying a terrible price.”

Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, noted that Mr. Feith’s superiors at the Pentagon had asked him to re-examine intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Therefore, Mr. Sessions said, there was no need for the briefers to point out that their conclusions differed from those of the C.I.A., because the briefing was intended as a “critique” of the agencies’ conclusions.

A similar argument has been made in a formal rebuttal to the inspector general that was prepared by Mr. Feith’s successor at the Pentagon.

Inquiry on Intelligence Gaps May Reach to White House, NYT, 10.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/washington/10feith.html

Editorial

Mr. Bush’s Improbable Budget

February 8, 2007
The New York Times

President Bush claims that his new $2.9 trillion budget request is a tough-minded plan for balancing the books by 2012. In reality, it’s a smokescreen for making Mr. Bush’s tax cuts permanent — and either hollowing out the government in the process or digging the country deeper into debt.

The budget is based on a series of improbable, if not dishonest, assumptions. To make it appear as if the tax cuts are affordable in the near term, it assumes that the Pentagon will not spend a single penny on Iraq or Afghanistan after 2009. It also assumes there will be no costs for fixing the alternative minimum tax after this year, even though Mr. Bush and virtually every politician in America is committed to such relief.

The new budget would also slash key entitlement programs and punish many of the country’s most vulnerable citizens. Sharp reductions are envisioned for Medicare, with cuts of $66 billion over five years, and Medicaid, down approximately $11 billion. Some of the Medicare proposals could serve as useful starting points for a debate on controlling costs through such steps as raising premiums for high-income beneficiaries. But the Medicaid cuts would be largely counterproductive. At a time when the number of uninsured children is rising, the cuts would force many states to reduce their Medicaid rolls.

Mr. Bush’s budget would also take an ax to most other domestic spending. One program that would be gone entirely in 2008 provides monthly bags of groceries, each worth less than $20, to 440,000 needy elderly people. The $99 million block grant to states to help pay for preventive health care would also be eliminated. Other cuts — in Head Start, veterans’ health care, environmental protection, scientific research, low-income housing and heating assistance, to name a few — would start in 2008 and grow, totaling $114 billion over five years. Such cuts would be shortsighted and cruel. They would also be politically impossible to enact — further exposing Mr. Bush’s budget as the sham it is.

Even if they were achievable, the proposed spending reductions would be grossly unfair. Government programs that serve middle-class and low-income Americans would be slashed to offset the cost of extending tax cuts that favor the rich. In 2012 alone, the president’s new budget would cut domestic discretionary spending by $34 billion, while tax cuts for households with incomes above $1 million would total $73 billion. In all, by 2012, 20 percent of the tax cuts would go to that richest sliver of Americans; one-third of the benefits would go to households with incomes over $400,000.

Mr. Bush’s new budget has a few worthwhile nuggets, like a proposed increase in Pell grants for low-income college students and a jump in the funds for AIDS treatment worldwide. In drafting a real budget, Congress can take those items from the president’s version, and jettison the rest.

Mr. Bush’s Improbable Budget, NYT, 8.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/opinion/08thur1.html

Bush Releases Budget

Aimed to Erase Deficit

February 6, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 — President Bush unveiled a $2.9 trillion budget on Monday that he said would wipe out the deficit in five years without raising taxes, setting up a clash with the Democratic-run Congress and charting a course for Republicans to continue his policies long after he leaves office.

The budget, in four volumes and 2,500 pages of text, charts and tables, made few concessions to the political realities facing Mr. Bush.

For a president less than two years from the end of his second term, and with his poll numbers low, it was a defiant statement of the principles he has championed for years: the power of tax cuts to drive the economy, the need to spend what it takes to succeed in Iraq and in the broader struggle against terrorism and the necessity of reining in spending on much of the rest of what government does.

Speaking to reporters after meeting with the cabinet, the president said, “We have proven, and I strongly believe Congress needs to listen to, a budget which has no tax increase, and a budget, because of fiscal discipline, that can be balanced in five years.”

He said the plan “is realistic; it’s achievable.”

To the Democrats who now run Congress, it was little more than a prop in a bit of theater that the White House used to try to define the fiscal debate on its terms.

While all presidential budgets are political documents as much as economic plans, this one, Democrats said, would get little hearing on Capitol Hill. They said the budget was built on flawed assumptions and fiscal trickery, including the failure to include estimates for the long-term cost of the war.

“What he’s saying is, basically you can have it all — you can spend the money, especially on defense and the war, and you can cut every tax, and it all works,” Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said in an interview. “But in the real world, it doesn’t work out.”

The budget calls for $145.2 billion for the war in the year starting Oct. 1, mostly for Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of a new request for an additional $99.6 billion to pay for the war for the balance of the current fiscal year. It includes money to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps and hire more Border Patrol agents, but imposes steep cuts in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid. It would trim or eliminate other domestic programs, like one providing loans for vocational education.

Assuming that all of Mr. Bush’s proposals were agreed to by Congress, that his economic assumptions panned out and that the costs of the war dropped sharply and then went away in coming years, the budget would bring the deficit down from a projected level of $244 billion this year to $239 billion next year. In 2012, three years after he leaves the White House, there would be a surplus of $61 billion.

The document provided Mr. Bush’s fellow Republicans with talking points to use in asserting that tax cuts have helped keep the economy strong, as they confront calls from some Democrats to roll back some of the tax cuts Mr. Bush signed into law in his first term. John Edwards, the Democratic candidate for president, said Monday that he would support raising taxes on upper-income people to help pay for his proposal to provide health coverage to the uninsured.

In an internal party strategy memorandum circulated on Capitol Hill, a senior Republican aide wrote that the budget “gives us a huge (and rare, given our new status) opportunity to get a jump on the Democrats and stay on the offensive for weeks to come.”

The memorandum continued, “Our message will be one that repeatedly challenges the Democrats to rein in federal spending and balance the budget without raising taxes on the American people.”

But it was also to some degree a longer-term legacy-building document for Mr. Bush, an effort to bake into the fiscal cake many of the domestic policies that have defined his presidency and conservative economic thought in the last several decades. And while the two parties have different views of how much to credit the Bush tax cuts for the economy’s current condition, the government’s books, at least in the short run, are benefiting from a jump in tax revenues that has already brought the deficit down substantially in the past several years.

The White House promises to achieve its balanced-budget goal, in part, by limiting the growth of all federal programs, outside of the military and domestic security, to 1 percent. In addition to assuming spending restraint, the budget assumes the economy and federal tax revenues will continue to grow — assumptions that Rob Portman, Mr. Bush’s budget director, described as “a cautious approach” rather than “a rosy scenario.”

The 2008 proposal is the first Bush administration budget to include emergency spending requests for Iraq and Afghanistan, a move Mr. Portman called “our good-faith effort to be as transparent as possible.” But that transparency came only after repeated complaints from lawmakers of both parties, who had grown tired of considering budgets that left out the bulk of war spending.

Just hours after the budget message was released, the Senate was locked in a procedural showdown over the Iraq resolution opposing Mr. Bush’s troop buildup. Disagreements on the war, within parties and between them, are so profound that Senator Conrad, the Budget Committee chairman, predicted that a fight over Iraq spending might prevent his committee from adopting any budget at all.

“Can you imagine getting every Democrat to agree on spending for the war?” Mr. Conrad asked.

As he has in years past, Mr. Bush uses the budget to challenge Democrats to rein in the growth of the government’s biggest entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The 2008 proposal includes plans to divert payroll taxes from Social Security into private accounts, a plan that went nowhere in the past, even when Republicans ran Capitol Hill.

The blueprint also calls for the government to reduce its projected spending on Medicare and Medicaid by a total of $280 billion over the life of the 10-year budget. While Democrats criticized Mr. Bush for what Speaker Nancy Pelosi called “wrong priorities,” they conceded privately that Mr. Bush was correct in warning that the unchecked growth of entitlement programs would eventually break the federal bank.

As in years past, domestic security would see a big increase under Mr. Bush’s budget, with spending rising by 8.4 percent to $61.1 billion. The plan includes enough new money for the Border Patrol to hire 3,000 new agents, bringing the total force to 17,819, compared with just over 9,000 in 2001. By the end of 2008, a total of about 370 miles of fence would be laid out on the border, compared with about 75 miles today.

In yet another sign of the times for Mr. Bush, the plan drew criticism from a leading Republican, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who is her party’s senior member on the domestic security committee. Ms. Collins said the budget “highlights the chronic and troubling underfunding” of grant programs for first responders.

Mr. Bush has long been criticized by some conservatives as being too willing to tolerate a steady expansion in the size of the federal government; some commentators refer to him, usually not admiringly, as a big-government conservative.

This budget calls for a 4.2 percent increase next year in overall government spending, down from a 4.8 percent increase between last year and this year.

The budget includes isolated increases for a few popular federal programs, including two in the area of education, which Mr. Bush considers a signature domestic issue. The White House called for gradually raising over five years the maximum Pell Grant for aid to needy college students to $5,400 a year from $4,050. Mr. Bush also proposed a $1.2 billion increase in aid to high schools that educate predominantly low-income youngsters.

But the president also proved willing to propose reining in the popular health program called Schip that provides insurance to low-income children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid.

The budget calls for only slim spending increases in the Schip program, so slim that Democrats say they are tantamount to cuts when inflation is considered. The budget also sets new rules limiting eligibility to youngsters with family incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $38,000 for a family of four.

Carl Hulse, Eric Lipton and Diana Jean Schemo contributed reporting.

    Bush Releases Budget Aimed to Erase Deficit, NYT, 6.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/washington/06budget.html

Bush Sends Congress a $2.9 Trillion Budget

February 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:39 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush sent a $2.9 trillion spending plan to a Democratic-controlled Congress on Monday, proposing to spend billions more to fight the war in Iraq while squeezing the rest of government to meet his goal of eliminating the deficit in five years. Democrats widely attacked the plan and even a prominent Republican said it faced bleak prospects.

Bush's spending plan would make his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a cost of $1.6 trillion over 10 years. He is seeking $78 billion in savings in the government's big health care programs -- Medicare and Medicaid -- over the next five years.

Release of the budget in four massive volumes kicks off months of debate in which Democrats, now in control of both the House and Senate for the first time in Bush's presidency, made clear that they have significantly different views on spending and taxes.

''The president's budget is filled with debt and deception, disconnected from reality and continues to move America in the wrong direction,'' said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C., said, ''I doubt that Democrats will support this budget, and frankly, I will be surprised if Republicans rally around it either.''

Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, agreed with the bleak assessment of Bush's prospects of getting Congress to approve his budget as proposed.

''Unfortunately, I don't think it has got a whole lot of legs,'' Gregg said, contending there is a wide gulf between the two parties. ''The White House is afraid of taxes and the Democrats are afraid of controlling spending,'' Gregg said.

The president insisted that he had made the right choices to keep the nation secure from terrorist threats and the economy growing.

''I strongly believe Congress needs to listen to a budget which says no tax increase and a budget, because of fiscal discipline, that can be balanced in five years,'' Bush told reporters after meeting with his Cabinet.

Just as Iraq has come to dominate Bush's presidency, military spending was a major element in the president's new spending request. Bush was seeking a Pentagon budget of $624.6 billion for 2008, more than one-fifth of the total budget, up from $600.3 billion in 2007.

For the first time, the Pentagon included details for the upcoming budget year on how much the Iraq war would cost -- an estimated $141.7 billion for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the cost of repairing and replacing equipment lost in combat.

But White House spokesman Tony Fratto cautioned that the 2008 projection was likely to change. ''We're not saying the number for '08 is the final number.''

The Bush budget includes just $50 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2009 and no money after that year. But the president rejected the suggestion that the administration was setting a timetable for troop withdrawal.

''There will be no timetable set,'' Bush told reporters. He said that would send the wrong signal to the enemy, the struggling Iraq democracy and the troops.

Bush projected a deficit in the current year of $244 billion, just slightly lower than last year's $248 billion imbalance. For 2008, the budget year that begins next Oct. 1, Bush sees another slight decline in the deficit to $239 billion. He sees that decline continuing over the next three years until the budget records a surplus of $61 billion in 2012, three years after Bush has left office.

Democrats, however, challenged those projections, contending that Bush only achieves a surplus by leaving out the billions of dollars Congress is expected to spend to keep the alternative minimum tax from ensnaring millions of middle-class taxpayers. His budget includes an AMT fix only for 2008.

Bush projects government spending in 2008 of $2.9 trillion, a 4.9 percent increase from the $2.78 trillion in outlays the administration is projecting for this year. However, the administration notes that the 2007 total is only an estimate, given that Congress is still working to complete a massive omnibus spending bill to cover most agencies for the rest of this fiscal year.

To help achieve what would be the government's first surplus since 2001, Bush is proposing $95.9 billion in savings in mandatory spending, the part of the budget that includes the big benefit programs of Social Security and health care.

Medicare, which provides health insurance for 43 million older and disabled Americans, would see the bulk of those savings -- reductions of $66 billion over five years. That would come about primarily by slowing the growth of payments to health care providers.

Additional savings would be achieved by charging higher income Medicare beneficiaries bigger monthly premiums.

While Bush said something had to be done to get control of spiraling health care costs, Congress refused to go along last year with Bush's effort for smaller reductions in Medicare.

Bush would seek to eliminate or sharply reduce 141 government programs for a five-year savings of $12 billion. But many of those reductions he has proposed in past budgets -- only to see them rejected by Congress.

Bush once listed overhauling Social Security as the No. 1 domestic priority of his second term. But his effort two years ago to accomplish this goal by diverting some Social Security taxes into private investment accounts went nowhere in Congress. He included the private accounts again in this year's budget. But to minimize the impact, he only showed the program taking effect in 2012, when the private accounts would cost $29.3 billion.

The president's budget also includes an initiative to expand health care coverage to the uninsured through a complex proposal that would give every family a $15,000 tax deduction for purchasing health coverage but would make current employee-supplied health coverage taxable for certain taxpayers.

Bush is also proposing to increase the maximum Pell grant, which goes to low-income students, from the current $4,050 to $4,600. Democrats are pushing for even larger increases.

Bush's energy proposals would expand use of ethanol and other renewable fuels with a goal of cutting gasoline use by 20 percent over the next decade.

Bush Sends Congress a $2.9 Trillion Budget, NYT, 5.2.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Budget.html

Contractors Take On

Biggest Role Ever in Washington

February 4, 2007
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and RON NIXON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government’s reflexive answer to almost every problem.

They hired another contractor.

It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour. Six CACI workers soon joined hundreds of other private-sector workers at the G.S.A., the government’s management agency.

Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.

Contractors still build ships and satellites, but they also collect income taxes and work up agency budgets, fly pilotless spy aircraft and take the minutes at policy meetings on the war. They sit next to federal employees at nearly every agency; far more people work under contracts than are directly employed by the government. Even the government’s online database for tracking contracts, the Federal Procurement Data System, has been outsourced (and is famously difficult to use).

The contracting explosion raises questions about propriety, cost and accountability that have long troubled watchdog groups and are coming under scrutiny from the Democratic majority in Congress. While flagrant cases of fraud and waste make headlines, concerns go beyond outright wrongdoing. Among them:

¶Competition, intended to produce savings, appears to have sharply eroded. An analysis by The New York Times shows that fewer than half of all “contract actions” — new contracts and payments against existing contracts — are now subject to full and open competition. Just 48 percent were competitive in 2005, down from 79 percent in 2001.

¶The most secret and politically delicate government jobs, like intelligence collection and budget preparation, are increasingly contracted out, despite regulations forbidding the outsourcing of “inherently governmental” work. Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said allowing CACI workers to review other contractors captured in microcosm “a government that’s run by corporations.”

¶Agencies are crippled in their ability to seek low prices, supervise contractors and intervene when work goes off course because the number of government workers overseeing contracts has remained level as spending has shot up. One federal contractor explained candidly in a conference call with industry analysts last May that “one of the side benefits of the contracting officers being so overwhelmed” was that existing contracts were extended rather than put up for new competitive bidding.

¶The most successful contractors are not necessarily those doing the best work, but those who have mastered the special skill of selling to Uncle Sam. The top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns. “We’ve created huge behemoths that are doing 90 or 95 percent of their business with the government,” said Peter W. Singer, who wrote a book on military outsourcing. “They’re not really companies, they’re quasi agencies.” Indeed, the biggest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin, which has spent $53 million on lobbying and $6 million on donations since 2000, gets more federal money each year than the Departments of Justice or Energy.

¶Contracting almost always leads to less public scrutiny, as government programs are hidden behind closed corporate doors. Companies, unlike agencies, are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Members of Congress have sought unsuccessfully for two years to get the Army to explain the contracts for Blackwater USA security officers in Iraq, which involved several costly layers of subcontractors.

Weighing the Limits

The contracting surge has raised bipartisan alarms. A just-completed study by experts appointed by the White House and Congress, the Acquisition Advisory Panel, found that the trend “poses a threat to the government’s long-term ability to perform its mission” and could “undermine the integrity of the government’s decision making.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whose new Democratic chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, added the word “oversight” to signal his intentions, begins a series of investigative hearings on Tuesday focusing on contracts in Iraq and at the Department of Homeland Security.

“Billions of dollars are being squandered, and the taxpayer is being taken to the cleaners,” said Mr. Waxman, who got an “F” rating last year from the Contract Services Association, an industry coalition. The chairman he succeeded, Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, earned an “A.”

David M. Walker, who as comptroller general of the United States leads the Government Accountability Office, has urged Congress to take a hard look at the proper limits of contracting. Mr. Walker has not taken a stand against contractors — his agency is also dependent on them, he admits — but he says they often fail to deliver the promised efficiency and savings. Private companies cannot be expected to look out for taxpayers’ interests, he said.

“There’s something civil servants have that the private sector doesn’t,” Mr. Walker said in an interview. “And that is the duty of loyalty to the greater good — the duty of loyalty to the collective best interest of all rather than the interest of a few. Companies have duties of loyalty to their shareholders, not to the country.”

Even the most outspoken critics acknowledge that the government cannot operate without contractors, which provide the surge capacity to handle crises without expanding the permanent bureaucracy. Contractors provide specialized skills the government does not have. And it is no secret that some government executives favor contractors because they find the federal bureaucracy slow, inflexible or incompetent.

Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, which represents government contractors, acknowledged occasional chicanery by contractors and too little competition in some areas. But Mr. Soloway asserted that critics had exaggerated the contracting problems.

“I don’t happen to think the system is fundamentally broken,” he said. “It’s remarkable how well it works, given the dollar volume.”

Blurring the Lines

Wariness of government contracting dates at least to 1941, when Harry S. Truman, then a senator, declared, “I have never yet found a contractor who, if not watched, would not leave the government holding the bag.”

But the recent contracting boom had its origins in the “reinventing government” effort of the Clinton administration, which slashed the federal work force to the lowest level since 1960 and streamlined outsourcing. Limits on what is “inherently governmental” and therefore off-limits to contractors have grown fuzzy, as the General Services Administration’s use of CACI International personnel shows.

“Hi Heinz,” Renee Ballard, a G.S.A. official, wrote in an e-mail message to Heinz Ruppmann, a CACI official, last June 12, asking for six “contract specialists” to help with a backlog of 226 cases that could lead to companies being suspended or barred from federal contracting. The CACI workers would review files and prepare “proposed responses for review and signature,” she wrote.

Mr. Amey, of the Project on Government Oversight, which obtained the contract documents under the Freedom of Information Act, said such work was clearly inherently governmental and called it “outrageous” to involve contractors in judging the misdeeds of potential competitors. CACI had itself been reviewed in 2004 for possible suspension in connection with supplying interrogators to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The company was ultimately cleared, though the G.S.A. found that CACI employees had improperly written parts of the “statements of work” for its own Iraq contract.

The price of $104 an hour — well over $200,000 per person annually — was roughly double the cost of pay and benefits of a comparable federal worker, Mr. Amey said.

Asked for comment, the G.S.A. said decisions on punishments for erring contractors “is indeed inherently governmental.” But the agency said that while the CACI workers assisted for three months, “all suspension/debarment decisions were made by federal employees.” A CACI spokeswoman made the same point.

The G.S.A., like other agencies, said it did not track the number or total cost of its contract workers. The agency administrator, Lurita Doan, who previously ran a Virginia contracting firm, has actively pushed contracting. Ms. Doan recently clashed with her agency’s inspector general over her proposal to remove the job of auditing contractors’ proposed prices from his office and to hire contractors to do it instead.

On some of the biggest government projects, Bush administration officials have sought to shift some decision making to contractors. When Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, addressed potential bidders on the huge Secure Border Initiative last year, he explained the new approach.

“This is an unusual invitation,” said Mr. Jackson, a contracting executive before joining the agency. “We’re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business.”

Boeing, which won the $80 million first phase of the estimated $2 billion project, is assigned not only to develop technology but also to propose how to use it, which includes assigning roles to different government agencies and contractors. Homeland Security officials insist that they will make all final decisions, but the department’s inspector general, Richard L. Skinner, reported bluntly in November that “the department does not have the capacity needed to effectively plan, oversee and execute the SBInet program.”
 

A ‘Blended Work Force’

If the government is exporting some traditional functions to contractors, it is also inviting contractors into agencies to perform delicate tasks. The State Department, for instance, pays more than $2 million a year to BearingPoint, the consulting giant, to provide support for Iraq policy making, running software, preparing meeting agendas and keeping minutes.

State Department officials insist that the company’s workers, who hold security clearances, merely relieve diplomats of administrative tasks and never influence policy. But the presence of contractors inside closed discussions on war strategy is a notable example of what officials call the “blended work force.”

That blending is taking place in virtually every agency. When Polly Endreny, 29, sought work last year with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, she was surprised to discover that most openings were with contractors.

“The younger generation is coming in on contracts,” said Ms. Endreny, who likes the arrangement. Today, only the “Oak Management” on her ID badge distinguishes her from federal employees at the agency’s headquarters.

She said her pay was “a little higher” than that of comparable federal workers, and she gets dental coverage they do not. Such disparities can cause trouble. A recent study of one NOAA program where two-thirds of the work force were contractors found that differences in salary and benefits could “ substantially undermine staff relations and morale.”

The shift away from open competition affects more than morale. One example among many: with troops short in Iraq, Congress in 2003 waived a ban on the use of private security guards to protect military bases in the United States. The results for the first $733 million were dismal, investigators at the Government Accountability Office found.

The Army spent 25 percent more than it had to because it used sole-source contracts at 46 of 57 sites, the investigators concluded. And screening of guards was so lax that at one base, 61 guards were hired despite criminal records, auditors reported. Yet the Army gave the contractors more than $18 million in incentive payments intended to reward good performance. (The Army did not contest G.A.O.’s findings and has changed its methods.)

A Coalition for Contracting

Mr. Soloway, of the contracting industry group, argues that the contracting boom has resulted from the collision of a high-technology economy with an aging government work force — twice as many employees are over 55 as under 30. To function, Mr. Soloway said, the government must now turn to younger, skilled personnel in the private sector, a phenomenon likely to grow when what demographers call a “retirement tsunami” occurs over the next decade.

“This is the new face of government,” Mr. Soloway said. “This isn’t companies gouging the government. This is the marketplace.”

But Paul C. Light of New York University, who has long tracked the hidden contractor work force to assess what he calls the “true size of government,” says the shift to contractors is driven in part by federal personnel ceilings. He calls such ceilings a “sleight of hand” intended to allow successive administrations to brag about cutting the federal work force.

Yet Mr. Light said the government had made no effort to count contractors and no assessment of the true costs and benefits. “We have no data to show that contractors are actually more efficient than the government,” he said.

Meanwhile, he said, a potent coalition keeps contracting growing: the companies, their lobbyists and supporters in Congress and many government managers, who do not mind building ties to contractors who may hire them someday. “All the players with any power like it,” he said.

That is evident wherever in Washington contractors gather to scout new opportunities. There is no target richer than the Homeland Security Department, whose Web site, in a section called “Open for Business,” displays hundreds of open contracts, including “working with selected cities to develop and exercise their catastrophic plans” ($500,000 to $1 million) and “Conduct studies and analyses, systems engineering, or provide laboratory services to various organizations to support the DHS mission” ($20 to $50 million).

One crisp morning in an office building with a spectacular view of the Capitol, Alfonso Martinez-Fonts Jr., the agency’s assistant secretary for the private sector, addressed a breakfast seminar on “The Business of Homeland Security.” The session drew a standing-room crowd.

Mr. Martinez-Fonts, a banker before joining the government, said he could not personally hand out contracts but could offer “tips, hints and directions” to companies on the hunt.

Joe Haddock, a Sikorsky Helicopters executive, summed up the tone of the session. “To us contractors,” Mr. Haddock said, “money is always a good thing.”

    Contractors Take On Biggest Role Ever in Washington, NYT, 4.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/washington/04contract.html?ei=5094&en=5a19d7cad91cd66d&hp=&ex=1170651600&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1170615537-9pyFxq2nvLi6d1Rw6f30Nw

Op-Ed Contributor

Bush Is Not Above the Law

January 31, 2007
The New York Times
By JAMES BAMFORD
Washington

LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

The ruling was the result of a suit, in which I am one of the plaintiffs, brought against the National Security Agency by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was a response to revelations by this newspaper in December 2005 that the agency had been monitoring the phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans for more than four years without first obtaining warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In the past, even presidents were not above the law. When the F.B.I. turned up evidence during Watergate that Richard Nixon had obstructed justice by trying to cover up his involvement, a special prosecutor was named and a House committee recommended that the president be impeached.

And when an independent counsel found evidence that President Bill Clinton had committed perjury in the Monica Lewinsky case, the impeachment machinery again cranked into gear, with the spectacle of a Senate trial (which ended in acquittal).

Laws are broken, the federal government investigates, and the individuals involved — even if they’re presidents — are tried and, if found guilty, punished. That is the way it is supposed to work under our system of government. But not this time.

Last Aug. 17, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the United States District Court in Detroit issued her ruling in the A.C.L.U. case. The president, she wrote, had “undisputedly violated” not only the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, but also statutory law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Enacted by a bipartisan Congress in 1978, the FISA statute was a response to revelations that the National Security Agency had conducted warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. To deter future administrations from similar actions, the law made a violation a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and five years in prison.

Yet despite this ruling, the Bush Justice Department never opened an F.B.I. investigation, no special prosecutor was named, and there was no talk of impeachment in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Justice Department lawyers argued last June that warrants were not required for what they called the administration’s “terrorist surveillance program” because of the president’s “inherent powers” to order eavesdropping and because of the Congressional authorization to use military force against those responsible for 9/11. But Judge Taylor rejected both arguments, ruling that even presidents must obey statutory law and the Constitution.

On Jan. 17, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales unexpectedly declared that President Bush had ended the program, deciding to again seek warrants in all cases. Exactly what kind of warrants — individual, as is required by the law, or broad-based, which would probably still be illegal — is as yet unknown.

The action may have been designed to forestall a potentially adverse ruling by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, which had scheduled oral arguments on the case for today. At that hearing, the administration is now expected to argue that the case is moot and should be thrown out — while reserving the right to restart the program at any time.

But that’s a bit like a bank robber coming into court and arguing that, although he has been sticking up banks for the past half-decade, he has agreed to a temporary halt and therefore he shouldn’t be prosecuted. Independent of the A.C.L.U. case, a criminal investigation by the F.B.I. and a special prosecutor should begin immediately. The question that must finally be answered is whether the president is guilty of committing a felony by continuously reauthorizing the warrantless eavesdropping program for the past five years. And if so, what action must be taken?

The issue is not original. Among the charges approved by the House Judiciary Committee when it recommended its articles of impeachment against President Nixon was “illegal wiretaps.” President Nixon, the bill charged, “caused wiretaps to be placed on the telephones of 17 persons without having obtained a court order authorizing the tap, as required by federal law; in violation of Sections 241, 371 and 2510-11 of the Criminal Code.”

Under his program, President Bush could probably be charged with wiretapping not 17 but thousands of people without having obtained a court order authorizing the taps as required by federal law, in violation of FISA.

It is not only the federal court but also many in Congress who believe that a violation of law has taken place. In a hearing on Jan. 18, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said, “For years, this administration has engaged in warrantless wiretapping of Americans contrary to the law.”

His view was shared by the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who said of Mr. Bush, “For five years he has been operating an illegal program.”

And Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, noted that much of the public was opposed to the program and that it both hurt the country at home and damaged its image abroad. “The heavy criticism which the president took on the program,” he said, “I think was very harmful in the political process and for the reputation of the country.”

To allow a president to break the law and commit a felony for more than five years without even a formal independent investigation would be the ultimate subversion of the Constitution and the rule of law. As Judge Taylor warned in her decision, “There are no hereditary kings in America.”

James Bamford is the author of two books on the National Security Agency, “The Puzzle Palace” and “Body of Secrets.”

    Bush Is Not Above the Law, NYT, 31.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/opinion/31bamford.html

Bush: 'I am the decision-maker'

Updated 1/26/2007 11:39 AM ET
USA Today
USA TODAY staff and wires

WASHINGTON — President Bush, in a challenge to members of Congress who oppose his plan to send more troops to Iraq, said today that "I am the decision-maker" on Iraq policy and criticized some lawmakers for not giving his new strategy a chance to work.

"I've picked the plan that I think is most likely to succeed," Bush said in an Oval Office meeting with senior military advisers.

His remarks came shortly after the Senate, 81-0, confirmed Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus as new commander of U.S. troops in Iraq.

The Senate, however, is expected to vote as early as next week on a non-binding resolution opposing Bush's new plan that Petraeus is supposed to carry out.

Bush, who met with Petraeus today, told reporters "My instructions to him was: 'Get over to the zone as quickly as possible, and implement a plan that will achieve our goals.'"

The president also said his policy to go after Iranians in Iraq who are believed to be fueling violence against U.S. troops did not mean the United States intends to expand the confrontation with Iran beyond Iraq's border. "That's a presumption that's simply not accurate," Bush said.

Petraeus, who has served two year-long tours in Iraq, is an expert on counterinsurgency and will lead the new U.S. effort to stop the sectarian violence in Baghdad and western Iraq. In 2004-05, he was commander of the training program of the Iraqi Army.

Last week, Bush announced plans to send 21,500 to Iraq. In testimony before the Senate this week. Petraeus described the situation in Iraq "dire" but said he believed Bush's strategy would work if bolstered by the additional U.S. troops and Iraqi forces.

Bush today had sharp words for lawmakers from both parties who are considering resolutions to oppose his new strategy for Iraq.

"Some are condemning a plan before it's even had a chance to work," Bush said.

On Wednesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a non-binding resolution, 12-9, calling the move "not in the national interest." Only one Republican, outspoken war-critic Sen. Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska, joined Democrats on the panel in support of the measure.

That resolution will go to the full Senate for a vote, likely next week. Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the committee and co-sponsor of the resolution, said he would consider amending the bill to win broader support from Republicans.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., who is offering his own, milder resolution, said Thursday that he will not negotiate with Democrats to develop a single proposal on Iraq.

Warner's decision strengthens the chances that his resolution will be the one to win final Senate approval. Democrats, who effectively need 60 votes to pass any measure, are expected to vote for his proposal if their measure fails. Several Republicans said they prefer Warner's approach because it is less divisive.

Any agreement on the two resolutions "should occur as a consequence of the will of the Senate, working in 'open' session," Warner said in a letter to Biden and other co-sponsors of the harsher measure.

Warner's non-binding resolution would put the Senate on record as opposing Bush's decision to send the additional troops to Iraq. It leaves open the possibility that a small number of forces could be sent to the western Anbar Province, where al-Qaeda members are believed to be operating.

"It's going to be an extremely complex mission," Warner, a leading Republican on defense issues, said of the task awaiting Petraeus.

Warner said he hopes American troops will be instructed that "wherever possible, the Iraqis should bear the brunt of the sectarian violence."

Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he is considering offering yet another resolution that would establish benchmarks by which the U.S. could measure the effectiveness of the troop increase. Unlike the Warner and Biden measures, McCain's resolution would not express opposition to the president's plan.

Republican leaders, however, were unlikely to try to corral members behind a single position.

White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten said in an interview Thursday with National Public Radio that the administration does not expect Congress to cut the purse strings for the war.

But he said the administration has some concern that the ill will that U.S. policy in Iraq has generated on Capitol Hill could hamper the ability for lawmakers to work with the White House on other issues.

Contributing: Douglas Stanglin in McLean, VA.; The Associated Press

    Bush: 'I am the decision-maker' , UT, 26.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-26-us-iran-iraq_x.htm

Bush Clears All Measures Against Iranians in Iraq

January 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:25 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush has authorized U.S. forces in Iraq to take whatever actions are necessary to counter Iranian agents deemed a threat to American troops or the public at large, the White House said Friday.

''It makes sense that if somebody's trying to harm our troops, or stop us from achieving our goal, or killing innocent citizens in Iraq, that we will stop them,'' Bush said. ''It's an obligation we all have ... to protect our folks and achieve our goal.''

The aggressive new policy came in response to intelligence that Iran is supporting terrorists inside Iraq and is providing bombs -- known as improvised explosive devices -- and other equipment to anti-U.S. insurgents.

''The president and his national security team over the last several months have continued to receive information that Iranians were supplying IED equipment and or training that was being used to harm American soldiers,'' National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

''As a result American forces, when they receive actionable information, may take the steps necessary to protect themselves as well as the population,'' Johndroe said.

Bush referred to the new policy in his Jan. 10 address to the nation in which he announced a buildup of 21,500 troops in Iraq. He said the United States would confront Iran and Syria more vigorously.

While promising tougher action, the White House said the United States does not intend to cross the Iraq-Iran border to attack Iranians.

During a picture-taking session Friday with Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, newly confirmed by the Senate to command U.S. troops in Iraq, Bush was asked about stepped-up activities in Iraq against Iranian activities thought to be fueling the violence.

He defended the policy, but said it is no indication that the United States intends to expand the confrontation beyond Iraq's borders.

''That's a presumption that's simply not accurate,'' Bush said.

But added: ''Our policy is going to be to protect our troops. It makes sense.''

Five Iranians were detained by U.S.-led forces earlier this month after a raid on an Iranian government liaison office in northern Iraq. The move further frayed relations between the two countries, already tense because of U.S.-led efforts to force Tehran to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons program.

''We believe that we can solve our problem with Iran diplomatically and are working to do that,'' Bush said. ''As a matter of fact, we're making pretty good progress on that front.''

The administration said at the time that U.S. forces entered an Iranian building in Kurdish-controlled Irbil because information linked it to Revolutionary Guards and other Iranian elements engaging in violent activities in Iraq.

But Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, contended the Iranians were working in a liaison office that had government approval and that the office was in the process of being approved as a consulate. In Iran, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said the U.S. raid constituted an intervention in Iranian-Iraqi affairs.

    Bush Clears All Measures Against Iranians in Iraq, NYT, 26.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iran.html?hp&ex=1169874000&en=60276b4384a39924&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

The President’s Risky Health Plan

January 26, 2007
The New York Times

The new health care proposals announced by President Bush this week purport to tackle the two toughest problems confronting the American health care system: the rising number of uninsured Americans and the escalating costs of medical care.

But on both counts, they fall miles short of what is needed to fix a system where — scandalously — 47 million Americans go without health insurance.

The financial sinkhole in Iraq and huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans have left the administration with no money to really address the problem. To keep the program “revenue neutral,” Mr. Bush would instead use tax subsidies to encourage more people to buy their own health insurance, while imposing additional taxes on people who have what Mr. Bush deems “gold plated” insurance.

It is a formula that would do little to reduce the number of uninsured Americans and would have a high risk of producing pernicious results. Even White House officials acknowledged earlier this week that they expected the number of uninsured to drop by only three million to five million people as a result of Mr. Bush’s proposals. They expect the states to take on most of the burden.

One enlightened element is that the plan would provide equal tax treatment to those who bought their insurance policies on the individual market and those who got coverage through group policies at work, thus ending a longstanding inequity that favors employer-based policies. To level the playing field, the administration proposes to grant everyone who gets qualifying health insurance a standard deduction — $15,000 for family coverage or $7,500 for single coverage — off their income subject to taxation. Those with family policies exceeding $15,000 in value would have to pay taxes on the excess amount.

After the proposed starting date in 2009, the administration estimates, about 80 percent of workers with employer-provided policies would pay lower taxes and 20 percent would pay higher taxes, unless they reduced the value of their health coverage to fit within the standard deduction.

The new standard deduction would almost certainly entice some people to buy health insurance who had previously elected not to. But a tax deduction is of little value to people so poor that they pay little or no income tax. And unfortunately, it is those people who account for the vast majority of the nation’s uninsured.

Instead of trying to fix that fundamental flaw, the administration has decided instead to buck it to the states. The White House has offered few details. But its idea is to allow states to redirect federal money that now helps to finance hospitals that provide charity care and use it instead to subsidize health insurance for the poor.

In an ideal world, it would make good sense to insure people in advance rather than wait for them to show up in a high-cost emergency room. But this plan could quickly cripple the safety-net hospitals. Fortunately, no governor would have to accept the offer to redirect funds. The scheme is mostly a reflection of how the administration is unwilling to accept true responsibility for the uninsured.

If the administration really wanted to help low-income people, it would have proposed a refundable tax credit that would have the same dollar value for everyone — instead of a tax deduction, which primarily helps people in high tax brackets. Even those who do not pay taxes would get a check for the dollar value of the credit, providing them at least some money to help pay for health insurance. Congress ought to recognize that credits are the better approach for even such a limited plan.

As for the tax increases on those “gold plated” health policies, the White House is hoping to discourage people from using high-priced comprehensive health policies that cover everything from routine office visits to costly diagnostic procedures that are not always necessary.

The administration’s goal is to instead encourage people to take out policies that might reduce the use of medical services, like policies with high deductibles or co-payments, or managed care plans. But even “copper plated” policies can exceed $15,000 in cost if they are issued in areas where medical prices are high or to groups with high numbers of older or chronically ill workers.

The whole approach rests on the premise that comprehensive prepaid health policies are a major factor in driving up costs; the theory is that people will tend to use services if they are covered. There is probably some truth in that.

But the main drivers in rising health costs are the costly services, high-priced drugs and hospitalizations for people who are seriously ill with catastrophic diseases or multiple chronic illnesses. Making their health coverage less generous would simply make it harder for them to get the care they need.

The greatest risk in the president’s proposal is that it would seem likely to lead many small- and medium-size employers to stop offering health benefits altogether on the theory that their workers could buy affordable insurance on their own. That would leave many more Americans at the mercy of the dysfunctional individual policy market, where administrative costs are high and insurers strive to avoid covering people who are apt to become sick and need costly care.

For all its fanfare, Mr. Bush’s plan would be unlikely to reduce the ranks of the uninsured very much. And if things went badly, it could actually increase their numbers. That’s not the answer Americans are waiting for and not what they deserve.

    The President’s Risky Health Plan, NYT, 26.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/opinion/26fri1.html

Bush Proposes Broadening the No Child Left Behind Act

January 25, 2007
The New York Times
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24—The Bush administration called on Wednesday for an array of changes to the president’s signature education law. The proposals would give local school officials new powers to override both teachers’ contracts and state limits on charter schools in the case of persistently failing schools.

The proposals are part of the administration’s blueprint for revising the No Child Left Behind Act, which Congress is scheduled to renew this year. Margaret Spellings, the education secretary, said the goal was to provide students in failing schools with other options and “to make sure we have our best personnel in the neediest places.”

President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law in 2002. It requires schools to test students in reading and math annually in grades three to eight, and establishes progressively more severe penalties for schools that fail to make adequate progress, including shutting the schools altogether.

Administration officials said there were currently about 1,800 of these schools across the country, where students have failed to meet state targets for reading and math for more than five years. But they said that loopholes in the current law allowed them to avoid serious action indefinitely.

“We all have to answer the question what are we going to do about that,” Ms. Spellings said in a telephone news conference. “This is the president’s answer to, Is the promise of No Child Left Behind real?”

She said that allowing local officials to close failing schools and replace them with charter schools would give children new options. Charter schools are publicly financed but freed from many of the regulations that apply to traditional neighborhood schools.

In 26 states, including New York, there are limits on how many charter schools can be opened. Critics point to a lack of consistent research showing charter schools are any more effective than traditional public schools in raising achievement.

Ms. Spellings said local superintendents would also be helped if they could transfer teachers in their districts to help improve poorly performing schools, even if union contracts banned such moves.

Edward J. McElroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers, derided the proposal as “silly on its face,” adding, “I have a feeling they’re setting up a straw man just to knock it down.”

While allowing for “areas of agreement” with the president’s blueprint, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the education committee, said he was “disappointed that the administration has proposed circumventing state law” with its proposal on charter schools.

In the House, Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who is chairman of the education committee, rebuffed the administration’s move to allow superintendents to override contracts, which he called a “proposal to gut collective-bargaining agreements.”

Separately, he rejected the administration’s call for school vouchers. President Bush proposed, as he has every year since taking office, taxpayer-financed vouchers to allow children in struggling schools to transfer to private schools.

“Private school vouchers,” Mr. Miller said, “have been rejected in the past, and nothing has changed to make them acceptable now. They are the same bad idea they have always been.”

Other administration proposals seemed likely to be more acceptable, among them: a call for a federal fund that would give extra pay to teachers who are most effective in raising children’s test scores, or who agree to teach in the neediest schools; and allowing districts with failing schools to first offer children tutoring before allowing them to transfer.

The administration also proposed requiring states to publicize how their students perform on a national exam, known as the nation’s report card, side by side with student performance on state exams. The move is intended to pressure states to make their own standards more rigorous.

Congress will consider the president’s blueprint as it takes up hearings to renew the law this spring. But with the presidential race taking shape, it is not at all certain that Congress will complete the job this year.

In moving to update the law, Congress and the administration are threading their way through discontent from across the political spectrum, from teachers unions upset that the law’s testing requirements are dictating what teachers do in the classroom to conservatives who say education should remain a purely local matter.

Michael J. Petrilli, an Education Department official in Mr. Bush’s first term who recently called the law “fundamentally flawed,” said the administration’s proposals represent “a pretty decent repair attempt.”

“It’s 50 percent stay the course, 30 percent tweak and tuck, and 20 percent bold new ideas,” Mr. Petrilli said.

He added, “Not bad for a president with 33 percent approval ratings, though the package as a whole has about a zero percent chance of getting through Congress.”

    Bush Proposes Broadening the No Child Left Behind Act, NYT, 25.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/us/25child.html

At the Libby Trial, Hints of Intrigue and Betrayal

January 25, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 — The assertion by lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr. that White House aides had sacrificed him to protect Karl Rove, the senior political adviser, appears to be based primarily on Mr. Libby’s own sense that the administration had failed to defend him adequately as the C.I.A. leak case unfolded.

But there is little known evidence to buttress the suggestion by Mr. Libby’s defense team in his obstruction and perjury trial that unnamed White House officials were deliberately setting Mr. Libby up to be a scapegoat.

Mr. Libby’s lawyers said in an opening statement on Tuesday that he felt so abandoned by the White House as the leak investigation intensified in the fall of 2003 that he appealed to his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Cheney subsequently wrote, according to the defense’s opening statement: “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy who was asked to stick his neck in the meatgrinder because of the incompetence of others.”

The defense team’s statements set off a debate across Washington about whether they were part of a legal gambit to divert attention from the underlying charge that Mr. Libby lied to F.B.I. agents and the grand jury or whether his lawyers had evidence of an effort within the White House to focus the blame on Mr. Libby.

Even if the assertion is shown to be true, it is not clear how it would help refute the charges that Mr. Libby had perjured himself.

Mr. Libby’s lawyers have so far offered few details about how he might have been set up as a fall guy for Mr. Rove. White House aides said little about the alleged rift on Wednesday, indicating they were prepared to grant their former colleague wide latitude to present an aggressive defense — even if it meant letting stand unanswered a story of intrigue and disloyalty involving President Bush’s and Mr. Cheney’s most trusted aides.

The accusations of scapegoating came as a surprise. In the past, White House aides have portrayed Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove as colleagues who moved in different orbits, but whose paths crossed collegially on various pieces of White House business, including the effort to defend a flawed statement in Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech in 2003 that Iraq had sought nuclear fuel in Africa.

But Mr. Libby may have had reason to feel singled out. He was the only White House official known to have been authorized to seek out reporters in the summer of 2003 in an effort to explain an intelligence report that the administration had used to make a case that Iraq was interested in acquiring uranium ore for its suspected nuclear program, according to documents in the case.

Mr. Cheney approved of Mr. Libby’s confidential meetings with reporters, according to the prosecution. The vice president had also spoken to Mr. Bush, who authorized the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to provide Mr. Libby with more information to discuss with the journalists, the legal papers said.

There may have been other reasons Mr. Libby felt the White House was turning against him. Under questioning from reporters, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said on Sept. 29, 2003, that Mr. Rove had no involvement in the leak of the identity of an intelligence officer, Valerie Wilson. But it took nearly a week before Mr. McClellan made a similar defense of Mr. Libby.

In each instance, Mr. McClellan’s statements, which he said at the time were based upon conversations with Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby, proved to be inaccurate; Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove had spoken to reporters about Ms. Wilson, who had worked undercover.

While Mr. Libby felt he was being left to fend for himself, there is little public evidence so far to support his lawyers’ suggestion that Mr. Libby was the victim of a deliberate effort to shift the blame to Mr. Libby to protect Mr. Rove, who by the fall of 2003 was masterminding Mr. Bush’s reelection campaign.

The issue of whether there was a conspiracy at the White House either to reveal Ms. Wilson’s identity or to cover up for the White House officials who engaged in such a plot was a central focus of the grand jury inquiry conducted by Patrick J. Ftizgerald, the prosecutor. Mr. Fitzgerald did not charge anyone with participating in a conspiracy and has never suggested that there is any evidence that one existed.

Mr. Fitzgerald spent many months exploring the issue, investigating one newspaper report of a broad conspiracy that later proved to be inaccurate, according to lawyers with clients in the case. Those lawyers said Mr. Fitzgerald questioned their clients, often in minute detail, about what they had done or said about the case. Associates of Mr. Rove, speaking on condition of anonymity, dismissed the idea that there was a cabal against Mr. Libby.

But the defense can marshal an argument that Mr. Libby was initially left out in the cold as the White House began mounting a defense of Mr. Rove, a review of White House comments on the leak inquiry shows.

On Sept. 29, 2003, as the leak inquiry was picking up steam and reporters were pressing to learn Mr. Rove’s role, Mr. McClellan said Mr. Rove had told him he was not involved in the leak. He called the accusations of Mr. Rove’s involvement “ridiculous.”

Asked about Mr. Libby in that afternoon’s press briefing, Mr. McClellan initially appeared noncommittal, saying, “If someone did something like this, it needs to be looked at by the Department of Justice.” Later in the briefing Mr. McClellan said, “I’ve made it clear that there’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement, and that includes the vice president’s office, as well.”

But a government filing in the spring suggested that Mr. Libby was dissatisfied with Mr. McClellan’s handling of the questions about his involvement. The filing showed that Mr. Libby had drafted a handwritten list of talking points for Mr. McClellan that read: “People have made too much of the difference in how I described Karl and Libby. I’ve talked to Libby. I said it was ridiculous about Karl, and it is ridiculous about Libby.”

Mr. McClellan indicated at the time his comments defending Mr. Libby had come from a conversation.

Former White House officials said they were surprised to hear of any rift between Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby. “One of their strengths was that they worked together,” said Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a former State Department official who has become a critic of how the administration had handled Iraq. “They didn’t show any ankle — it was always a team effort.”

Several former officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby had several areas of intersection. Mr. Libby also held the rank of a presidential adviser, and he stood in for Mr. Cheney frequently on domestic and foreign policy meetings. Both men had a hand in the marketing, and later, the defense, of the Iraq strategy. But they approached it from different angles. Mr. Libby was deeply involved in developing and assessing intelligence about Iraq and using it to build the case for the war, and then defending that case as it began to unravel. Mr. Rove built a re-election strategy for Mr. Bush that relied heavily on his prosecution of the war against terrorism and the Iraq invasion.

Both men had their own contacts among journalists. Mr. Rove dealt mostly with political reporters, including the conservative columnist Robert Novak, who first disclosed Ms. Wilson’s identity. Mr. Libby tended to speak with reporters who focused on national security matters, including Judith Miller, then of The New York Times.

Mr. Fitzgerald has also introduced a new player into the mix, Ari Fleischer, Mr. McClellan’s predecessor as White House press secretary. Mr. Fleischer, Mr. Fitzgerald said in court on Tuesday, had been informed by Mr. Libby about Ms. Wilson’s identity as the wife of Joseph C. Wilson, the former diplomat whose criticism of pre-war intelligence about Iraq had set off the case. Mr. Fleischer had later discussed Ms. Wilson with reporters including David Gregory of NBC News, according to the account.

Theodore V. Wells Jr., Mr. Libby’s lawyer, has argued that Mr. Fleischer’s testimony came after an immunity deal and that he had no notes about the lunch he reportedly had with Mr. Libby. But that argument fits what appears to be a general strategy by Mr. Wells to show a confusing situation where loyalties, and memories, are questionable.

Sarah Abruzzese contributed reporting from Washington.

    At the Libby Trial, Hints of Intrigue and Betrayal, NYT, 25.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/us/politics/25rove.html?hp&ex=1169787600&en=42684fa0780c8693&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush Iraq Plan Is Condemned by Senate Panel

January 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 — One day after President Bush implored Congress to give his Iraq strategy a chance to succeed, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution on Wednesday denouncing the plan to send more troops to Baghdad, setting up the most direct confrontation over the war since it began nearly four years ago.

The full Senate is poised to consider the nonbinding, yet strongly symbolic, repudiation of Mr. Bush as early as Wednesday. Democratic leaders agreed to tone down the language in the resolution, hoping to make it more acceptable to Republicans in an effort to send a strong, bipartisan rebuke to the White House.

“This is not designed to say, ‘Mr. President, ah-ha, you’re wrong,’ ” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat and chairman of the committee. “This is designed to say, ‘Mr. President, please don’t go do this.’ ”

Even as the White House delicately worked to persuade some Republicans to consider the president’s approach, the administration also said Congressional action would not interrupt the plan to send more than 20,000 American troops to Iraq. In a television interview on CNN, Vice President Dick Cheney declared, “It won’t stop us.”

The Foreign Relations Committee approved the resolution by a vote of 12 to 9, with a Republican senator, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, joining 11 Democrats in supporting it. But even Republicans who opposed the resolution, including Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, expressed deep doubt about whether the troop increase could succeed and suggested it was time for a new direction.

The committee rejected amendments that would have strengthened or softened the resolution, which described Mr. Bush’s plan to increase troops as contrary to the national interest.

Some Republicans expressed reluctance to support the legislation because they feared it could be seen as a political attack on Mr. Bush, but left themselves open to backing a similar plan offered by Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican.

The Foreign Relations Committee tends to carry a more centrist outlook than the Senate as a whole, but Democrats say they believe that at least 8 of the 49 Republicans might join with nearly all Democrats in embracing a resolution — Mr. Biden’s or Mr. Warner’s — critical of the president’s troop increase plan.

Senator George V. Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, said he was disappointed that the administration had failed to extend an olive branch to Congress. He said he told a White House official at the State of the Union address on Tuesday that the stalemate in Iraq was threatening to consume the Bush presidency.

“It’s time to recognize that if you keep going the way you are, you are never going to achieve what you want to achieve,” Mr. Voinovich said. “And, beyond that, it’s going to fall over on your domestic initiatives and make your presidency uneventful and not have meaning.”

Hours after the hearing on Wednesday, the effort led by Mr. Warner was gaining ground, with six Democrats and three other Republicans signing on as co-sponsors of his proposal, which also bluntly opposes sending more troops to Iraq. Mr. Warner was declining offers from Democratic leaders to merge his proposal with theirs, saying he wanted to keep his plan as neutral as possible, so it could attract wide bipartisan support. “It’s not a question of who is the most patriotic or who is trying to set up a confrontation with the president,” Mr. Warner said, speaking from the floor of the Senate. “To have a vote all on one side or all on the other side will not help.”

While details of the two resolutions vary somewhat, their message is the same: many members of Congress do not support the plan to expand the military operation in Iraq.

The White House is shying away from an overt lobbying effort to thwart the Iraq resolutions, as it might do more harm than good. Instead, the administration is leaving it mainly to the Republican leadership, including the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and the Republican whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi, to work toward an alternative.

Still, the White House has sought to head off overwhelming votes against the president in both the Senate and the House. Since Mr. Bush delivered his Iraq speech on Jan. 10, the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and his deputy, J. D. Crouch, have met with members of both parties. Officials, aware that a majority of senators are likely to vote in favor of the Warner resolution, say those meetings will continue. But the remarks by Mr. Cheney on Wednesday suggested that the White House was not focused on the resolutions. “We are moving forward,” Mr. Cheney said in the CNN interview. “The Congress has control over the purse strings. They have the right, obviously, if they want, to cut off funding. But in terms of this effort, the president has made his decision.”

A preview of next week’s full debate on Iraq unfolded Wednesday in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with senator after senator recounting the stories of troops from their states who had died in Iraq. Under the new Democratic majority, the committee has held nearly daily hearings on Iraq.

Senator James Webb, a Virginia Democrat who fought as a marine in Vietnam, urged his colleagues not to draw a link between the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Such comparisons, he feared, could force people away from backing the Iraq resolutions.

“I think there are parallels and there were many people at this table who opposed the Vietnam War, but some of those parallels are superficial,” Mr. Webb said. “We’re losing the support of a lot of people who supported the Vietnam War and who have problems with this if we try to lump it together.”

Mr. Hagel, who also served in Vietnam, has derided the president’s Iraq strategy as the worst foreign policy since Vietnam. Yet on Wednesday, Mr. Hagel took a different approach as he addressed fellow Republicans — from the administration or the Congress — who have questioned the motives of those who have spoken critically of the war.

“I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line on this. What do you believe? What are you willing to support? What do you think? Why were you elected?” Mr. Hagel said, his voice booming. “If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Kate Zernike contributed reporting.

    Bush Iraq Plan Is Condemned by Senate Panel, NYT, 25.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/washington/25capital.html?hp&ex=1169787600&en=c69da687b9b6dede&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

The State of the Union

January 24, 2007
The New York Times

The White House spin ahead of George W. Bush’s seventh State of the Union address was that the president would make a bipartisan call to revive his domestic agenda with “bold and innovative concepts.” The problem with that was obvious last night — in six years, Mr. Bush has shown no interest in bipartisanship, and his domestic agenda was set years ago, with huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans and crippling debt for the country.

Combined with the mounting cost of the war in Iraq, that makes boldness and innovation impossible unless Mr. Bush truly changes course. And he gave no hint of that last night. Instead, he offered up a tepid menu of ideas that would change little: a health insurance notion that would make only a tiny dent in a huge problem. More promises about cutting oil consumption with barely a word about global warming. And the same lip service about immigration reform on which he has failed to deliver.

At times, Mr. Bush sounded almost as if he’d gotten the message of the 2006 elections. “Our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on — as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done,” he said.

But we’ve heard that from Mr. Bush before. In early 2001, he promised to bring Americans together and instead embarked on his irresponsible tax cuts, a divisive right-wing social agenda and a neo-conservative foreign policy that tore up international treaties and alienated even America’s closest allies. In the wake of 9/11, Mr. Bush had a second chance to rally the nation — and the world — only to squander it on a pointless, catastrophic war in Iraq. Mr. Bush promised bipartisanship after his re-election in 2004, and again after Hurricane Katrina. Always, he failed to deliver. He did not even mention New Orleans last night.

When Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, Mr. Bush’s only real interest was in making their majority permanent; consultation meant telling the Democrats what he had decided.

Neither broken promises nor failed policies changed Mr. Bush’s mind. So the nation has been saddled with tax cuts that have turned a budget surplus into a big deficit, education reform that has been badly managed and underfinanced, far-right judges with scant qualifications, the dismantling of regulations in order to benefit corporations at the expense of workers, and a triumph of ideology over science in policy making on the environment and medical research. All along, Americans’ civil liberties and the constitutional balance have been trampled by a president determined to assert ever more power.

Now that the Democrats have taken Congress, Mr. Bush is acting as if he’d had the door to compromise open all along and the Democrats had refused to walk through it.

Last night, Mr. Bush also acted as if he were really doing something to help the 47 million people in this country who don’t have health insurance. What he offered, by the White House’s own estimate, would take a few million off that scandalously high number and shift the burden to the states. Mr. Bush’s plan would put a new tax on Americans who were lucky enough to still have good health-care coverage through their employers. Some large portion of those are middle class and represented by the labor unions that Mr. Bush and the Republicans are dedicated to destroying.

Mr. Bush’s comments on Iraq added nothing to his failed policies. He did, at last, propose a permanent increase in the size of the Army and Marines that would repair some of the damage he has done to those forces. But that would take years, and it would do nothing to halt Iraq’s spiral. Mr. Bush failed to explain how he would pay for a larger force, which would almost certainly require cutting budget-busting weapons programs. That would mean going up against the arms industry and its lobbyists — something Mr. Bush has never been willing to do.

Mr. Bush almost certainly didn’t intend it, but his speech did reinforce one vital political fact — that it’s not just up to him anymore. There was a big change last night: the audience. Instead of solid Republican majorities marching in lock step with the White House, Congress is controlled by Democrats. It will be their task to give leadership to a nation that desperately wants change and expects its leaders to work together to deliver it. The Democrats’ challenge will be to form real coalitions with willing Republicans. If they do, Mr. Bush may even be forced, finally, to compromise.

Say what you will about the flaws and shortcomings of the two-party system. After six years of the Bush presidency, at least we know it’s a lot better than the one-party system.

    The State of the Union, NYT, 24.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/opinion/24wed1.html

NYT        January 23, 2007

Bush Insists U.S. Must Not Fail in Iraq         NYT        24.1.2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/washington/24bush.html?hp&ex=
1169701200&en=62b4b5db07135457&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush Insists U.S. Must Not Fail in Iraq

January 24, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — President Bush tried to resuscitate his ailing presidency Tuesday night, using his State of the Union address to present a modest agenda of energy and health care proposals while warning an increasingly assertive Congress against undercutting his new Iraq strategy.

It was a speech that reflected Mr. Bush’s difficult circumstances. It was limited in ambition and political punch at home, with no proposals to rival his call two years ago to remake Social Security, no mention of rebuilding New Orleans and no allusions to limiting stem cell research or banning gay marriage.

And when it came to his plan to send additional troops to Iraq, he was forced to plead with the Democrats who now control Congress — and with a growing number of Republican critics — to “give it a chance to work.”

In an admission that the United States now finds itself trapped in the cross-fire of a sectarian conflict, Mr. Bush said, “This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in.” While he insisted that America could not afford to fail, he also warned the Iraqi government that “our commitment is not open-ended.”

His freshest initiative was setting a goal of reducing projected gasoline consumption 20 percent over the next 10 years. This hit a theme tailored to his appeal for bipartisanship in a city where the balance of power has shifted markedly against Mr. Bush since the last State of the Union address. Although he did not propose any measures to deal with emissions from power plants and factories, the main sources of greenhouse gases, he spoke of “the serious challenge of global climate change.”

The other main element of his domestic agenda, a package of proposals intended to improve access to health insurance, had drawn intense opposition from Democrats long before Mr. Bush walked to the well of the House chamber on Tuesday night, a scene he could not have relished but handled graciously. Behind him sat a Democratic House speaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi, sitting alongside Vice President Dick Cheney. In front of him was an audience of Democrats growing increasingly comfortable with their new power, including quite a few who are jockeying to take his job and reverse the policies he has put in place.

Mr. Bush gamely ticked off other goals he would like to achieve before leaving office in three days short of two years. They included overhauling immigration laws, taking steps toward a balanced budget, dealing with the long-term financial condition of Social Security and Medicare, and imposing tighter standards on schools.

Yet the proposals were overwhelmed by the Iraq debate.

“Many in this chamber understand that America must not fail in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said, “because you understand that the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching.”

While Mr. Bush has traditionally used these speeches to present a hopeful vision of Iraq’s future, he could not do so on Tuesday night. His own nominee to take over the command of United States forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier in the day that “the situation in Iraq is dire.”

Mr. Bush started his speech 12 hours before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was to begin working on a bipartisan resolution in opposition to his plan to send additional troops to Iraq. Despite his proposal of a bipartisan council to advise him on the battle against Islamic extremism, Democrats immediately assailed him, and members of his own party continued to show signs of edging away.

In the Democratic response to his address, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, whose son is a marine serving in Iraq, said that Mr. Bush “took us into this war recklessly,” and that the United States was now “held hostage to the predictable and predicted disarray that followed.” Mr. Webb called for “a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq,” and said that if Mr. Bush did not change course in Iraq and in his economic policies, “we will be showing him the way.”

Mr. Bush got a polite reception, but one far more muted than in previous appearances. He waited until the end of his nearly 50-minute speech to deliver the assessment that typically opens these addresses, that “the state of our union is strong.” For a man who finds himself struggling to maintain public and political support, Mr. Bush delivered the speech in a confident tone, with easy and relaxed smiles.

Seeking new ground for consensus, Mr. Bush reached back to a theme that marked the first days of his presidency, when he would regularly appeal for bipartisanship. “Our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on, as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done,” he said.

But the power dynamic on Tuesday night was completely different. In the six years in which Republicans controlled one or both houses of Congress, Democrats said they saw little of that bipartisan instinct at work, and despite vows to behave differently, they have not shown much in return.

In fact, Mr. Bush’s argument on Tuesday night for embracing his Iraq plan amounted to a reverse of the argument that he made from the same podium four years ago, when he contended that dealing with Saddam Hussein would help the United States bring other rogue states to heel. This time, Mr. Bush spoke of a “nightmare scenario,” of an Iraq “overrun by extremists on all sides.” He said the violence in the country would turn contagious, spread beyond Iraq’s borders and inflame the entire Middle East.

And he appealed to Democrats to remember the votes many of them cast in 2002 to authorize the invasion, throwing some responsibility their way in the process.

“We went into this largely united, in our assumptions and in our convictions,” he said, recalling the days when his approval ratings were sky-high. “And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure.”

Mr. Bush was careful in describing what many in his administration believe could be a coming confrontation with Iran. While he vowed that the world would never allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, he made no threats, saying he was relying on diplomacy to deal with both Iran and North Korea, the two countries that, five years ago, he declared in a State of the Union address made up an “axis of evil” with Mr. Hussein’s Iraq.

There were no such labels on Tuesday, a reflection of the reality that with American forces tied down in Iraq, Mr. Bush’s options are limited.

But the effect of Iraq extends to the domestic front. Even his allies say the war threatens the prospects of the new initiatives he described.

“Iraq casts a huge shadow over anything in the domestic policy arena that the president talks about,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster. “The situation makes it very difficult for the president to get Americans to pay attention to what he’s saying on issues like energy and health care.”

Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, argued otherwise. “If you talk about the issues the public cares about, and you put forward innovative, bold ideas,” Mr. Bartlett said, “the American people, regardless of what the polls say that day, will say, ‘This is worth study, this is worth engaging the Democratic Congress on.’ ”

Ms. Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, said in a joint statement that Mr. Bush’s goals on energy were “commendable” but suggested that they would seek to achieve them through different policies.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, speaking on ABC News, said Mr. Bush would find “a receptive audience” for his energy and health care goals, though she later said she found the early details of his health care plan “really troubling.” The Republican minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the two parties should find innovative ways to tackle the issues.

Mr. Bush’s aides and allies argue that he could exert some leverage by accusing Democrats of intransigence and “do-nothingness” should they flatly shoot down his proposals, as they were starting to do even before his speech.

“The real question is not whether he can make it work; he’s extended his hand several times now,” said Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona. “The real question is how much do the Democrats want to cooperate with him.”

But the Democrats have been in control only a few weeks, and polls indicate that for now the public is more likely to side with them in a fight. And it is not clear that Mr. Bush’s new proposals would do anything to reverse the political balance of power.

    Bush Insists U.S. Must Not Fail in Iraq, NYT, 24.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/washington/24bush.html?hp&ex=1169701200&en=62b4b5db07135457&ei=5094&partner=homepage

President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
The White House
January 23, 2007

United States Capitol
Washington, D.C.
President's Remarks
9:13 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. And tonight, I have a high privilege and distinct honor of my own -- as the first President to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madam Speaker. (Applause.)

In his day, the late Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr. from Baltimore, Maryland, saw Presidents Roosevelt and Truman at this rostrum. But nothing could compare with the sight of his only daughter, Nancy, presiding tonight as Speaker of the House of Representatives. (Applause.) Congratulations, Madam Speaker. (Applause.)

Two members of the House and Senate are not with us tonight, and we pray for the recovery and speedy return of Senator Tim Johnson and Congressman Charlie Norwood. (Applause.)

Madam Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:

The rite of custom brings us together at a defining hour -- when decisions are hard and courage is needed. We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors underway, and others that are ours to begin. In all of this, much is asked of us. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined enemies -- and the wisdom to face them together.

Some in this chamber are new to the House and the Senate -- and I congratulate the Democrat majority. (Applause.) Congress has changed, but not our responsibilities. Each of us is guided by our own convictions -- and to these we must stay faithful. Yet we're all held to the same standards, and called to serve the same good purposes: To extend this nation's prosperity; to spend the people's money wisely; to solve problems, not leave them to future generations; to guard America against all evil; and to keep faith with those we have sent forth to defend us. (Applause.)

We're not the first to come here with a government divided and uncertainty in the air. Like many before us, we can work through our differences, and achieve big things for the American people. Our citizens don't much care which side of the aisle we sit on -- as long as we're willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done. (Applause.) Our job is to make life better for our fellow Americans, and to help them to build a future of hope and opportunity -- and this is the business before us tonight.

A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy -- and that is what we have. We're now in the 41st month of uninterrupted job growth, in a recovery that has created 7.2 million new jobs -- so far. Unemployment is low, inflation is low, and wages are rising. This economy is on the move, and our job is to keep it that way, not with more government, but with more enterprise. (Applause.)

Next week, I'll deliver a full report on the state of our economy. Tonight, I want to discuss three economic reforms that deserve to be priorities for this Congress.

First, we must balance the federal budget. (Applause.) We can do so without raising taxes. (Applause.) What we need is impose spending discipline in Washington, D.C. We set a goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009, and met that goal three years ahead of schedule. (Applause.) Now let us take the next step. In the coming weeks, I will submit a budget that eliminates the federal deficit within the next five years. (Applause.) I ask you to make the same commitment. Together, we can restrain the spending appetite of the federal government, and we can balance the federal budget. (Applause.)

Next, there is the matter of earmarks. These special interest items are often slipped into bills at the last hour -- when not even C-SPAN is watching. (Laughter.) In 2005 alone, the number of earmarks grew to over 13,000 and totaled nearly $18 billion. Even worse, over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate -- they are dropped into committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You didn't vote them into law. I didn't sign them into law. Yet, they're treated as if they have the force of law. The time has come to end this practice. So let us work together to reform the budget process, expose every earmark to the light of day and to a vote in Congress, and cut the number and cost of earmarks at least in half by the end of this session. (Applause.)

And, finally, to keep this economy strong we must take on the challenge of entitlements. Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are commitments of conscience, and so it is our duty to keep them permanently sound. Yet, we're failing in that duty. And this failure will one day leave our children with three bad options: huge tax increases, huge deficits, or huge and immediate cuts in benefits. Everyone in this chamber knows this to be true -- yet somehow we have not found it in ourselves to act. So let us work together and do it now. With enough good sense and goodwill, you and I can fix Medicare and Medicaid -- and save Social Security. (Applause.)

Spreading opportunity and hope in America also requires public schools that give children the knowledge and character they need in life. Five years ago, we rose above partisan differences to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, preserving local control, raising standards, and holding those schools accountable for results. And because we acted, students are performing better in reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap.

Now the task is to build on the success, without watering down standards, without taking control from local communities, and without backsliding and calling it reform. We can lift student achievement even higher by giving local leaders flexibility to turn around failing schools, and by giving families with children stuck in failing schools the right to choose someplace better. (Applause.) We must increase funds for students who struggle -- and make sure these children get the special help they need. (Applause.) And we can make sure our children are prepared for the jobs of the future and our country is more competitive by strengthening math and science skills. The No Child Left Behind Act has worked for America's children -- and I ask Congress to reauthorize this good law. (Applause.)

A future of hope and opportunity requires that all our citizens have affordable and available health care. (Applause.) When it comes to health care, government has an obligation to care for the elderly, the disabled, and poor children. And we will meet those responsibilities. For all other Americans, private health insurance is the best way to meet their needs. (Applause.) But many Americans cannot afford a health insurance policy.

And so tonight, I propose two new initiatives to help more Americans afford their own insurance. First, I propose a standard tax deduction for health insurance that will be like the standard tax deduction for dependents. Families with health insurance will pay no income on payroll tax -- or payroll taxes on $15,000 of their income. Single Americans with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $7,500 of their income. With this reform, more than 100 million men, women, and children who are now covered by employer-provided insurance will benefit from lower tax bills. At the same time, this reform will level the playing field for those who do not get health insurance through their job. For Americans who now purchase health insurance on their own, this proposal would mean a substantial tax savings -- $4,500 for a family of four making $60,000 a year. And for the millions of other Americans who have no health insurance at all, this deduction would help put a basic private health insurance plan within their reach. Changing the tax code is a vital and necessary step to making health care affordable for more Americans. (Applause.)

My second proposal is to help the states that are coming up with innovative ways to cover the uninsured. States that make basic private health insurance available to all their citizens should receive federal funds to help them provide this coverage to the poor and the sick. I have asked the Secretary of Health and Human Services to work with Congress to take existing federal funds and use them to create "Affordable Choices" grants. These grants would give our nation's governors more money and more flexibility to get private health insurance to those most in need.

There are many other ways that Congress can help. We need to expand Health Savings Accounts. (Applause.) We need to help small businesses through Association Health Plans. (Applause.) We need to reduce costs and medical errors with better information technology. (Applause.) We will encourage price transparency. And to protect good doctors from junk lawsuits, we passing medical liability reform. (Applause.) In all we do, we must remember that the best health care decisions are made not by government and insurance companies, but by patients and their doctors. (Applause.)

Extending hope and opportunity in our country requires an immigration system worthy of America -- with laws that are fair and borders that are secure. When laws and borders are routinely violated, this harms the interests of our country. To secure our border, we're doubling the size of the Border Patrol, and funding new infrastructure and technology.

Yet even with all these steps, we cannot fully secure the border unless we take pressure off the border -- and that requires a temporary worker program. We should establish a legal and orderly path for foreign workers to enter our country to work on a temporary basis. As a result, they won't have to try to sneak in, and that will leave Border Agents free to chase down drug smugglers and criminals and terrorists. (Applause.) We'll enforce our immigration laws at the work site and give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers, so there's no excuse left for violating the law. (Applause.)

We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals. (Applause.) We need to resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country without animosity and without amnesty. (Applause.) Convictions run deep in this Capitol when it comes to immigration. Let us have a serious, civil, and conclusive debate, so that you can pass, and I can sign, comprehensive immigration reform into law. (Applause.)

Extending hope and opportunity depends on a stable supply of energy that keeps America's economy running and America's environment clean. For too long our nation has been dependent on foreign oil. And this dependence leaves us more vulnerable to hostile regimes, and to terrorists -- who could cause huge disruptions of oil shipments, and raise the price of oil, and do great harm to our economy.

It's in our vital interest to diversify America's energy supply -- the way forward is through technology. We must continue changing the way America generates electric power, by even greater use of clean coal technology, solar and wind energy, and clean, safe nuclear power. (Applause.) We need to press on with battery research for plug-in and hybrid vehicles, and expand the use of clean diesel vehicles and biodiesel fuel. (Applause.) We must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol -- (applause) -- using everything from wood chips to grasses, to agricultural wastes.

We made a lot of progress, thanks to good policies here in Washington and the strong response of the market. And now even more dramatic advances are within reach. Tonight, I ask Congress to join me in pursuing a great goal. Let us build on the work we've done and reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years. (Applause.) When we do that we will have cut our total imports by the equivalent of three-quarters of all the oil we now import from the Middle East.

To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 -- and that is nearly five times the current target. (Applause.) At the same time, we need to reform and modernize fuel economy standards for cars the way we did for light trucks -- and conserve up to 8.5 billion more gallons of gasoline by 2017.

Achieving these ambitious goals will dramatically reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but it's not going to eliminate it. And so as we continue to diversify our fuel supply, we must step up domestic oil production in environmentally sensitive ways. (Applause.) And to further protect America against severe disruptions to our oil supply, I ask Congress to double the current capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. (Applause.)

America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change. (Applause.)

A future of hope and opportunity requires a fair, impartial system of justice. The lives of our citizens across our nation are affected by the outcome of cases pending in our federal courts. We have a shared obligation to ensure that the federal courts have enough judges to hear those cases and deliver timely rulings. As President, I have a duty to nominate qualified men and women to vacancies on the federal bench. And the United States Senate has a duty, as well, to give those nominees a fair hearing, and a prompt up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. (Applause.)

For all of us in this room, there is no higher responsibility than to protect the people of this country from danger. Five years have come and gone since we saw the scenes and felt the sorrow that the terrorists can cause. We've had time to take stock of our situation. We've added many critical protections to guard the homeland. We know with certainty that the horrors of that September morning were just a glimpse of what the terrorists intend for us -- unless we stop them.

With the distance of time, we find ourselves debating the causes of conflict and the course we have followed. Such debates are essential when a great democracy faces great questions. Yet one question has surely been settled: that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy. (Applause.)

From the start, America and our allies have protected our people by staying on the offense. The enemy knows that the days of comfortable sanctuary, easy movement, steady financing, and free flowing communications are long over. For the terrorists, life since 9/11 has never been the same.

Our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen. We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented, but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States. We uncovered an al Qaeda cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America. And just last August, British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic Ocean. For each life saved, we owe a debt of gratitude to the brave public servants who devote their lives to finding the terrorists and stopping them. (Applause.)

Every success against the terrorists is a reminder of the shoreless ambitions of this enemy. The evil that inspired and rejoiced in 9/11 is still at work in the world. And so long as that's the case, America is still a nation at war.

In the mind of the terrorist, this war began well before September the 11th, and will not end until their radical vision is fulfilled. And these past five years have given us a much clearer view of the nature of this enemy. Al Qaeda and its followers are Sunni extremists, possessed by hatred and commanded by a harsh and narrow ideology. Take almost any principle of civilization, and their goal is the opposite. They preach with threats, instruct with bullets and bombs, and promise paradise for the murder of the innocent.

Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions. They want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country. By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty. They would then be free to impose their will and spread their totalitarian ideology. Listen to this warning from the late terrorist Zarqawi: "We will sacrifice our blood and bodies to put an end to your dreams, and what is coming is even worse." Osama bin Laden declared: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

These men are not given to idle words, and they are just one camp in the Islamist radical movement. In recent times, it has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shia extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East. Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah -- a group second only to al Qaeda in the American lives it has taken.

The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat. Whatever slogans they chant, when they slaughter the innocent they have the same wicked purposes. They want to kill Americans, kill democracy in the Middle East, and gain the weapons to kill on an even more horrific scale.

In the sixth year since our nation was attacked, I wish I could report to you that the dangers had ended. They have not. And so it remains the policy of this government to use every lawful and proper tool of intelligence, diplomacy, law enforcement, and military action to do our duty, to find these enemies, and to protect the American people. (Applause.)

This war is more than a clash of arms -- it is a decisive ideological struggle, and the security of our nation is in the balance. To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred, and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come and kill us. What every terrorist fears most is human freedom

-- societies where men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience, and live by their hopes instead of their resentments. Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies -- and most will choose a better way when they're given a chance. So we advance our own security interests by helping moderates and reformers and brave voices for democracy. The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity. And I say, for the sake of our own security, we must. (Applause.)

In the last two years, we've seen the desire for liberty in the broader Middle East -- and we have been sobered by the enemy's fierce reaction. In 2005, the world watched as the citizens of Lebanon raised the banner of the Cedar Revolution, they drove out the Syrian occupiers and chose new leaders in free elections. In 2005, the people of Afghanistan defied the terrorists and elected a democratic legislature. And in 2005, the Iraqi people held three national elections, choosing a transitional government, adopting the most progressive, democratic constitution in the Arab world, and then electing a government under that constitution. Despite endless threats from the killers in their midst, nearly 12 million Iraqi citizens came out to vote in a show of hope and solidarity that we should never forget. (Applause.)

A thinking enemy watched all of these scenes, adjusted their tactics, and in 2006 they struck back. In Lebanon, assassins took the life of Pierre Gemayel, a prominent participant in the Cedar Revolution. Hezbollah terrorists, with support from Syria and Iran, sowed conflict in the region and are seeking to undermine Lebanon's legitimately elected government. In Afghanistan, Taliban and al Qaeda fighters tried to regain power by regrouping and engaging Afghan and NATO forces. In Iraq, al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists blew up one of the most sacred places in Shia Islam -- the Golden Mosque of Samarra. This atrocity, directed at a Muslim house of prayer, was designed to provoke retaliation from Iraqi Shia -- and it succeeded. Radical Shia elements, some of whom receive support from Iran, formed death squads. The result was a tragic escalation of sectarian rage and reprisal that continues to this day.

This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we're in. Every one of us wishes this war were over and won. Yet it would not be like us to leave our promises unkept, our friends abandoned, and our own security at risk. (Applause.) Ladies and gentlemen: On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory. (Applause.)

We're carrying out a new strategy in Iraq -- a plan that demands more from Iraq's elected government, and gives our forces in Iraq the reinforcements they need to complete their mission. Our goal is a democratic Iraq that upholds the rule of law, respects the rights of its people, provides them security, and is an ally in the war on terror.

In order to make progress toward this goal, the Iraqi government must stop the sectarian violence in its capital. But the Iraqis are not yet ready to do this on their own. So we're deploying reinforcements of more than 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Iraq. The vast majority will go to Baghdad, where they will help Iraqi forces to clear and secure neighborhoods, and serve as advisers embedded in Iraqi Army units. With Iraqis in the lead, our forces will help secure the city by chasing down the terrorists, insurgents, and the roaming death squads. And in Anbar Province, where al Qaeda terrorists have gathered and local forces have begun showing a willingness to fight them, we're sending an additional 4,000 United States Marines, with orders to find the terrorists and clear them out. (Applause.) We didn't drive al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan only to let them set up a new safe haven in a free Iraq.

The people of Iraq want to live in peace, and now it's time for their government to act. Iraq's leaders know that our commitment is not open-ended. They have promised to deploy more of their own troops to secure Baghdad -- and they must do so. They pledged that they will confront violent radicals of any faction or political party -- and they need to follow through, and lift needless restrictions on Iraqi and coalition forces, so these troops can achieve their mission of bringing security to all of the people of Baghdad. Iraq's leaders have committed themselves to a series of benchmarks -- to achieve reconciliation, to share oil revenues among all of Iraq's citizens, to put the wealth of Iraq into the rebuilding of Iraq, to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's civic life, to hold local elections, and to take responsibility for security in every Iraqi province. But for all of this to happen, Baghdad must be secure. And our plan will help the Iraqi government take back its capital and make good on its commitments.

My fellow citizens, our military commanders and I have carefully weighed the options. We discussed every possible approach. In the end, I chose this course of action because it provides the best chance for success. Many in this chamber understand that America must not fail in Iraq, because you understand that the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching.

If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime. A contagion of violence could spill out across the country -- and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict.

For America, this is a nightmare scenario. For the enemy, this is the objective. Chaos is the greatest ally -- their greatest ally in this struggle. And out of chaos in Iraq would emerge an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America. To allow this to happen would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and invite tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing is more important at this moment in our history than for America to succeed in the Middle East, to succeed in Iraq and to spare the American people from this danger. (Applause.)

This is where matters stand tonight, in the here and now. I have spoken with many of you in person. I respect you and the arguments you've made. We went into this largely united, in our assumptions and in our convictions. And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure. Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq, and I ask you to give it a chance to work. And I ask you to support our troops in the field, and those on their way. (Applause.)

The war on terror we fight today is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others. And that's why it's important to work together so our nation can see this great effort through. Both parties and both branches should work in close consultation. It's why I propose to establish a special advisory council on the war on terror, made up of leaders in Congress from both political parties. We will share ideas for how to position America to meet every challenge that confronts us. We'll show our enemies abroad that we are united in the goal of victory.

And one of the first steps we can take together is to add to the ranks of our military so that the American Armed Forces are ready for all the challenges ahead. (Applause.) Tonight I ask the Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years. (Applause.) A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. It would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.

Americans can have confidence in the outcome of this struggle because we're not in this struggle alone. We have a diplomatic strategy that is rallying the world to join in the fight against extremism. In Iraq, multinational forces are operating under a mandate from the United Nations. We're working with Jordan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and the Gulf States to increase support for Iraq's government.

The United Nations has imposed sanctions on Iran, and made it clear that the world will not allow the regime in Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. (Applause.) With the other members of the Quartet -- the U.N., the European Union, and Russia -- we're pursuing diplomacy to help bring peace to the Holy Land, and pursuing the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in peace and security. (Applause.) In Afghanistan, NATO has taken the lead in turning back the Taliban and al Qaeda offensive -- the first time the Alliance has deployed forces outside the North Atlantic area. Together with our partners in China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, we're pursuing intensive diplomacy to achieve a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons. (Applause.)

We will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma -- and continue to awaken the conscience of the world to save the people of Darfur. (Applause.)

American foreign policy is more than a matter of war and diplomacy. Our work in the world is also based on a timeless truth: To whom much is given, much is required. We hear the call to take on the challenges of hunger and poverty and disease -- and that is precisely what America is doing. We must continue to fight HIV/AIDS, especially on the continent of Africa. (Applause.) Because you funded our Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the number of people receiving life-saving drugs has grown from 50,000 to more than 800,000 in three short years. I ask you to continue funding our efforts to fight HIV/AIDS. I ask you to provide $1.2 billion over five years so we can combat malaria in 15 African countries. (Applause.)

I ask that you fund the Millennium Challenge Account, so that American aid reaches the people who need it, in nations where democracy is on the rise and corruption is in retreat. And let us continue to support the expanded trade and debt relief that are the best hope for lifting lives and eliminating poverty. (Applause.)

When America serves others in this way, we show the strength and generosity of our country. These deeds reflect the character of our people. The greatest strength we have is the heroic kindness, courage, and self-sacrifice of the American people. You see this spirit often if you know where to look -- and tonight we need only look above to the gallery.

Dikembe Mutombo grew up in Africa, amid great poverty and disease. He came to Georgetown University on a scholarship to study medicine -- but Coach John Thompson got a look at Dikembe and had a different idea. (Laughter.) Dikembe became a star in the NBA, and a citizen of the United States. But he never forgot the land of his birth, or the duty to share his blessings with others. He built a brand new hospital in his old hometown. A friend has said of this good-hearted man: "Mutombo believes that God has given him this opportunity to do great things." And we are proud to call this son of the Congo a citizen of the United States of America. (Applause.)

After her daughter was born, Julie Aigner-Clark searched for ways to share her love of music and art with her child. So she borrowed some equipment, and began filming children's videos in her basement. The Baby Einstein Company was born, and in just five years her business grew to more than $20 million in sales. In November 2001, Julie sold Baby Einstein to the Walt Disney Company, and with her help Baby Einstein has grown into a $200 million business. Julie represents the great enterprising spirit of America. And she is using her success to help others -- producing child safety videos with John Walsh of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Julie says of her new project: "I believe it's the most important thing that I have ever done. I believe that children have the right to live in a world that is safe." And so tonight, we are pleased to welcome this talented business entrepreneur and generous social entrepreneur -- Julie Aigner-Clark. (Applause.)

Three weeks ago, Wesley Autrey was waiting at a Harlem subway station with his two little girls, when he saw a man fall into the path of a train. With seconds to act, Wesley jumped onto the tracks, pulled the man into the space between the rails, and held him as the train passed right above their heads. He insists he's not a hero. He says: "We got guys and girls overseas dying for us to have our freedoms. We have got to show each other some love." There is something wonderful about a country that produces a brave and humble man like Wesley Autrey. (Applause.)

Tommy Rieman was a teenager pumping gas in Independence, Kentucky, when he enlisted in the United States Army. In December 2003, he was on a reconnaissance mission in Iraq when his team came under heavy enemy fire. From his Humvee, Sergeant Rieman returned fire; he used his body as a shield to protect his gunner. He was shot in the chest and arm, and received shrapnel wounds to his legs -- yet he refused medical attention, and stayed in the fight. He helped to repel a second attack, firing grenades at the enemy's position. For his exceptional courage, Sergeant Rieman was awarded the Silver Star. And like so many other Americans who have volunteered to defend us, he has earned the respect and the gratitude of our entire country. (Applause.)

In such courage and compassion, ladies and gentlemen, we see the spirit and character of America -- and these qualities are not in short supply. This is a decent and honorable country -- and resilient, too. We've been through a lot together. We've met challenges and faced dangers, and we know that more lie ahead. Yet we can go forward with confidence -- because the State of our Union is strong, our cause in the world is right, and tonight that cause goes on. God bless. (Applause.)

See you next year. Thank you for your prayers.

END 10:02 P.M. EST

    President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address, White House, 23.1.2007,http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html

Bush unveils new health insurance plan

Sat Jan 20, 2007 8:11 PM ET
Reuters
By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Saturday proposed tax breaks to make health insurance more affordable to the nearly 47 million Americans who lack it and suggested removing some tax benefits for the most expensive employer-provided health care plans.

Health care is emerging in opinion polls as a top concern among many Americans as private health insurance costs soar, putting a burden on workers and companies.

The president, looking to gain momentum for his domestic agenda that is at risk of becoming overshadowed by the Iraq war, will include the health proposal in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

"We must address these rising costs, so that more Americans can afford basic health insurance. And we need to do it without creating a new federal entitlement program or raising taxes," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Democrats, newly in control Congress, reacted skeptically to Bush's proposal although Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said he was pleased the president "is finally talking about the growing crisis in health care."

Most Americans who have health coverage get it through their employers, but others receive it through government programs such as those for the elderly, the disabled and low-income children. Some people also buy it on their own.

Bush's proposal would for the first time allow people to take a tax deduction -- similar to the one used by homeowners for their mortgage costs -- when they buy health coverage on their own instead of through an employer.

The program is intended to have no effect on government revenues because the cost of the tax breaks would be offset with other tax changes, according to a senior administration official who described the proposal to reporters.

Currently, employees who receive health coverage through their jobs do not pay taxes on the benefit. Bush would cap the amount of coverage that would be considered tax-free. Anything above that would be taxed as income. The limit for deductions would be $15,000 for families and $7,500 for individuals. The average cost of family health coverage is $11,500.

TAX DEDUCTIONS

While some people would get hit with higher taxes, there would be a windfall for those who opted for low-cost plans.

For example, a family who bought a $10,000 plan could still take the full $15,000 deduction and pocket the extra money.

"This is essentially a standard deduction for health care, and the size of the deduction will be significantly higher than the cost of an average policy," said a senior White House official. "Because of this, about 80 percent of people with employer-based plans will see their tax liability fall because their insurance policies cost less than the deduction."

Bush said the current tax code unfairly penalized people who buy health insurance on their own while steering some toward "gold-plated" plans that drive up the cost of coverage.

But Kennedy said he was concerned that the tax changes could undermine employer-provided coverage while failing to do enough to help the uninsured.

New York Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the Bush plan would increase the tax burden on working families.

"This is a dangerous policy that ultimately shifts cost and risk from employers to employees and could result in a higher number of uninsured," Rangel said.

A few states are experimenting with ways to extend coverage to the uninsured, including California and Massachusetts. The Bush plan would redirect some money that now goes to hospitals and other institutions to help states broaden health coverage.

    Bush unveils new health insurance plan, R, 20.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2007-01-21T011140Z_01_N19343305_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-HEALTHCARE.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-4

Bush Comments on Agents Who Shot Suspected Drug Dealer

January 20, 2007
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 — President Bush waded this week into the furor surrounding two former border patrol agents who were each convicted and sentenced to more than a decade in prison in the shooting of a suspected Mexican drug dealer in Texas.

The case has become something of a cause among some advocates for tougher border security, who argue that the agents should be pardoned because they were doing their jobs in 2005 when they fired on the man, an assertion that has been contested by the federal prosecutors overseeing the case.

In an interview with KFOX-TV in El Paso, Mr. Bush was asked on Thursday whether he would consider a pardon for the two former agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, who began serving their federal prison sentences of 11 years and 12 years respectively this week.

“There are standards that need to be met in law enforcement, and according to a jury of their peers, these officers violated some standards,” Mr. Bush said. “On this case, people need to take a hard look at the facts, at the evidence that the jury looked at, as well as a judge. And that’s — I will do the same thing.”

“Now, there’s a process for pardons,” he continued. “I mean, it’s got to work its way through a system here in government. But I just want people to take a sober look at the reality. It’s a case, as you said, it’s got a lot of emotions.”

Some interpreted Mr. Bush’s remarks to imply that he would consider a pardon for the two men. But Justice Department officials said on Friday that the two men were ineligible for consideration of a pardon at this time.

Requests for pardons, which are screened by the Justice Department before being considered by the White House, are not considered until at least five years after a petitioner has been convicted or released from jail or prison, according to the department’s guidelines.

A commutation of sentence, which reduces the period of incarceration, is not generally considered for people who are appealing their convictions, the guidelines said.

The two former agents have said they will appeal their convictions.

Johnny Sutton, the United States attorney who oversaw prosecution of the case, , dismissed the idea that the two men were simply doing their jobs or defending themselves. During their trial, the agents said they had scuffled with the suspected drug dealer, who they believed had a gun, before firing at him.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mr. Sutton said in a statement last week, noting that the two men did not report the shooting to their superiors.

“These agents shot someone who they knew to be unarmed and running away,” Mr. Sutton said. “They destroyed evidence, covered up a crime scene and then filed false reports about what happened. It is shocking that there are people who believe it is O.K. for agents to shoot an unarmed suspect who is running away.”

    Bush Comments on Agents Who Shot Suspected Drug Dealer, NYT, 20.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/washington/20border.html

News Analysis

White House Shifting Tactics in Spy Cases

January 19, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

In a four-paragraph letter on Wednesday announcing that the Bush administration had reversed its position and would submit its domestic surveillance program to judicial supervision, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales used one phrase three times. A secret court, he said, had fashioned a way to allow the program to be monitored by the judiciary without compromising the need for “speed and agility.”

That phrase also captures, some critics say, the administration’s moving-target litigation strategy, one that often seeks to change the terms of the debate just as a claim of executive authority is about to be tested in the courts or in Congress.

On Wednesday, the administration announced that an unnamed judge on the secret court, in a nonadversarial proceeding that apparently cannot be appealed, had issued orders that apparently both granted surveillance requests and set out some ground rules for how such requests would be handled.

The details remained sketchy yesterday, but critics of the administration said they suspected that one goal of the new arrangements was to derail lawsuits challenging the program in conventional federal courts.

“It’s another clear example,” said Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, “of the government playing a shell game to avoid accountability and judicial scrutiny.”

In other cases, too, the timing of litigation decisions by the government has been suggestive.

Shortly before the Supreme Court heard a set of three detainee cases in 2004, the administration reversed course and allowed two Americans held incommunicado by the military to meet with their lawyers, mooting that issue.

After the court ruled that one of the men, Yaser Hamdi, could challenge his detention in court, the administration instead freed him and sent him to Saudi Arabia.

And just as the Supreme Court was considering whether to review the case of the second man, Jose Padilla, he was transferred to the criminal justice system last year, mooting his appeal.

Paul W. Butler, a former federal prosecutor who served as special assistant to Donald H. Rumsfeld when he was secretary of defense, said the administration’s critics were too quick to view ordinary developments as nefarious ones.

“You do have to ascribe some good faith,” said Mr. Butler, now a partner with the Washington law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. “The government uses presidential authority when they think it’s necessary and the law does not provide the specific authority they need. If there is a road that can be taken, operating according to statutes or putting people into the criminal justice system when that makes sense, they will do that.”

Like other administrations, even when this one alters course, it almost never concedes that its earlier actions were mistaken.

In the case of the eavesdropping program, the administration continues to maintain that it is free to operate without court approval. Its decision to submit to the secret court, administration lawyers said, was voluntary. At a briefing Wednesday, almost as an afterthought, a senior Justice Department official said, “There’s obviously an advantage to having all three branches involved.”

The announcement about the surveillance program came two weeks before a federal appeals court in Cincinnati was to hear the first appellate argument about the lawfulness of the program. Government lawyers now say that case is moot, but their claim is open to question.

The usual rule is that cases seeking relief in the future are indeed moot when the relief they seek is granted. But there is an exception, said David Cole, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has challenged the program in a separate lawsuit filed in New York.

He cited a series of Supreme Court decisions in which the defendants had voluntarily done what the lawsuits were seeking. Such cases are moot, the court ruled in 1968, for instance, only if it is “absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur.”

Because the administration has reserved the right to continue the program, Mr. Cole said, the courts should rule on whether it violated a 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Constitution.

A third case, from Oregon, is almost certainly not moot. In addition to asking the court to stop surveillance without warrants in the future, that suit asks for money as damages for past surveillance.

The Oregon case, brought by an Islamic charity and two of its lawyers, differs from the Cincinnati appeal and the New York suit because the plaintiffs in it say they have seen a classified document confirming that their communications were actually intercepted.

“We’re certainly center stage now,” said Jon B. Eisenberg, who represents the charity, Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, and the lawyers.

Mr. Gonzales, speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday said that the recent orders involved a creative reading of the 1978 law, often called FISA. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, administration lawyers determined that the program could not be reconciled with the law but later decided to “push the envelope.”

Statements like that frustrate the administration’s critics.

“It is very difficult to know if this order in fact satisfies FISA,” Mr. Cole said.

Because FISA applications are one-sided affairs, with no one arguing the other side, there is no losing party who can appeal from the orders. In a letter on Wednesday, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the presiding judge of the 11-member court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, said she would have no objection to the release of the relevant orders to lawmakers if the Justice Department approved.

But Mr. Gonzales indicated that the department would object to the release of at least the “operational details” disclosed in the orders.

    White House Shifting Tactics in Spy Cases, NYT, 19.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/washington/19legal.html?hp&ex=1169269200&en=df0e196e391a2470&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Measure in Senate Urges No Troop Rise in Iraq

January 18, 2007
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — The Senate set the stage on Wednesday for a direct clash with President Bush over the war, with two senior Democrats and a prominent Republican introducing a symbolic measure to declare that the administration’s plan to send additional troops to Iraq runs counter to the national interest.

The resolution, proposed by Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Carl Levin of Michigan, both Democrats, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican, would not be binding, and the White House said it would have no effect on Mr. Bush’s plan to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

But sponsors of the measure said Congressional passage would send a powerful message that the president could not ignore, and its adoption could be a precursor to further efforts by opponents of the war to place limits on his use of the military in Iraq or to limit financing for the war.

The measure says that the United States cannot sustain an open-ended commitment to Iraq, that the chief responsibility for quelling unrest there rests with Iraqi security forces and that the United States should seek a political solution. [Resolution text: nytimes.com/washington.]

“This resolution will demonstrate — and it will demonstrate it right away — that support is not there for the president’s policy in Iraq,” said Mr. Biden, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman. “The sooner he recognizes that reality and acts on it, the better off all of us will be.”

Mr. Biden’s committee expects to take up the resolution next Wednesday, pushing any votes on the measure past Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Senate Democratic leaders have said they will bring it to the floor relatively quickly. House Democrats have made it clear that they will not take up any similar proposal until after the Senate has voted on one.

Republican leaders promised to offer an alternative that would call for time to allow Mr. Bush’s new policy to work — an attempt to provide Republicans unhappy with the war an avenue to express their view without backing the more critical proposal.

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, a longtime Democrat who was re-elected last year as an independent, was the only non-Republican to pledge support so far. But Mr. Kyl said he believed that many of his Republican colleagues would ultimately find it difficult to vote against the White House.

“You cannot micromanage a war from the United States Senate,” Mr. Kyl said. “At least, you can’t effectively or constitutionally do that. If you vote to fund the military, then you need to leave the tactical decisions to the commanders on the ground and the commander in chief.”

But another Republican senator, Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, quickly got behind the new resolution, and Mr. Hagel predicted that others would as well. “Now is the time for the Congress to make its voice heard on a policy that has such significant implications for the nation, the Middle East and the world,” Ms. Snowe said in a statement.

Other Republicans who have expressed unease about the troop buildup, including Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Norm Coleman of Minnesota, took no immediate stance on the resolution. They expressed some reservations about the tone and scope of the proposal, which refers to escalating the war, which some Republicans believe has become a loaded partisan description.

In an effort to limit defections, wavering Republicans were invited to the White House for briefings on Wednesday. Tony Snow, Mr. Bush’s press secretary, reiterated the administration’s contention that a vote in opposition to Mr. Bush’s policy would send a mixed message about American intentions.

“What signal does it send to the Iraqis in terms of steadfastness ?” he asked. “What does it say — does it make the troops feel better about their support from the United States?”

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, accused the resolution’s three sponsors of political gamesmanship in advocating a nonbinding vote rather than taking on the more difficult issue of limiting funding for American forces. “Rather than have a serious debate we see this kind of posturing,” Mr. Cornyn said.

Mr. Hagel bristled at that comment. “This is a serious resolution put forward by serious people who care about our country,” he said. “There is no moral high ground that one group of senators has over the other.”

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate say they believe that they can reach an early consensus on symbolic votes opposing the president and then later consider putting restrictions on spending for the war after gauging the depth of resistance. The House Defense Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday began a series of closed hearings on potential limits on military spending.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, gained Democratic support for requiring the president to seek new authority from Congress before raising troop levels.

House Republicans introduced a measure that would prohibit Congress from cutting off or restricting “funding for units and members of the armed forces in harm’s way.”

    Measure in Senate Urges No Troop Rise in Iraq, NYT, 18.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/washington/18cong.html?hp&ex=1169182800&en=99772e13dda6155d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Court to Oversee U.S. Wiretapping in Terror Cases

January 18, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — The Bush administration, in a surprise reversal, said on Wednesday that it had agreed to give a secret court jurisdiction over the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program and would end its practice of eavesdropping without warrants on Americans suspected of ties to terrorists.

The Justice Department said it had worked out an “innovative” arrangement with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that provided the “necessary speed and agility” to provide court approval to monitor international communications of people inside the United States without jeopardizing national security.

The decision capped 13 months of bruising national debate over the reach of the president’s wartime authorities and his claims of executive power, and it came as the administration faced legal and political hurdles in its effort to continue the surveillance program.

The new Democratic-led Congress has pledged several investigations. More immediately, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is expected to face hostile questioning on Thursday from the Senate Judiciary Committee on the program. And an appellate court in Cincinnati is scheduled to hear arguments in two weeks on the government’s appeal of an earlier ruling declaring the program illegal and unconstitutional.

Some legal analysts said the administration’s pre-emptive move could effectively make the court review moot, but Democrats and civil rights advocates said they would press for the courts and Congress to continue their scrutiny of the program of wiretapping without warrants, which began shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Democrats praised the administration’s decision, but said it should have come much sooner.

"The announcement today is welcome news,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the Intelligence Committee. “But it is also confirmation that the administration’s go-it-alone approach, effectively excluding Congress and the courts and operating outside the law, was unnecessary.”

Mr. Rockefeller added, “I intend to move forward with the committee’s review of all aspects of this program’s legality and effectiveness.”

Since the surveillance program was publicly disclosed in December 2005 by The New York Times, the White House has maintained, in scores of court filings, policy papers and press statements, that the president has the inherent power to conduct wiretaps without a court warrant even though a 1978 law put intelligence surveillance under judicial review. The administration failed to win Congressional approval for the program last year after months of lobbying, and some Democrats are still trying to ban it outright.

The administration continued to assert on Wednesday that the N.S.A. program had operated legally, but it also said the time had come to allow the intelligence surveillance court, known as the FISA court, to review all warrants on all wiretaps in terrorism investigations.

“There’s obviously an advantage to having all three branches involved,” said a senior Justice Department official, who briefed reporters on the decision on condition of anonymity. “This issue of the terrorist surveillance program is one that has been under intense public debate and scrutiny on the Hill, and just considering all these circumstances, the president determined that this is the appropriate course.”

President Bush has authorized the continuation of the N.S.A. program every 45 days by executive order to allow the N.S.A. to conduct wiretaps on international communications without a court warrant. When the current order expires, however, President Bush has decided not to reauthorize the program, officials said.

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had obtained multiple orders, or warrants, a week ago from the FISA court allowing it to monitor international communications in cases where there was probable cause to believe one of the participants was linked to Al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist group.

“As a result of these orders,” Mr. Gonzales told leaders of Congressional Intelligence and Judiciary Committees in a letter dated Wednesday, “any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

Justice Department officials said that the FISA court orders, which were not made public, were not a broad approval of the surveillance program as a whole, an idea that was proposed last year in Congressional debate over the program. They strongly suggested that the orders secured from the court were for individual targets, but they refused to provide details of the process used to identify targets — or how court approval had been expedited — because they said it remained classified. The senior Justice Department official said that discussing “the mechanics of the orders” could compromise intelligence activities.

Justice Department officials would not describe whether the court had agreed to new procedures to streamline the process of issuing orders or accepted new standards to make it easier for the government to get approval to monitor suspect e-mail and phone communications.

But the officials suggested that the effort to obtain the court’s approval for orders on Jan. 10 was not easy. “These aren’t some sort of advisory rulings,” one official said. “These are orders issued by the FISA court, not some cookie-cutter order. These orders are complex. It took a long time to work on this.”

The officials said the new approach was based on evolving legal interpretations of the foreign surveillance law by the Justice Department, changes in the foreign surveillance statute in recent years and precedents set by the FISA court in approving specific requests to conduct electronic monitoring.

The N.S.A., which has run the program of surveillance without warrants since Mr. Bush secretly approved it in October 2001, is known to have used broad pattern analysis in tracking terrorist communications and identifying possible terrorists.

But senior lawmakers said they were still uncertain Wednesday, even after the administration’s announcement, about how the court would go about approving warrants, how targets would be identified, and whether that process would differ from the court’s practices since 1978.

The administration said it had briefed the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees in closed sessions on its decision.

But Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico, who serves on the Intelligence committee, disputed that, and some Congressional aides said staff members were briefed Friday without lawmakers present.

Ms. Wilson, who has scrutinized the program for the last year, said she believed the new approach relied on a blanket, “programmatic” approval of the president’s surveillance program, rather than approval of individual warrants.

Administration officials “have convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program,” Ms. Wilson said in a telephone interview. She said Congress needed to investigate further to determine how the program is run.

Democrats have pledged to investigate the N.S.A. program and other counterterrorism programs they say may rely on excessive presidential authority. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said the announcement appeared to be intended in part to head off criticism Mr. Gonzales was likely to face at Thursday’s judiciary committee hearing.

“I don’t think the timing is coincidental,” Mr. Schumer said in a telephone interview. “They knew they had a very real problem, and they’re trying to deflect it.”

But Justice Department officials said the timing of the announcement was driven solely by the FISA court’s notification in recent days that it had approved the new orders. The officials said the orders were the result of two years of discussing with the court how to bring the eavesdropping program under court review, a process they said began long before the program become public.

A Justice Department official said the department would file a motion with the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, arguing that the court’s review of the issue in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union “is now moot” in light of this week’s developments.

But several legal analysts said the issue might not be resolved that simply.

Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who has been critical of the program, said the appellate court was likely to send the issue back to the trial court to re-examine the issue.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., said the appellate court should still examine the legality of the program and whether the it had violated intelligence law for the last five years.

“It’s not academic when the president violates the law,” Mr. Romero said.

    Court to Oversee U.S. Wiretapping in Terror Cases, NYT, 18.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/washington/18intel.html?hp&ex=1169182800&en=31f17ca266626030&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush readies speech on climate change

Wed Jan 17, 2007 8:57 AM ET
Reuters
By Chris Baltimore

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush's annual speech to Congress next week is likely to call for a massive increase in U.S. ethanol usage and tweak climate change policy while stopping short of mandatory emissions caps, sources familiar with White House plans said on Tuesday.

Bush's annual State of the Union address is expected to touch on key energy policy points, after Bush made the surprise pronouncement during last year's address that the United States is addicted to Middle East crude oil supplies.

A rising focus on "energy security" by both the Bush administration and Congress has added momentum to efforts to employ home-grown fuel sources like ethanol to reduce U.S. dependency on oil imports.

Following that theme, Bush is likely to call for more U.S. usage of home-grown supplies of ethanol, the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Iowa, which grows more corn than any other U.S. state, is also a key stop for candidates in the upcoming 2008 presidential elections. Ethanol is made from agricultural products like corn.

One source briefed by White House officials said Bush's speech on January 23 could call for over 60 billion gallons a year of ethanol to be mixed into U.S. gasoline supplies by 2030.

That would be a massive increase from the 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol use by 2012 required by current U.S. law.

"I think it's going to be a big number," the source said on condition of anonymity. "It's in the ballpark of even above 60 billion (gallons) by 2030."

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the details of the speech.

POLICY ON GLOBAL WARMING

The White House on Tuesday confirmed that Bush's speech will outline a policy on global warming, but said Bush has not dropped his opposition to mandatory limits on heat-trapping greenhouse-gas emissions.

Some industry officials and media reports speculated that Bush would agree to mandatory emissions caps in an effort to combat global warming, reversing years of opposition to mandatory caps. But the White House denied this.

"If you're talking about enforceable carbon caps, in terms of industry-wide and nationwide, we knocked that down. That's not something we're talking about," White House spokesman Tony Snow said at Tuesday's media briefing.

Delaware Democrat Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the panel's senior Republican, introduced a nonbinding resolution calling for the United States to return to international negotiations on climate change.

"It is critical that the international dialogue on climate change and American participation in those discussions move beyond the disputes over the Kyoto Protocols," Lugar said in a statement.

Britain's "The Observer" newspaper reported on Sunday that unnamed senior Downing Street officials said Bush was preparing to issue a changed climate policy during the State of the Union.

U.S. allies like Britain and Germany have pressed for a new global agreement on climate change to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. Bush withdrew the United States from the protocol in 2001, saying its targets for reducing carbon emissions would unfairly hurt the U.S. economy.

The speech is a moving target and White House officials are known to make last-minute tweaks.

Last year, White House political advisors added the "addicted to oil" remarks hours before Bush spoke.

Investors hope Bush will embrace biofuels in his speech.

"I would like him to set a very aggressive target for renewable fuels," top Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla told the Reuters Global Biofuel Summit on Tuesday.

(Additional reporting by Caren Bohan in Washington and Mary Milliken in Los Angeles)

    Bush readies speech on climate change, R, 17.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2007-01-17T135618Z_01_N16234366_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-ENVIRONMENT.xml&src=011707_1106_DOUBLEFEATURE_weather

Senator Clinton Calls Bush Plan ‘a Losing Strategy’

January 17, 2007
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — Fresh from a weekend trip to Iraq, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton this morning intensified her opposition to President Bush’s new plan to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad, calling it “a losing strategy” and a “very bad mission” and proposing new limits and conditions on the overall war effort.

In laying out her latest set of positions and talking points on Iraq during appearances on the NBC and CBS morning shows, and on National Public Radio, Mrs. Clinton — a likely candidate for president in 2008 — did not call for a fixed deadline for withdrawing all American forces, saying only that the troops should leave Iraq “eventually.” Nor did she endorse blocking money for the new troop deployment. Those two positions are favored by many antiwar Democrats who are expected to be a force in the presidential primaries, and by at least one likely rival in 2008, former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Instead, Mrs. Clinton called for capping the number of American forces in Iraq to the total number there on Jan. 1 — before Mr. Bush proposed adding forces. That total is roughly 140,000. She also proposed making a new threat to Iraqi government leaders to force their cooperation: the loss of American funds to train and equip Iraqi forces, rebuild the economy, and, to make the pressure more acute, to provide security for the leaders themselves.

Mrs. Clinton did not outline benchmarks for that progress, but she indicated that the Shiite-led government would be expected to crack down on sectarian militias in Baghdad and elsewhere and to find new ways to work with Sunni political groups.

She also called for sending more troops to support the American military mission in Afghanistan, which she referred to as “quite a success story.” And she opposed any shift of forces out of Afghanistan as part of the troop expansion in Iraq.

Yet when it came to a threshold political issue for many Democrats — the end of the American military effort in Iraq — Senator Clinton did not embrace an instant withdrawal or a specific timetable for doing so.

“I’m for redeploying our troops out of Baghdad and eventually out of Iraq so we can make sure that they’re not in the midst of a civil war,” she said on CBS’s “Early Show.”

Mrs. Clinton’s appearances on the morning shows had the effect of cutting into some of the coverage of Tuesday’s announcement by Senator Barack Obama of Illinois that he would run for president. Clinton advisers said that she was not trying to upstage Mr. Obama; rather, her trip to Iraq on Saturday was always intended to bolster a new set of statements by Mrs. Clinton about the war, and she used network television and public radio this morning to try to speak directly to as many people as possible.

After her stop in Iraq, Senator Clinton visited American troops in Afghanistan and Germany before returning on Monday. She delayed a new conference on Tuesday after a member of her delegation, Representative John McHugh, a Republican from New York, took ill. That news conference is now scheduled for this afternoon.

Mrs. Clinton, who met with American commanders and Iraqi officials during her visit to Baghdad, said she received “lip service” during her meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki.

“This is clearly an abdication of responsibility by this government — we need some leverage on them,” Senator Clinton said on CBS.

“Enough of the talk,” she added, noting that Americans were protecting Iraqi leaders and training Iraqi troops yet reaping no rewards. “Let’s just say, we’re not going to do that anymore.”

She insisted that sectarian violence would continue in Iraq regardless of whether there were more or fewer troops, because the Iraqi government was not committed to the mission.

“They’re waiting us out,” she said on NBC’s “Today” show. “They intend to do everything they can to impose a particular brand of dominance over the Sunnis, and there’s no reason for the Sunni insurgency therefore to stop.”

Senator Clinton also said on NBC that Congress had limited ability to block the president’s troop plan outright.

“The president has enormous authority under our constitutional system to do exactly what he’s doing,” Mrs. Clinton said. “He already has the money appropriated in the budget.”

She said she was troubled that the Bush administration seemed willing to shift troops from Afghanistan to take part in a “losing strategy” in Iraq; a moment later, she expressed concern about sending more troops “to Iraq on this very bad mission.”

Mrs. Clinton was asked about her presidential plans on both NBC and CBS, and declined to say anything about her thinking or timetable. She was also asked about the decision by Senator Obama to form a presidential exploratory committee. He is expected to formally announced for the presidency in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 10.

Mrs. Clinton avoided making any pointed criticisms of Mr. Obama, but, on CBS, she did make a glancing reference to the importance of experience. Mr. Obama has served in the United States Senate for just over two years; he was an Illinois state senator and a law professor before that.

“I’m looking forward to a spirited and substantive debate about issues, about goals, about aspirations, about experience, about the kinds of things that voters will be interested in,” Mrs. Clinton said.

    Senator Clinton Calls Bush Plan ‘a Losing Strategy’, NYT, 17.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/washington/17cnd-hillary.html?hp&ex=1169096400&en=915037d66a9da265&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush, Cheney say congressional opposition won't halt troop buildup

Updated 1/15/2007 5:17 AM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush concedes he isn't popular, and that the war in Iraq isn't either. Yes, progress is overdue and patience is all but gone. Yet none of that changes his view that more U.S. troops are needed to win in Iraq.

"I'm not going to try to be popular and change principles to do so," Bush said in a television interview that aired Sunday night.

Digging in for confrontation, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney say they will not budge from sending more U.S. troops to Iraq no matter how much Congress opposes it.

"I fully understand they could try to stop me," Bush said of the Democrat-run Congress. "But I've made my decision, and we're going forward."

As the president talked tough, lawmakers pledged to explore ways to stop him.

"We need to look at what options we have available to constrain the president," said Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a possible White House candidate in 2008. Democrats remain wary, though, of appearing unsupportive of American troops.

A defiant Cheney, meanwhile, said Democrats offered criticism without credible alternatives. He pointedly reminded lawmakers that Bush is commander in chief.

"You cannot run a war by committee," the vice president said of congressional input.

The aggressive White House reaction came as the House and Senate prepare to vote on resolutions opposing additional U.S. troops in Iraq.

As the White House watched even some GOP support peel away from the war plan, it went all-out to regain some footing.

Bush gave his first interview from Camp David, airing Sunday night on CBS' 60 Minutes. It was his second prime-time opportunity in five days to explain why he thinks adding U.S. troops can help stabilize Iraq and hasten the time when American soldiers can come home. He addressed the nation from the White House last Wednesday evening.

"Some of my buddies in Texas say, 'You know, let them fight it out. What business is it of ours?"' Bush said of Iraqis. "And that's a temptation that I know a lot of people feel. But if we do not succeed in Iraq, we will leave behind a Middle East which will endanger America."

Yet when asked if he owes the Iraqi people an apology for botching the management of the war, he said, "Not at all.

"We liberated that country from a tyrant," Bush said. "I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude."

Bush announced last week he will send 21,500 more troops to Iraq to halt violence, mainly around Baghdad, as an essential step toward stabilizing the country's government.

Democrats in Congress — along with some Republicans — were unimpressed and frustrated. Beyond promising to go on record in opposition to the president's approach, the Democratic leadership is considering whether, and how, to cut off funding for additional troops.

"You don't like to micromanage the Defense Department, but we have to, in this case, because they're not paying attention to the public," said Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who helps oversee military funding.

It is unclear how any effort by Congress could affect Bush's plan. National security adviser Stephen Hadley said the White House already has money appropriated by Congress to move the additional forces to Iraq.

GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a potential 2008 presidential contender who endorses Bush's call for more troops, said votes to express disapproval were pointless.

"If they're dead serious then we should have a motion to cut off funding," he said of those fighting Bush's strategy.

Many Democrats favor a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, along with new diplomatic efforts with Iraq's neighbors.

The Bush administration had hoped that the president's overhauled strategy would lead to some bipartisan unity or that the White House would at least get an extended hearing before legislative leaders made up their minds. Instead, it encountered majority opposition in Congress and a public that rejected by large polling margins the military and political ideas Bush announced.

In the CBS interview, Bush rejected an assertion that, time and again, his administration hasn't been straight with the American people about Iraq. He said his spirits were strong.

"I really am not the kind of guy that sits here and says, 'Oh gosh, I'm worried about my legacy,"' Bush said.

The president also said he saw part of the Internet-aired video of the execution of Saddam Hussein, which showed some Iraqis taunting Saddam as he stood with a noose around his neck on the gallows. He said it could have been handled a lot better.

Bush said he got no particular satisfaction from seeing Saddam hang. "I'm not a revengeful person," he said.

Hadley was interviewed on This Week on ABC and Meet the Press on NBC. Cheney was on Fox News Sunday. Obama was on CBS' Face the Nation. Murtha appeared on This Week.

    Bush, Cheney say congressional opposition won't halt troop buildup, UT, 15.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-14-bush-iraq_x.htm

Bush Authorized Iranians' Arrest in Iraq, Rice Says

January 13, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — A recent series of American raids against Iranians in Iraq was authorized under an order that President Bush decided to issue several months ago to undertake a broad military offensive against Iranian operatives in the country, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

“There has been a decision to go after these networks,” Ms. Rice said in an interview with The New York Times in her office on Friday afternoon, before leaving on a trip to the Middle East.

Ms. Rice said Mr. Bush had acted “after a period of time in which we saw increasing activity” among Iranians in Iraq, “and increasing lethality in what they were producing.” She was referring to what American military officials say is evidence that many of the most sophisticated improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, being used against American troops were made in Iran.

Ms. Rice was vague on the question of when Mr. Bush issued the order, but said his decision grew out of questions that the president and members of his National Security Council raised in the fall.

The administration has long accused Iran of meddling in Iraq, providing weapons and training to Shiite forces with the idea of keeping the United States bogged down in the war. Ms. Rice’s willingness to discuss the issue seemed to reflect a new hostility to Iran that was first evident in Mr. Bush’s speech to the nation on Wednesday night, in which he accused Tehran of providing material support for attacks on American troops and vowed to respond.

Until now, despite a series of raids in which Iranians have been seized by American forces in Baghdad and other cities in Iraq, administration officials have declined to say whether Mr. Bush ordered such actions.

The White House decision to authorize the aggressive steps against Iranians in Iraq appears to formalize the American effort to contain Iran’s ambitions as a new front in the Iraq war. Administration officials now describe Iran as the single greatest threat the United States faces in the Middle East, though some administration critics regard the talk about Iran as a diversion, one intended to shift attention away from the spiraling chaos in Iraq.

In adopting a more confrontational approach toward Iran, Mr. Bush has decisively rejected recommendations of the Iraq Study Group that he explore negotiations with Tehran as part of a new strategy to help quell the sectarian violence in Iraq.

In the interview on Friday, Ms. Rice described the military effort against Iranians in Iraq as a defensive “force protection mission,” but said it was also motivated by concerns that Iran was trying to further destabilize the country.

Mr. Bush’s public warning to Iran was accompanied by the deployment of an additional aircraft carrier off Iran’s coast and advanced Patriot antimissile defense systems in Persian Gulf countries near Iran’s borders. Both the White House and the secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, insisted Friday that the United States was not seeking to goad Iran into conflict, and that it had no intention of taking the battle into Iranian territory. The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, warned reporters away from “an urban legend that’s going around” that Mr. Bush was “trying to prepare the way for war” with Iran or Syria.

Mr. Gates said that the United States did not intend to engage in hot pursuit of the operatives into Iran.

“We believe that we can interrupt these networks that are providing support, through actions inside the territory of Iraq, that there is no need to attack targets in Iran itself,” Mr. Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I continue to believe what I told you at the confirmation hearing,” he added, referring to last month’s hearings on his nomination, “that any kind of military action inside Iran itself would be a very last resort.”

Ms. Rice’s comments came just a day after the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, issued a sharp warning to the administration about the recent raids against Iranians in Iraq, including one in Erbil early Thursday.

He said the vote to authorize the president to order the use of force to topple Saddam Hussein was not a vehicle for mounting attacks in Iran, even to pursue cells or networks assisting insurgents or sectarian militias. “I just want the record to show — and I would like to have a legal response from the State Department if they think they have authority to pursue networks or anything else across the border into Iran and Iraq — that will generate a constitutional confrontation here in the Senate, I predict to you,” Mr. Biden said.

In the view of American officials, Iran is engaged in a policy of “managed chaos” in Iraq. Its presumed goal, both policymakers and intelligence officials say, is to raise the cost to the United States for its intervention in Iraq, in hopes of teaching Washington a painful lesson about the perils of engaging in regime change.

Toward this end, American officials charge, Iran has provided components, including explosives and infrared triggering devices, for sophisticated roadside bombs that are designed to penetrate armor. They have also provided training for several thousand Shiite militia fighters, mostly in Iran. Officials say the training is carried out by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

In the interview on Friday, Ms. Rice said, “We think they are providing help to the militias as well, and maybe even the more violent element of these militias.”

In addition, American officials say the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force is active in Iraq. A senior military official said last week that one of the Iranians seized in Baghdad late last month was the No. 3 Quds official. He said American forces uncovered maps of neighborhoods in Baghdad in which Sunnis could be evicted, and evidence of involvement in the war during the summer in Lebanon.

That Iranian official was ordered released, by Ms. Rice among others, after Iran claimed he had diplomatic status.

This week, American forces in Iraq conducted at least two raids against suspected Iranian operatives, including the raid in Erbil. The United States is currently detaining several individuals with Iranian passports who were picked up in those raids. The Iranians have said that they were in the process of establishing a consulate, but American officials said that the Erbil operation was a liaison office and that the workers there did not have diplomatic passports.

A defense official said Friday that such raids would continue. “We are going to be more aggressive,” he said, referring to the suspected Iranian operatives. “We are going to look for them and to try to do what we can to get them into custody.”

Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

    Bush Authorized Iranians' Arrest in Iraq, Rice Says, NYT, 13.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/world/middleeast/13strategy.html?hp&ex=1168750800&en=795e4300a038a37a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush Renews Vow to Veto Medicare Bill

January 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:28 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush renewed his veto threat Friday as Democrats pushed legislation that would require the government to negotiate drug prices for Medicare patients.

The House began debating the bill that would require the secretary of Health and Human Services to conduct those negotiations. It's one of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's six priorities for the new Democratic-controlled House.

Democrats touted the negotiations as a way to save money for seniors and taxpayers. They said that the government would be able to drive down prices by buying in bulk.

''Medicare overpays drug companies in purchasing medicine,'' said the bill's author, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich.

Republicans countered that the drug benefit, which kicked in on Jan. 1, 2006, has cost less than anticipated, and the large majority of seniors and disabled who use the program are satisfied.

''With all that's right with the program, it seems unwise and unkind to jeopardize its success,'' said Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas.

Bush contends that competition is already reducing prices for seniors and creating an environment that encourages the development of new drugs.

''Government interference impedes competition, limits access to lifesaving drugs, reduces convenience for beneficiaries and ultimately increases costs to taxpayers, beneficiaries and all American citizens alike,'' the administration said in a written statement Thursday.

White House press secretary Tony Snow on Friday said actuaries at both the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Health and Human Services say the bill will have little or no effect on federal spending and provide no substantial savings to the government.

''If this bill is presented to the president, he will veto it,'' Snow said.

Presidents have vetoed 1,485 bills during the nation's history. Congress overrode only 106 of them, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Such overrides require that two-thirds of those present in each chamber vote to override the president's veto.

Currently, private drug plans negotiate how much they'll pay for the medicine their customers take. Those plans get a federal subsidy, plus consumers pay for a portion of the medicine.

Dingell said the government can do better than individual insurance companies in getting discounts.

''The president and his Republicans allies have argued that this bill would do nothing. Then why, I must ask, would he bother to veto it?'' said Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Democrats have said that savings produced by the negotiations would be used to reduce a coverage gap that is common in many plans. Reducing the gap, known as the doughnut hole, would lower those beneficiaries' out-of-pocket costs.

But Republicans counter that there wouldn't be any savings. Also, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the legislation was unlikely to result in savings to taxpayers.

The program cost about $30 billion in its first year.Insurance companies offer competing coverage plans, and seniors may enroll in the one they like best. The administration announced on Wednesday that 23.5 million seniors had enrolled in stand-alone plans as of Jan. 1.

While a majority of seniors are expressing satisfaction with the program, surveys also indicate that they overwhelmingly want the government to have the power to negotiate drug prices.

A survey of seniors for the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that about 81 percent of seniors want to let the government use its buying power to negotiate drug prices, including 67 percent who said they strongly favor such negotiations.

The issue is expected to have a tougher time in the Senate. However, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., gave supporters of the measure a lift on Thursday when he said the total prohibition on government negotiations for Medicare beneficiaries should be eliminated.

''I do not buy the argument that the sky will fall on the prescription drug market if we remove this clause,'' said Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicare.

    Bush Renews Vow to Veto Medicare Bill, NYT, 12.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Medicare-Drugs.html

Bush’s Plan for Iraq Runs Into Opposition in Congress

January 12, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 President Bush’s call to increase the American military commitment in Iraq ran into intense Congressional opposition Thursday from Democrats and from moderate Republicans who expressed profound skepticism.

A day after the president set out a new strategy for bringing stability to Iraq, the White House found few allies on either side of the aisle when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The reception she received suggested that Mr. Bush’s prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday had done little to build political support for sending additional troops to Baghdad.

“I think what occurred here today was fairly profound, in the sense that you heard 21 members, with one or two notable exceptions, expressing outright hostility, disagreement and or overwhelming concern with the president’s proposal,” the committee’s new Democratic chairman, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, said at the conclusion of Ms. Rice’s testimony.

Republicans were more supportive in the House, where the new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Armed Services Committee. But Democrats were scathing in their criticism, and in both the House and the Senate, Democratic leaders moved ahead with plans to oppose Mr. Bush’s plan through nonbinding resolutions.

While saying they do not plan any immediate effort to try to thwart the Bush plan by cutting off funds, some Democrats said they would continue to consider placing limitations on the administration when Congress considers a war spending measure later in the year.

Despite the decision by many members of his party to break with the White House over the troop increase, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he would use parliamentary tactics to try to thwart the Democratic effort to adopt the Senate resolution opposing the plan.

In Baghdad, Iraq’s Shiite-led government responded tepidly to Mr. Bush’s announcement that he would send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq to bolster the effort to curb rampant sectarian violence.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki failed to appear as scheduled at a news conference and did not make any public comment.

Meanwhile, President Bush and his top cabinet officials spent Thursday traveling and testifying in support of his new Iraq strategy.

Early in the day, in an emotional ceremony at the White House, Mr. Bush awarded the Medal of Honor to the family of Cpl. Jason Dunham, a marine from Scio, N.Y., who was killed in Iraq in 2004 when he threw himself on a grenade to save the rest of his unit. The president began crying during the ceremony. It was the second Medal of Honor proceeding to come out of the Iraq war.

Afterward, he traveled to Fort Benning, Ga., where he spoke to Army soldiers about the Iraq plan. He said his approach would not produce an immediate reduction in violence but represented “our best chance for success.” Some of the troops based at Fort Benning have already served twice in Iraq and are scheduled for a third deployment.

Ms. Rice appeared on morning news programs before joining Mr. Gates at a news conference in the White House. Both then moved to Capitol Hill for a first substantive showdown with the new Democratic majority and an encounter with the shifting politics of the war.

At the House Armed Services Committee hearing, it was standing-room-only, with some spectators sprawled on the floor and others spilling out the door.

In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican who has been critical of the administration’s handling of the war, drew applause when he described the president’s proposals as a “dangerous foreign policy blunder,” and vowed to oppose them. Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and a vigorous opponent of the war, spoke of it as “quite possibly the greatest foreign policy mistake in the history of our nation.”

Expressing doubt about whether Iraqis “are done killing each other,” Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, said, “Why put more American lives on the line now in the hope that this time they’ll make the difficult choice?”

Several Republicans questioned the Bush plan without rejecting it outright, but their call for greater detail made it clear they remained unconvinced. Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire agreed that approving new legislation in Iraq on sharing oil revenue would be central to weaving estranged Sunni Arabs into the political process, but he said no United States government official could describe the law to him.

“It’s the most remarkable law that no one has ever seen,” he said.

Away from the Congressional hearings, White House and Pentagon officials held a series of private meetings with lawmakers on Thursday in an attempt to blunt the criticism, especially from Republicans.

Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new American commander in Iraq, waved off reporters as he shuttled between the offices of Republican Senators John W. Warner of Virginia and Jeff Sessions of Alabama. “Please, guys. Can I just make the rounds up here?” he said, declining to answer further questions.

During their testimony, Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice declined to specify a time limit on the troop increase and were cautious about predicting rapid improvements in security in Baghdad, where most of the additional troops will be positioned, saying progress is likely to come gradually.

“I think that we all know that the stakes in Iraq are enormous and that the consequences of failure would also be enormous not just for America and for Iraq, but for the entire region of the Middle East and indeed for the world,” Ms. Rice said.

The deployment schedule, in which more than 20,000 fresh soldiers and marines would roll into Iraq over several months, was intended to give the president time to reconsider the increase should the Iraqi government fail to provide its share of security forces as promised, Ms. Rice said.

“I have met Prime Minister Maliki,” she said. “I was with him in Amman. I saw his resolve. I think he knows that his government is, in a sense, on borrowed time, not just in terms of the American people, but in terms of the Iraqi people.”

Still, she spoke directly about Mr. Maliki’s failure to come through on his past promises to bring additional Iraqi troops into Baghdad. “They haven’t performed in the past and so the president is absolutely right, and we have all been saying to them, ‘You have to perform,’” she said.

Mr. Gates would not say when asked whether the planned American troop increases over the next few months could be withheld if additional Iraqi units promised for Baghdad failed to materialize.

“We are going to have a number of opportunities to go back to the Iraqis and point out where they have failed to meet their commitments,” he said, adding, “I think our assumption going forward is that they have every intention of making this work.”

Pressed repeatedly by members of both parties about what steps the Bush administration would take if Iraq continued to balk, he added, “We would clearly have to relook at the strategy.”

Mr. Gates said the Pentagon was revising rules governing mobilization of Army National Guard and Reserve members so troops who had already done a tour in Iraq in the past five years could now be sent back to Iraq if their units was remobilized. But the new policy would aim to shorten the time Guard members were mobilized to a maximum of a year.

He also announced a large permanent increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, a repudiation of the approach of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who argued for keeping ground force levels low and insisted that authorization for any additional troops be done temporarily.

Under Mr. Bush’s plan, the active duty Army total manpower over the next five years would grow to 547,000, an increase of 39,000 over the current level. In addition, the Marine Corps would grow to 202,000, an increase of 23,000. The expansions would have to be approved by Congress.

Democrats in both the House and Senate would not rule out eventually putting limitations on financing for the war if Mr. Bush continued on a course they contended defied the will of Congress and the American public. But they say that possibility, which could open them to Republican attacks, will have to be faced later when an emergency spending request and Pentagon spending are considered in the spring and summer.

Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the Democratic chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that sets military spending and a leading party critic of the war, is exploring ways to attach conditions to a Pentagon measure.

Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said “a wide variety of ideas are bubbling forth,” for how the party should respond to the president. But beyond voting on a resolution to symbolically oppose the Iraq plan, he said it remained unlikely that Democrats could block the troop increase to Baghdad.

“If you were going to have a so-called surge, part of that is supposedly by keeping people there longer,” Mr. Obey said. “It’s pretty hard to shut off funds for troops who are already there, so it gets very, very complicated.”

Late Thursday, James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group, whose report in November the Bush administration largely spurned, said in a statement that some of its recommendations were reflected in Mr. Bush’s plan and urged the White House to give “further consideration” to the panel’s remaining ideas.

At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Mr. Biden issued a sharp warning to the administration after Mr. Gates discussed recent raids against Iranians in Iraq, including one in Erbil early Thursday, and described them as part of a new effort “to root out the networks” involved in bringing Iranian-supplied explosive devices into Iraq.

Mr. Biden responded by saying that the vote to authorize the president to order the use of force to topple Saddam Hussein should not be used as a vehicle for mounting attacks inside Iran, even in pursuit of cells or networks assisting insurgents or sectarian militias.

“I just want the record to show and I would like to have a legal response from the State Department if they think they have authority to pursue networks or anything else across the border into Iran and Iraq that will generate a constitutional confrontation here in the Senate, I predict to you,” Mr. Biden said.

Also, the State Department announced on Thursday that Timothy Carney, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as a senior civilian American authority in Iraq for three months in 2003, is the new coordinator for Iraq reconstruction.

Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

    Bush’s Plan for Iraq Runs Into Opposition in Congress, NYT, 12.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12policy.long.html?hp&ex=1168664400&en=7854218e3a2f55ed&ei=5094&partner=homepage

House backs broader embryonic stem cell research

Thu Jan 11, 2007 5:52 PM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The new Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to lift President George W. Bush's restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research.

But the vote of 253-174, largely along party lines, fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a promised presidential veto.

The measure passed after an emotional debate in which supporters touted the research as the best hope for potential cures for ailments such as Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injuries.

Opponents condemned it as unethical and immoral. Bush restricted funding for the research in August 2001.

Bush, whose support base includes conservative Christian voters who tend to oppose the use of stem cells taken from human embryos, in July used the only veto of his presidency to date to reject an identical measure.

The White House reiterated Bush's intention to use his veto power, saying American taxpayers should not pay for research involving the intentional destruction of human embryos.

The bill is part of a six-measure package that House Democrats vowed to vote on during their "first 100 legislative hours" after winning control of Congress from Bush's Republicans in November elections.

Already this week, the House passed two other bills in the Democrats' legislative package, one to bolster U.S. security and the other to raise the federal minimum wage.

The stem cell bill now goes to the Senate, where supporters believe it will pass with a veto-proof two-thirds majority.

The debate can transcend party politics, with some anti-abortion Republicans strongly supporting the research. Thirty-seven Republicans backed the bill on Thursday, while 16 Democrats opposed it.

SANCTITY OF LIFE

"I believe this legislation does not seek to destroy life," said House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

"It seeks to preserve and protect life," he said. "We have a moral obligation to provide our scientific community with the tools it needs to save lives."

Many scientists view embryonic stem cells as the potential raw material for a new era of regenerative medicine, hoping to harness the unique qualities of the cells to repair damaged tissue. Such therapies are seen as years in the future.

Stem cells are a kind of master cell for the body, capable of growing into various tissue and cell types. Those taken from days-old embryos are especially malleable but "adult" stem cells found in babies and adults also have shown promise.

Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, favors research on stem cells not taken from embryos but opposes the current measure.

"Where will this all take us? If this bill were to be passed and signed into law, we would see the demise -- the destruction -- over time ... of millions of embryos," he said.

There is no U.S. law against human embryonic stem cell research. Bush's 2001 policy limited federal funding to research on the human embryonic stem cell colonies, or lines, that existed at the time.

Some scientists say many of those roughly 20 lines are deteriorating, contaminated or were developed through obsolete methods, making them inadequate to determine the potential therapeutic value of embryonic stem cells.

The bill would allow federal funding on research involving stem cell lines derived from embryos created at fertility clinics that would otherwise be thrown away because they are not needed to implant in a woman to make a baby.

The bill is sponsored by Reps. Mike Castle, a Delaware Republican, and Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. Last year, the House passed the bill 235-193 before Bush's veto.

    House backs broader embryonic stem cell research, R, 11.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2007-01-11T225001Z_01_WAT006848_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-CONGRESS-STEMCELL.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

Bush would veto Medicare drug price measure, Republicans say

Updated 1/11/2007 5:00 PM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush promised on Thursday to veto Democratic-drafted legislation requiring the government to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices under Medicare.

The House is to debate and vote Friday on the bill, which is one of a handful of priority items for Democrats who gained control of Congress in last fall's elections.

"Government interference impedes competition, limits access to lifesaving drugs, reduces convenience for beneficiaries and ultimately increases costs to taxpayers, beneficiaries and all American citizens alike," the administration said in a written statement.

Further, it said, competition already "is reducing prices to seniors, providing a wide range of choices and leading to a more productive environment for the development of new drugs."

Bush had already threatened to veto another of the top six bills Democrats are pushing across the House floor in the first two weeks of the new Congress. That's the measure, approved Thursday, to expand the extent to which federal funds could be used for embryonic stem cell research.

Several Democrats campaigned last fall as critics of the two-year-old program that offers prescription drug coverage under Medicare, saying it tilted too heavily toward profits for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

Currently, private drug plans negotiate how much they'll pay for the medicine their customers take. But the legislation under consideration Friday would require the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to do so.

"It is clear Medicare can do better and we are insisting that they do so," said Rep. John Dingell, R-Mich., the bill's author.

Democrats have said they would use the savings produced by the negotiations to reduce a coverage gap that is common in many plans.

Republicans argue that individual insurance companies already negotiate lower prices on behalf of their customers, and that the Democratic approach was tantamount to calling for federal price controls.

They note that the program is coming in under budget and seniors are expressing support for the benefit.

"What we set out to do, we accomplished," said Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., during a hearing Thursday about the drug benefit. "We had a success, a very big success."

Also, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the legislation was unlikely to result in lower prices.

"The secretary would be unable to negotiate prices across the broad range of covered Part D drugs that are more favorable than those obtained by (the plans) under current law," Donald B. Marron, the CBO's acting director, has written.

Actuaries for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services came to the same conclusion Thursday.

Dingell, a leading supporter of the legislation, dismissed the CBO's letter.

"This isn't the first time the Congress and CBO differed on the amount of savings a particular bill would achieve," he said. "Common sense tells you that negotiating with the purchasing power of 43 million Medicare beneficiaries behind you would result in lower drug prices."

The legislation, expected on the House floor on Friday, also would ban any attempt to limit the array of drugs available to Medicare beneficiaries by creating formularies. That stands in contrast to the Veterans Administration, which has lower prices for its beneficiaries but uses formularies that limit patient choice.

Under the Medicare prescription drug program, insurance companies offer competing coverage plans, and seniors may enroll in the one they like best. The administration announced on Wednesday that 23.5 million seniors had enrolled in stand-alone plans as of Jan. 1.

While a majority of seniors are expressing satisfaction with the program, surveys also indicate that they overwhelmingly want the government to have the power to negotiate drug prices.

A survey of seniors for the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that about 81% of seniors want to let the government use its buying power to negotiate drug prices, including 67% who said they strongly favor such negotiations. Democrats say that another survey showed that requiring government negotiations polled more favorably than any other issue that Democrats included for their first 100 hours of the new Congress.

The issue is expected to have a tougher time in the Senate. However, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., gave supporters of the measure a lift on Thursday when he said the total prohibition on government negotiations for Medicare beneficiaries should be eliminated.

"I do not buy the argument that the sky will fall on the prescription drug market if we remove this clause," said Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicare.

    Bush would veto Medicare drug price measure, Republicans say, UT, 11.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-11-medicare_x.htm

White House Pushes Hard on Iraq Plan

January 11, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 -- President Bush’s top aides pushed hard today for Mr. Bush’s Iraq strategy and unveiled plans to add 92,000 soldiers and marines to the overall strength of the United States military and help Iraqis far beyond Baghdad’s borders.

The addition of 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 to the Marine Corps, to be accomplished over five years, was announced by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates the morning after Mr. Bush told the American people that about 20,000 more troops are being sent to Iraq.

And the move to “further decentralize and diversify” the American civilian presence in Iraq was announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the administration moved to persuade a skeptical Congress to embrace an intensified military, economic and military offensive to pacify Iraq and strengthen its frail, fledgling democracy.

“Success in Iraq relies on more than military efforts,” Ms. Rice said at a news conference. “It requires robust political and economic progress.”

It also depends on diplomacy, Ms. Rice said, reiterating that the United States would bring renewed pressure on Iran and Syria, both regarded by Washington as interlopers in Iraq.

Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared with the two Cabinet members, said a look at the casualty lists in Iraq should convince anyone that the Iraqis are doing their share to eradicate terrorists and sectarian killers.

Immediately after their joint news conference, the secretaries and General Pace headed to Capitol Hill, where Mr. Gates and General Pace were to testify before the House Armed Services Committee and Ms. Rice was appearing before the Senate and House foreign relations panels.

The Cabinet members and the general were in line for sharp, perhaps hostile questions from the Democratic-controlled committees, if the reaction to Mr. Bush’s Iraq speech of Wednesday night was any indicator. For instance, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called Mr. Bush’s plan to send just over 20,000 more troops “three and a half years later and several hundred thousand troops short” and said it was high time for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to show that he is as committed as the United States to a new, peaceful Iraq.

Ms. Rice said she has appointed Tim Carney, a former ambassador to Haiti, to the new position of coordinator for “Iraq transitional assistance” to work with Iraqis on economic and development projects.

“Iraq is central to the future of the Middle East,” Ms. Rice said at the news conference.

Ms. Rice said it is essential to get Americans “out of the embassy, out of the Green Zone,” the heavily fortified sector in Baghdad, and into the countryside to help Iraqis build their country.

Mr. Gates said it would be obvious fairly soon if Iraqis are indeed living up to their obligations, and that the depth of their commitment would be a factor in how long the temporary American troop increase would last.

At the same time, he said that Iraq would continue to be a very dangerous place, at least as long as Americans are, in effect, “the prisoners of anyone who wants to strap on a bomb and blow themselves up.” But given the enormous stakes, Mr. Gates said, “failure in Iraq is not an option.”

    White House Pushes Hard on Iraq Plan, NYT, 11.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/world/middleeast/11cnd-capital.html?hp&ex=1168578000&en=9de2f83aac6506fc&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Democrats Plan to Fight Expansion of Troops

January 11, 2007
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 — The new Democratic leaders of Congress on Wednesday accused President Bush of ignoring strong American sentiment against the war in Iraq and said they would build a bipartisan campaign against his proposed military expansion.

Democrats continued to debate how assertively to confront Mr. Bush over his plan. House Democrats said that they would seek to attach conditions to the spending request Mr. Bush will send to Congress soon and that those conditions, if not met, could lead Congress to limit or halt money for wider military operations.

“We are going to fund the troops that are there,” said Brendan Daly, an aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House speaker. “Any escalation of troops we will subject to scrutiny. We will have hearings, and we will set benchmarks that the president must meet to obtain this money.”

Any challenge to Mr. Bush over paying for the additional troops is probably months away. House Democrats said their first step would be to vote on a nonbinding resolution opposing Mr. Bush’s plan. The Senate is planning to vote on a similar resolution as soon as next week.

“The president’s response to the challenge of Iraq is to send more American soldiers into the crossfire of a civil war,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, responding for his party immediately after Mr. Bush spoke. “The escalation of this war is not the change the American people called for in the last election.”

The criticism from Democrats resounded in near unison on Wednesday evening, a rare moment for a party that for more than four years has struggled to present a unified policy on Iraq.

Of more immediate concern to the administration was the bleak assessment from some Republicans.

Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, delivered a strong rebuke to the plan in a speech on the Senate floor only hours before the presidential address. A recent trip to Iraq, Mr. Coleman said, confirmed his fears that Baghdad was besieged by irreparable sectarian violence.

“I refuse to put more American lives on the line in Baghdad without being assured that the Iraqis themselves are willing to do what they need to do to end the violence of Iraqi against Iraqi,” said Mr. Coleman, who is up for re-election in 2008.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, one of the administration’s staunchest allies on Iraq, disagreed. Public opinion was not entirely against the war, Mr. McCain said, adding, “Americans want to be told how we can prevail in Iraq and how we can get out.”

Even though Mr. Bush proposed a bipartisan Congressional working group on Iraq, he set the stage for a major confrontation with Democrats, who won the majority last fall after the lingering war soured the climate for Republicans. The clash begins Thursday as Democrats open a series of hearings to scrutinize the president’s approach on Iraq.

“In the coming days and weeks, we should undertake respectful debate and deliberation over this new plan,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, a Democrat turned independent singled out by Mr. Bush for recommending a new bipartisan group focusing on the war on terror. “Excessive partisan division and rancor at home only weakens our will to prevail in this war.”

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, whose potential presidential ambitions are complicated by her previous support for the war, rejected the proposal to send more American troops to Iraq. Mrs. Clinton said more pressure should be placed on the Iraqi government to begin solving its own crisis.

“The president simply has not gotten the message sent loudly and clearly by the American people, that we desperately need a new course,” she said. “The president has not offered a new direction, instead he will continue to take us down the wrong road, only faster.”

The White House had asked Republicans to reserve judgment on the Iraq strategy — or to at least stay silent — but several Republicans distanced themselves from the president Wednesday. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, made calls and held meetings in an effort to stem political damage.

“This is a dangerously wrongheaded strategy that will drive America deeper into an unwinnable swamp at a great cost,” said Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska. “It is wrong to place American troops in the middle of Iraq’s civil war.”

Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, who was among the first Republicans to drop his support of the administration’s Iraq policy, said he was opposed to a troop increase. “This is the president’s Hail Mary pass,” Mr. Smith said. “Now it is up to the Iraqi army to catch the ball.”

Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, said he had reservations about increasing troops, but declined to condemn the president’s plan until Congress had had the opportunity to study it.

“Blow the whistle, time out, until Congress has done its homework and its analysis,” Mr. Warner said. “But each day that goes by, all of us are pained by the casualties. We cannot dither about.”

Six hours before the president delivered his address, Congressional leaders from both parties were called to the White House for a briefing. Democrats dismissed the meeting as a last-minute procedural briefing, saying the president had failed to consult with them, as he promised to only a week ago.

Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting.

    Democrats Plan to Fight Expansion of Troops, NYT, 11.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/washington/11reaction.html

News Analysis

Bush’s Strategy for Iraq Risks Confrontations

January 11, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 — By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

In so doing, Mr. Bush is taking a calculated gamble that no matter how much hue and cry his new strategy may provoke, in the end the American people will give him more time to turn around the war in Iraq and Congress will not have the political nerve to thwart him by cutting off money for the war.

The plan, outlined by the president in stark, simple tones in a 20-minute speech from the White House library, is vintage George Bush — in the eyes of admirers, resolute and principled; in the eyes of critics, bull-headed, even delusional, about the prospects for success in Iraq. It is the latest evidence that the president is convinced that he is right and that history will vindicate him, even if that vindication comes long after he is gone from the Oval Office.

Mr. Bush long ago staked his presidency on Iraq, and to the extent he can salvage the war he can also salvage the remaining two years of his administration. So he is taking a risk, challenging not only the Democratic leadership in Congress but also some members of his own party, who are openly skeptical that the new policy will work and who, unlike the president, will be running for re-election.

But there are no guarantees that Mr. Bush’s reading of the country and the Congress will prove correct.

“It’s more than a risk, it’s a riverboat gamble,” said Leon E. Panetta, a Democratic member of the Iraq Study Group and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. “There’s no question that under our system he’s going to be able to deploy these troops without Congress being able to stop him. But he’s going to face so many battles over these next few months, on funding for the war, on every decision he makes, that he’s basically taking the nation into another nightmare of conflict over a war that no one sees any end to.”

The White House orchestrated an elaborate rollout for the speech, including a presidential briefing for network news anchors before Mr. Bush addressed the nation. On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates are scheduled to appear at a news conference before testifying on Capitol Hill — a show of cabinet comity that might have been unthinkable when Donald H. Rumsfeld was still at the Pentagon.

Acknowledging that any mistakes in Iraq were his own and that Americans would face “trying hours” in the months ahead, Mr. Bush took pains to say he had consulted with members of Congress. But Democrats complained the consultation was perfunctory. Standing outside the White House after meeting with the president just hours before his speech, Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to force a vote on Mr. Bush’s plan.

That vote would be nonbinding. But in the months to come, Democrats could go further, tying Mr. Bush’s hands by setting conditions on the use of tax dollars, as Congress did during the Vietnam War and in Lebanon and Central America.

Wartime clashes between presidents and the Congress are a familiar thread in American history. But perhaps no president since Richard M. Nixon has so boldly expanded an unpopular war. Explaining his decision to invade Cambodia in April 1970, Nixon said: “A majority of the American people, a majority of you listening to me, are for the withdrawal of our forces from Vietnam. The action I have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of that withdrawal program.”

Likewise, Mr. Bush has concluded that he must scale up American involvement in order to scale it down. The White House press secretary, Tony Snow, said on Tuesday that Mr. Bush hoped to “bring the public back to this war.” But the president’s aides are under no illusions.

“The reality is, conditions on the ground have to change,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president.

In the meantime, some Republicans are already jumping ship. Moderates like Senators Gordon H. Smith of Oregon and Susan Collins of Maine, both up for re-election in 2008, oppose sending more troops to Baghdad, and on Wednesday, a conservative, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, joined them.

After Democrats swept the November midterm elections, people both inside and outside the administration expected the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to provide Mr. Bush with a face-saving exit from the war. Mr. Bush made favorable reference to the study group on Wednesday night, noting that he had accepted some of its 79 recommendations.

But he rejected its central notion, that the United States should set a timetable for scaling back combat operations and mount a new diplomatic offensive to engage Iran and Syria. Mr. Bush concluded that those recommendations were not a recipe for victory, but rather, as he said after a meeting with Mr. Maliki in November, a recipe for “a graceful exit,” a path he did not want to pursue. At their meeting, Mr. Maliki presented Mr. Bush with a plan calling for Iraqi troops to assume primary responsibility for security in Baghdad, shifting American troops to the periphery of the capital. Instead, Mr. Bush concluded that the United States would have to take a central role, because the Iraqis were not capable of quelling the sectarian violence on their own.

In a sense, it is a predictable path for Mr. Bush. This, after all, is the same president who lost the popular vote in 2000, was installed in the White House by a 5-to-4 vote of the Supreme Court and then governed as if he had won by a landslide. And this is the same president who, after winning re-election in 2004, famously told reporters that he had “earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”

But no American president has been able to prosecute a war indefinitely without the support of the American public. With polls showing fewer than 20 percent of Americans supporting increasing troop levels in Iraq, Mr. Bush and those Republicans who support him know that the new policy will be a tough sell.

“The American people have no reason in the world to think it’s going to work just like the president paints it,” said one of those backers, Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, “but I think the American people, in their usual good sense, are going to wait around for a while and say, ‘Mr. President, you’ve taken us down a lot of roads in Iraq, let’s go down this one and see if it works.’ ”

The question for Mr. Bush is just how long the American people, and their elected representatives, will wait.

    Bush’s Strategy for Iraq Risks Confrontations, NYT, 11.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/washington/11assess.html?hp&ex=1168578000&en=cd8b0a3a2added58&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush Adds Troops in Bid to Secure Iraq

January 11, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 — President Bush embraced a major tactical shift on Wednesday evening in the war in Iraq when he declared that the only way to quell sectarian violence there was to send more than 20,000 additional American troops into combat.

Yet in defying mounting pressure to begin troop withdrawals, the president reiterated his argument that the consequences of failure in Iraq were so high that the United States could not afford to lose.

In a speech to the nation, Mr. Bush conceded for the first time that there had not been enough American or Iraqi troops in Baghdad to halt the capital’s descent over the past year into chaos. In documents released just before the speech, the White House acknowledged that his previous strategy was based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about the power of the shaky Iraqi government.

Mr. Bush gave no indication that the troop increase would be short-lived, describing his new strategy as an effort to “change America’s course in Iraq,” and he said that “we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties” in the course of more intensive round-the-clock patrols in some of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

But Mr. Bush rekindled his argument that a withdrawal would doom to failure the American experiment in Iraq, touch off chaos throughout the Middle East, provide a launching pad for attacks in the United States, and embolden Iran to develop nuclear weapons. [Transcript, Page A18.]

In making that argument, the president rejected strategies advocated by newly empowered Democrats, restive Republicans and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, describing them as a formula for deepening disaster. “To step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government,” Mr. Bush said from the White House library, a room that officials said had been chosen to create more of a sense of a conversation with an anxious American public, rather than the formal surroundings of the Oval Office.

“Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal,” Mr. Bush said. “If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.”

He also offered his most direct acknowledgment of error in an American-led war that has lasted nearly four years and claimed more than 3,000 American lives. “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility lies with me,” he said.

Yet for the first time, Mr. Bush faces what could become considerable political opposition to pursuing a war in which 132,000 Americans are already committed, even before the increases announced Wednesday.

Democrats in Congress are drawing up plans for what, at a minimum, could be a nonbinding resolution expressing opposition to the commitment of more forces to what many of them say they now believe is a losing fight. They will be joined by some Republicans, and may attempt other steps to block Mr. Bush from deepening the American commitment.

Not since Richard M. Nixon ordered American troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia in 1970 has a president taken such a risk with an increasingly unpopular war. “For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said in repeating an argument that he has used for nearly four years — that a retreat from the country before a decisive victory is won would provide terrorists a place in which to conduct new attacks on the United States and American targets.

As part of a campaign to market the new strategy, Mr. Bush’s aides insisted that the plan was largely created by the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Yet Mr. Bush sounded less than certain of his support for the prime minister, who many in the White House and the military fear may be intending to extend Shiite power over the Sunnis, or could prove incapable of making good on his promises. “If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people,” Mr. Bush declared.

He put it far more bluntly when leaders of Congress visited the White House earlier on Wednesday. “I said to Maliki this has to work or you’re out,” the president told the Congressional leaders, according to two officials who were in the room. Pressed on why he thought this strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, Mr. Bush shot back: “Because it has to.”

In his 20-minute address to the nation, Mr. Bush said that for the first time Iraq would take command-and-control authority over all of its own forces, and that while more American ground troops were being put into the field, they would take more of a background role. He said the Iraqi government had committed to a series of “benchmarks” — which included another 8,000 Iraqi troops and policemen in Baghdad, passage of long-delayed legislation to share oil revenues among Iraq’s sects and ethnic groups, and a $10 billion jobs and reconstruction program, financed by the Iraqis.

Until the summer, Mr. Bush had used the phrase “stay the course” to describe his approach in Iraq, and his decision to describe his new strategy as an effort to “change America’s course” appeared intended to distance himself from that old approach. An earlier plan unveiled in November 2005 had been titled “Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” but Mr. Bush used the word “victory” sparingly on Wednesday night, and then only to diminish expectations.

“The question is whether our new strategy will bring us closer to success,” he said. “I believe that it will,” saying that if it is successful it would result in a “functioning democracy” that “fights terrorists instead of harboring them.”

In some of his sharpest words of warning to Iran, Mr. Bush accused the Iranian government of “providing material support for attacks on American troops” and vowed to “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies.”

He left deliberately vague the question of whether those operations would be limited to Iraq or conducted elsewhere, and said he had ordered the previously reported deployment of a new aircraft carrier strike group to the region, where it is in easy reach of Iranian territory.

Mr. Bush also announced that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would leave Friday for the region to build diplomatic support for the American effort in Iraq.

Robert M. Gates, who replaced Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary, is among the new members of the Iraq team whom Mr. Bush has brought in to execute the new strategy.

In the past week, Mr. Bush has speeded up the removal of the American commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who is to become the Army chief of staff, and replaced him with a counterinsurgency specialist, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus , who has embraced the new plan. A new American ambassador has been nominated to Baghdad as well, to replace Zalmay Khalilzad, a Sunni of Afghan heritage, who has been nominated to represent the United States in the United Nations.

While Democrats and some Republicans who attacked Mr. Bush’s plan in advance of the speech have questioned sending more troops, others question whether the Bush plan is too small — and falls short of the numbers needed to make a difference in a violent capital of six million.

Nonetheless, one of Mr. Bush’s top advisers said at the White House on Wednesday that he expected that Senator John McCain, who has championed a significant, long-term increase in troops, would embrace the plan.

The adviser cited a section of the Iraq Study Group’s report that had said the bipartisan commission could “support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad, or to speed up the training and equipping mission.”

But on the same page, the report warned that “adding more American troops could conceivably worsen those aspects of the security problem that are fed by the view that the United States presence is intended to be a long-term ‘occupation.’ ” Similarly, the group urged direct engagement with Iran and Syria; Mr. Bush rejected that approach.

Mr. Bush, one of his top aides said in an interview on Wednesday, simply concluded that “the Iraqi government was running out of time” and would collapse without additional help. Yet at the core of Mr. Bush’s new strategy, his own aides said, lies a tension between two objectives: Mr. Bush’s commitment to staying in Iraq until the country is a stable, self-sustaining democracy, and his vague threat to Mr. Maliki that the American presence would be cut short if Americans believed that the effort was failing.

His aides hinted that the administration had already come up with a “Plan B” in case the latest strategy failed, with one saying “there are other ways to achieve our objective.” But he would not describe that strategy, or say if it involved withdrawal, containment or the breakup of the country into sectarian entities.

The five-brigade increase in American forces will be accomplished by speeding up the deployment of four units already scheduled to go to Iraq, and by sending one additional brigade that was not scheduled to go. The total increase of American troops in Iraq amounts to roughly 20,000, including 4,000 marines who will be stationed in Anbar Province, the stronghold of elements of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Sunni insurgency. The increase in Iraqi troops and policemen amounts, officials said, to about 8,000.

The units heading into Iraq begin with a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, now in Kuwait, expected in Iraq before the end of the month, followed by a brigade of the First Infantry Division, based at Fort Riley, Kan., probably next month.

The Army is also planning to announce that the Second Infantry Division, Fourth Brigade, based in Fort Lewis, Wash., and the Third Infantry Division’s Second Brigade, based at Fort Stewart, Ga., and the Third Brigade, based at Fort Benning, Ga., should begin preparing to go to Iraq earlier than scheduled. Officials said that the total increase in troops could take three or four months.

The Bush plan also calls for delaying the departure from Iraq of a Minnesota National Guard brigade by four months, an official said. The unit had planned to leave in the spring and had not been notified that it would be staying longer, Lt. Col. Kevin Olson, a spokesman for the Minnesota Guard, said Wednesday.

The president is expected to submit a supplemental budget request that will include $5.6 billion for the new troop commitment and roughly $1.1 billion for new job commitments and aid.

    Bush Adds Troops in Bid to Secure Iraq, NYT, 11.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/world/middleeast/11prexy.html?hp&ex=1168578000&en=11cd4fdcb960957e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Transcript of President Bush’s Address to Nation on U.S. Policy in Iraq

January 11, 2007
The New York Times

Following is a transcript of President Bush’s address to the nation last night, as recorded by The New York Times:

Good evening. Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement. We thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together, and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.

But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq — particularly in Baghdad — overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam, the Golden Mosque of Samarra, in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.

The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people and it is unacceptable to me. Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review. We consulted members of Congress from both parties, our allies abroad and distinguished outside experts. We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group — a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. In our discussions, we all agreed that there is no magic formula for success in Iraq. And one message came through loud and clear: Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow — would — would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On Sept. 11, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.

The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad. Eighty percent of Iraq’s sectarian violence occurs within 30 miles of the capital. This violence is splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves and shaking the confidence of all Iraqis. Only Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.

Now, let me explain the main elements of this effort: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital. The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad’s nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort — along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations — conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents.

This is a strong commitment. But for it to succeed, our commanders say the Iraqis will need our help. So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I have committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them, five brigades, will be deployed to Baghdad. These troops will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences: In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents, but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned. This time, we will have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared. In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter these neighborhoods, and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated.

I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people — and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The prime minister understands this. Here is what he told his people just last week: “The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of sectarian or political affiliation.”

This new strategy will not yield an immediate end to suicide bombings, assassinations or I.E.D. [improvised explosive device] attacks. Our enemies in Iraq will make every effort to ensure that our television screens are filled with images of death and suffering. Yet over time, we can expect to see Iraqi troops chasing down murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad’s residents. When this happens, daily life will improve, Iraqis will gain confidence in their leaders and the government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas. Most of Iraq’s Sunni and Shia want to live together in peace, and reducing the violence in Baghdad will help make reconciliation possible.

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend 10 billion dollars of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq’s constitution.

America will change our approach to help the Iraqi government as it works to meet these benchmarks. In keeping with the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, we will increase the embedding of American advisers in Iraqi Army units and partner a Coalition brigade with every Iraqi Army division. We’ll help the Iraqis build a larger and better-equipped Army and we will accelerate the training of Iraqi forces, which remains the essential U.S. security mission in Iraq. We will give our commanders and civilians greater flexibility to spend funds for economic assistance. We will double the number of provincial reconstruction teams. These teams bring together military and civilian experts to help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation, strengthen the moderates and speed the transition to Iraqi self-reliance. And Secretary Rice will soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance being spent in Iraq.

As we make these changes, we will continue to pursue Al Qaeda and foreign fighters. Al Qaeda is still active in Iraq. Its home base is Anbar Province. Al Qaeda has helped make Anbar the most violent area of Iraq outside the capital. A captured Al Qaeda document describes the terrorists’ plan to infiltrate and seize control of the province. This would bring Al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq’s democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing Al Qaeda leaders, and they are protecting the local population. Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on Al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops. These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to up the pressure on the terrorists. America’s men and women in uniform took away Al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan — and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenge. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.

We will use America’s full diplomatic resources to rally support for Iraq from nations throughout the Middle East. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the gulf states need to understand that an American defeat in Iraq would create a new sanctuary for extremists and a strategic threat to their survival. These nations have a stake in a successful Iraq that is at peace with its neighbors, and they must step up their support for Iraq’s unity government. We endorse the Iraqi government’s call to finalize an International Compact that will bring new economic assistance in exchange for greater economic reform. And on Friday, Secretary Rice will leave for the region to build support for Iraq, and continue the urgent diplomacy required to help bring peace to the Middle East.

The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy — by advancing liberty across a troubled region. It is in the interests of the United States to stand with the brave men and women who are risking their lives to claim their freedom, and to help them as they work to raise up just and hopeful societies across the Middle East.

From Afghanistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian Territories, millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence, and want a future of peace and opportunity for their children. And they are looking at Iraq. They want to know: Will America withdraw and yield the future of that country to the extremists — or will we stand with the Iraqis who have made the choice for freedom?

The changes I have outlined tonight are aimed at ensuring the survival of a young democracy that is fighting for its life in a part of the world of enormous importance to American security. Let me be clear: The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience, and they will make the year ahead bloody and violent. Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue, and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties. The question is whether our new strategy will bring us closer to success. I believe that it will.

Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship. But victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world: a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties and answers to its people. A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them, and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and our grandchildren.

This new approach comes after consultations with Congress about the different courses we could take in Iraq. Many are concerned that the Iraqis are becoming too dependent on the United States and therefore, our policy should focus on protecting Iraq’s borders and hunting down Al Qaeda. Their solution is to scale back America’s efforts in Baghdad or announce the phased withdrawal of our combat forces. We carefully considered these proposals. And we concluded that to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear the country apart and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale. Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer and confront an enemy that is even more lethal. If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home.

In the days ahead, my national security team will fully brief Congress on our new strategy. If — if members have improvements that can be made, we will make them. If circumstances change, we will adjust. Honorable people have different views and they will voice their criticisms. It is fair to hold our views up to scrutiny. And all involved have a responsibility to explain how the path they propose would be more likely to succeed.

Acting on the good advice of Senator Joe Lieberman and other key members of Congress, we will form a new, bipartisan working group that will help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror. This group will meet regularly with me and my administration. It will help strengthen our relationship with Congress. We can begin by working together to increase the size of the active Army and Marine Corps, so that America has the Armed Forces we need for the 21st century. We also need to examine ways to mobilize talented American civilians to deploy overseas — where they can help build democratic institutions in communities and nations recovering from war and tyranny.

In these dangerous times, the United States is blessed to have extraordinary and selfless men and women willing to step forward and defend us. These young Americans understand that our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary, and that the advance of freedom is the calling of our time. They serve far from their families, who make the quiet sacrifices of lonely holidays and empty chairs at the dinner table. They have watched their comrades give their lives to ensure our liberty. We mourn the loss of every fallen American; and we owe it to them to build a future worthy of their sacrifice.

Fellow citizens: The year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice and resolve. It can be tempting to think that America can put aside the burdens of freedom. Yet times of testing reveal the character of a nation. And throughout our history, Americans have always defied the pessimists and seen our faith in freedom redeemed. Now America is engaged in a new struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can and we will prevail.

We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours. Thank you and good night.

    Transcript of President Bush’s Address to Nation on U.S. Policy in Iraq, NYT, 11.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/us/11ptext.html

Bush backs off fight on four court nominees

Tue Jan 9, 2007 4:09 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Backing away from a confrontation with Senate Democrats, President George W. Bush has decided to withdraw four appeals court nominations whose selections had met with resistance, the White House said on Tuesday.

The nominations of William Haynes, Michael Wallace, William Myers and Terrence Boyle will be withdrawn, said White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore.

Haynes's role as general counsel for the Department of Defense and in advising the Bush administration on the treatment of terror suspects had stirred controversy and Democrats had criticized the records of the other nominees on issues like civil rights and the environment.

With the Senate now under Democratic control, prospects for their confirmations appeared slim.

"As many of America's courts lay vacant, the president's main focus now is to address this issue by moving forward in the 110th Congress with a new slate of highly qualified nominees," Lawrimore said.

    Bush backs off fight on four court nominees, R, 9.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2007-01-09T210815Z_01_N09190970_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-COURT.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

Bush Announces Pick for Intelligence Post

January 5, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 — From the start, John D. Negroponte felt miscast as the nation’s first director of national intelligence, a diplomat who never seemed comfortable in spook’s clothing, colleagues and friends of his said.

Even at age 67, Mr. Negroponte longed to be back in the thick of policymaking, they said. But he knew it was the one role he was barred from playing as long as he remained the nation’s top intelligence chief, whose role is to step into the Oval Office each morning as a neutral, impartial adviser on the threats lurking around the globe.

It was because of this, officials said, that he agreed to do something generally unheard of in a city obsessed with the bureaucratic totem pole: trade a cabinet-level job for a subcabinet post as deputy secretary of state, a job that essentially requires him to handle tasks that Condoleezza Rice would rather not deal with.

President Bush nominated him for the post today, and Mr. Negroponte said, “It will be a great privilege for me to come home to the department where I began my career and rejoin a community of colleagues whose work is so important.”

To succeed Mr. Negroponte, Mr. Bush, as expected, named a retired admiral, Mike McConnell, who has had extensive experience in the collection and analysis of intelligence.

“He served as director of the National Security Agency in the 1990’s,” Mr. Bush said. “He was the intelligence officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the liberation of Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm.”

Although he has been a private consultant for the last decade, Mr. McConnell said he had stayed in touch with intelligence agencies and issues.

His work, he said, “has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left.”

Mr. Negroponte leaves his office at Bolling Air Force Base after only 19 months and with mixed reviews. The base is the home of a new intelligence bureaucracy created to solve the problems laid bare after the Sept. 11 attacks, but Mr. Negroponte barely had time to get it running. All over Washington on Thursday, there were questions about whether Mr. Negroponte was there long enough to lay the foundations of real change and whether his transfer suggested that the Bush administration was less committed than it claimed to be to an intelligence overhaul that President Bush had billed as the most significant restructuring of American spy agencies in half a century.

Senior administration officials said it was Mr. Bush who personally asked Mr. Negroponte to take on the diplomatic post sometime last month. It was the second time in two years that Mr. Bush had turned to Mr. Negroponte to fill a critical job: Mr. Negroponte became the director of national intelligence only after several other candidates had turned down the job. This time around, Ms. Rice had requested over the summer that Mr. Negroponte become her deputy. But the decision languished for months as the White House sought an adequate replacement for the spy chief, and as Mr. Negroponte vacillated between remaining at the helm of an intelligence community that numbered roughly 100,000 people and a return to the State Department, in the shadow of the administration’s most visible international figure.

Senior administration officials said that Ms. Rice wanted Mr. Negroponte to focus on China and North Korea, which have been among his focuses in the intelligence post, and on Iraq, a country he knows particularly well.

Mr. Negroponte has also served as ambassador to the United Nations, Mexico, the Philippines and Honduras, in a Foreign Service career that spanned more than three decades. A senior administration official who was involved in discussions about his nomination said that Ms. Rice regarded him as a foreign policy moderate who could help fill the big voids left by the departure of Robert B. Zoellick, who stepped down as deputy secretary last summer, and Philip D. Zelikow, who left the job of State Department counselor last month.

Ms. Rice would continue to play a central role in Iraq policy, the official said, but she has also made it clear that she wants to devote more time to a broader diplomatic initiative aimed at Middle East peace.

John E. McLaughlin, a former director of central intelligence who is a friend of Mr. Negroponte, said that he managed to make the transition from career Foreign Service officer to the intelligence arena with little difficulty, but that Mr. Negroponte was now returning to the world where he felt most at ease.

Mr. McLaughlin said he believed that Mr. Negroponte’s familiarity with the latest intelligence from Iraq would help to bring a “realistic” view of the situation there as the administration works to develop a new strategy.

But other intelligence experts expressed concern about what Mr. Negroponte’s departure might mean to the office he helped to establish. “My major concern about this appointment is not about the State Department, but what happens at the D.N.I. office,” said Lee H. Hamilton, who served as co-chairman of both the 9/11 commission and the Iraq Study Group. “The future of that office and the concept of intelligence-sharing is on the line.”

Top Congressional officials responded angrily to the news of Mr. Negroponte’s departure.

“I think he walked off the job, and I don’t like it,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Just as Mr. Negroponte is leaving his post, his office is finishing a major National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s chances of surviving as a unified, independent country — a review that was commissioned only after a Congressional request over the summer, on a problem that Mr. Negroponte will have to help manage in his new post.

“He came into it after just a year in Iraq, and someone without a strong background in intelligence, and I think he is leaving awfully early, given the importance of getting this right,” said Robert Hutchings, the senior diplomat in residence at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, who once headed the National Intelligence Council.

“I think it is quite irresponsible,” he said.

Mr. Hutchings said the departure would compound “three or four years of nonstop turmoil” within American intelligence agencies.

Bush administration officials noted several successes during Mr. Negroponte’s tenure, most significant the creation and progress of the National Counterterrorism Center. Terrorism experts have credited the center with fusing information from across the intelligence community to understand better the global terrorism threat.

But as he assembled a staff of more than 1,500 people, he was criticized for simply adding another layer to a bureaucracy he was assigned to streamline. But some intelligence experts said that the criticism was unfair, and that the real blame rested with Congress for passing convoluted legislation that made bureaucratic bloat at the director of national intelligence office inevitable. Some critics say that the job of spy czar was never necessary to begin with. Some of those whom the White House first approached to take the job nearly two years ago — including Robert M. Gates, the newly installed secretary of defense — were deeply skeptical about whether that structure would work.

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said that President Bush was “very impressed” with the job Mr. Negroponte had done.

One of the greatest difficulties of Mr. Negroponte’s position has been trying to wrest control over multibillion dollar spy satellites and other gadgetry from the Pentagon, which historically had been in charge of 80 percent of the nation’s intelligence budget.

One of the top priorities of the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, was to expand the Pentagon’s role in intelligence gathering, and some members of Congress say that Mr. Negroponte was not aggressive enough in bringing the Pentagon’s intelligence budget more under his control.

Some intelligence experts believe that Mr. Gates is likely to be less territorial than Mr. Rumsfeld was about the Pentagon’s intelligence functions, and may even be eager to cede some of the Pentagon’s authority to the new intelligence chief. Others said that the job of corralling 16 sometimes dysfunctional intelligence agencies is an often thankless task, and one where it is difficult to have a noticeable impact. Mr. Negroponte is said by associates to have grown particularly weary of clashes with members of Congress.

“I think it’s pretty telling that both Bob Gates and John Negroponte prefer jobs trying to bail us out of Iraq to the job of trying to fix U.S. intelligence,” said Amy Zegart, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and an expert in intelligence overhaul.

Jim Rutenberg and John Holusha contributed reporting.

    Bush Announces Pick for Intelligence Post, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/washington/05cnd-intel.html?hp&ex=1168059600&en=ccb62c6b48201e10&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush to Name a New General to Oversee Iraq

January 5, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 — President Bush has decided to name Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus as the top American military commander in Iraq, part of a broad revamping of the military team that will carry out the administration’s new Iraq strategy, administration officials said Thursday.

In addition to the promotion of General Petraeus, who will replace Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the choice to succeed Gen. John P. Abizaid as the head of the Central Command is expected to be Adm. William J. Fallon, who is the top American military officer in the Pacific, officials said.

The changes are being made as the White House is considering an option to increase American combat power in Baghdad by five brigades as well as adding two battalions of reinforcements to the volatile province of Anbar in western Iraq.

Mr. Bush, who said Thursday that he would present details of his overall strategy for Iraq next week, and several top aides held a video teleconference on Thursday, speaking with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and his top deputies about plans to add forces in the capital and other matters. The session lasted roughly an hour and 45 minutes.

“I said that ‘You show the will, we will help you,’ ” Mr. Bush told reporters.

Echoing the comments of both military and political advisers in recent weeks, he added, “One thing is for certain: I will want to make sure that the mission is clear and specific and can be accomplished.”

Senior administration officials said that the choice of General Petraeus was part of a broader effort to change almost all of the top American officials in Iraq as Mr. Bush changes his strategy there.

“The idea is to put the whole new team in at roughly the same time, and send some clear messages that we are trying a new approach,” a senior administration official said Thursday.

In addition to the military changes, Mr. Bush intends to appoint the ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, as the new United States ambassador to the United Nations, a senior administration official said Thursday.

“It was clearly time to move the players around on the field,” said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Mr. Bush had yet to announce the changes. “This helps the president to make the case that this is a fresh start.”

Admiral Fallon would be the first Navy officer to serve as the senior officer of the Central Command, which is managing simultaneous ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Admiral Fallon is regarded within the military as one of its stronger regional combat commanders, and his possible appointment also reflects a greater emphasis on countering Iranian power, a mission that relies heavily on naval forces and combat airpower to project American influence in the Persian Gulf.

General Petraeus, who is now the head of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., helped oversee the drafting of the military’s comprehensive new manual on counterinsurgency. He has served two previous tours in Iraq, and some former officers say he sees the need for additional troops in Baghdad.

He will replace General Casey, whose plan for troop reductions in Iraq faltered last year in the face of escalating sectarian strife and who initially expressed public wariness about any short-term increase in troops in Iraq, a move that is now a leading option under consideration by the White House.

The departures of both General Casey and General Abizaid were expected, though in General Casey’s case it appears to have been moved up several months from the originally anticipated shift in spring or summer. General Abizaid’s tour had already been extended for a full year beyond the typical two-year stint, and he has announced that he will retire soon.

The troop increase option under discussion would focus on improving security in Baghdad. Under this approach, two Army combat brigades would be sent to the capital during the first phase of the operation. A combat brigade generally consists of about 3,500 soldiers. At the same time, a third brigade would be positioned in Kuwait as a reserve, and two more brigades would be on call in the United States.

The expectation is that these three brigades would eventually be sent to Baghdad as well, though the president would have the option to limit the reinforcements. Part of the increase could be achieved by holding some units past their currently scheduled return home.

Scaling up by five brigades would more than double the number of American combat troops involved in security operations in the Iraqi capital. The emphasis on Baghdad reflects the view that stability in the capital is a precondition for any broader effort to bring calm to the whole country. It is also a recognition that the administration sees sectarian violence as a greater threat to Iraq’s stability than the Sunni Arab insurgency.

While Baghdad is the principal focus, the option also provides for sending two battalions of reinforcements to Anbar, where overstretched Marine and Army forces have been battling Sunni Arab insurgents. A basic battalion generally consists of 1,200 troops.

One issue under discussion is how to mesh the emerging American strategy with the Iraqis’ capabilities. Bush administration officials say they want the increase in American troops to be paralleled by a considerable rise in the number of functional Iraqi troops. But the Iraqis failed in the summer to send all the reinforcements that had been requested, and some Iraqi security forces, particularly the police, have been infiltrated by militias.

Another point of contention is that some senior aides to Mr. Maliki have been notably unenthusiastic about an increase in American troops in Baghdad. During his meeting with Mr. Bush in Jordan in November, Mr. Maliki presented a plan that would shift most Americans to the periphery of Baghdad so they could concentrate on fighting Sunni insurgents while the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government asserted more control over the capital. That has left some American officials wondering whether the Maliki government was making a legitimate bid to exercise sovereignty or is committed to a sectarian Shiite agenda.

Bush administration officials believe that their new Iraqi strategy must involve political steps toward reconciliation and reconstruction programs to produce jobs.

In their teleconference, Mr. Bush and Mr. Maliki discussed the Iraqi government’s efforts at political reconciliation and the Iraqi prime minister’s vows to rein in militias, the pace of which American officials have found painfully slow. Discussing the execution of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Bush said the Maliki government was right to investigate the circumstances surrounding the hanging.

General Petraeus participated in the initial invasion of Iraq as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division. The division fought its way toward Baghdad and was later sent to Mosul in northern Iraq, where the general focused on political and economic reconstruction efforts.

“We are in a race to win over the people,” read a sign in his Mosul headquarters. “What have you and your element done today to contribute to victory?”

General Petraeus did a second tour in Iraq in which he oversaw the efforts to train the Iraqi Army. At his current post at Fort Leavenworth, he has been involved in the push to change the United States Army’s training and education to emphasize counterinsurgency operations.

Jack Keane, the retired Army general who served as vice chief of the Army, called General Petraeus an “imaginative commander who is experienced and knows how to deal with irregular warfare,” as the Army refers to insurgencies.

The Iraq commander post is considered a four-star general’s command, a promotion that would add a star to General Petraeus’s shoulder.

Officials also said Admiral Fallon received a persuasive recommendation from the Joint Chiefs as one of the military’s stronger commanders of a geographic theater, with his current command including the challenges of North Korea and China.

In that capacity, he also took the unusual and punitive move in December of canceling a large, annual field exercise with the Philippines over a local judge’s failure to honor the bilateral treaty governing protections for American military personnel. The judge refused to honor the agreement’s rule that American military personnel remain in American custody pending final appeal of all criminal proceedings against them, and ordered a marine convicted of rape held in a local jail even though the case was on appeal.

David E. Sanger and Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.

    Bush to Name a New General to Oversee Iraq, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/world/middleeast/05military.html?hp&ex=1168059600&en=b4d8f52e64339832&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush administration defends emergency mail inspection

Posted 1/4/2007 10:39 PM ET
USA Today
By Mimi Hall and David Jackson

WASHINGTON — The White House on Thursday defended a policy allowing the government to open mail without a warrant, despite criticism that the crime-fighting tactic might lead to privacy breaches.

Bush administration and Postal Service officials said citizens' mail remains constitutionally protected from unreasonable search and seizure. But White House spokesman Tony Snow said the United States needs to have the power to inspect mail in emergencies.

The mail controversy erupted Wednesday after a report in the New York Daily News that President Bush on Dec. 20 attached a so-called signing statement to a new postal law. The statement grants the government the authority during emergencies to bypass a law forbidding mail to be opened without a warrant.

Snow said Bush was simply reiterating authority the government already has under the law.

U.S. Postal Service spokesman Thomas Day concurred. "The president is not exerting any new authority," he said.

Snow did not say what emergency circumstances might warrant inspections of the mail.

Brian Walsh, a lawyer at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the authority likely would only be used in extreme cases, such as if police learned a bomb or an envelope containing anthrax or another biohazard was in the mail.

If the government didn't have the authority for prompt inspections, the mail — particularly overnight delivery — could become "a courier service for drug dealers or terrorists," Walsh said.

Privacy rights advocates expressed concern that the administration could loosely define emergency situations to include looking at mail sent by or delivered to people who might wrongly be included on the government's terrorist watch lists.

The American Civil Liberties Union said such "deliberate ambiguity" was troublesome.

It "raises a red flag because of President Bush's history of asserting broad powers to spy on Americans," ACLU Director Anthony Romero said.

Others accused Bush of making an end-run around the Constitution and Congress.

"This opens the door into the government prying into private communications," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice. "It's something we associate with a totalitarian or police state."

In Congress, where Democrats took control of both houses Thursday for the first time in 12 years, some lawmakers expressed unease about the practice.

"Every American wants foolproof protection against terrorism," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said. "But history has shown it can and should be done within the confines of the Constitution. This last-minute, irregular and unauthorized reinterpretation of a duly passed law is the exact type of maneuver that voters so resoundingly rejected in November."

    Bush administration defends emergency mail inspection, UT, 4.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-04-mail-inspection_x.htm

Trying to Regain Initiative, Bush Looks Ahead

January 3, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT and JOHN HOLUSHA

WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 — President Bush sought today to regain the initiative on the eve of the Democratic takeover of Congress, pledging to work enthusiastically with the new lineup of lawmakers but holding fast to his own goals.

Offering his congratulations to the incoming 110th Congress, Mr. Bush made it clear that he will resist being painted as a lame-duck president in his last two years — “one-quarter of my presidency, plenty of time to accomplish important things for the American people,” as he put it in an essay in The Wall Street Journal today.

Mr. Bush struck the same tone this morning in remarks after a Cabinet meeting. He voiced the hope that Democrats and Republicans alike “can find common ground to serve our folks,” and then sounded much as he did last summer and fall while campaigning for Republican candidates and positions.

“One area where we must work together is that we’ve got to make sure we spend the people’s money wisely,” Mr. Bush said after the Cabinet session. No doubt aware that Democrats are wary of being portrayed as members of a tax-and-spend party, Mr. Bush spoke, as he often did on the campaign trail, of “the need to keep this economy growing by making tax relief permanent,” and of his desire to “reform” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. Bush laid out his positions in more detail on the OpEd page of The Journal, often a friendly platform. “It is a fact that economies do best when you reward hard work by allowing people to keep more of what they have earned,” the president wrote in The Journal. “It is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues.”

Mr. Bush wrote that he saw “the opportunity to build a bipartisan consensus to fight and win the war” in Iraq.

“Ultimately, Iraqis must resolve the most pressing issues facing them,” Mr. Bush said. “We can’t do it for them.”

Mr. Bush is expected to address the nation soon on his Iraq policy. His speech, to be televised in prime time, is being eagerly awaited in the aftermath of calls for change, both by an independent commission that investigated the Iraq situation and, implicitly, by the results of the November elections, which returned power to Democrats for the first time since 1994.

Democrats may be in a celebratory mood as they prepare to wield the gavels in the House and Senate, but the president was not entirely conciliatory. “The majority party in Congress gets to pass the bills it wants,” he wrote in The Journal. “The minority party, especially where the margins are close, has a strong say in the form bills take. And the Constitution leaves it to the president to use his judgment whether they should be signed into law.”

Democrats will have only a thin margin in the new Senate, though its majority in the House is more comfortably large. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, vice chairman of the Democratic conference in the Senate, said today that Democrats “certainly want to work with the president.”

“We hope that when the president says compromise, it means more than ‘do it my way,’ which is what he’s meant in the past,” Mr. Schumer said.

Mr. Bush asked the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress today to make good on campaign promises by shining light on the previously clandestine expenditures known as “earmarks,” through legislation to require disclosure of their sponsors and other details.

Speaking in the White House’s rose garden after the Cabinet meeting, Mr. Bush noted that the soon-to-be chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees had agreed on a temporary moratorium on earmarks, which are parochial spending measures slipped into larger, often unrelated bills at the behest of one or a few members.

“But we need to do more,” Mr. Bush said. “Congress needs to adopt real reform that requires full disclosure of the sponsors, the costs, the recipients and the justification for every earmark.”

And he said Congress “needs to cut the number and cost of earmarks next year by half.”

The President said he plans to submit next month a five-year budget proposal intended to bring the federal budget into balance by 2012 without raising taxes.

He also repeated his desire for legislation giving the president the power to delete individual provisions from spending bills, known as a line-item veto — a power that Congress, even when controlled by the same party as the president, has refused to grant.

Mr. Bush took a friendly if not altogether conciliatory tone toward Congress in his remarks, saying, “I’ve been encouraged by the productive meeting I have had with many of the new leaders of Congress.”

But he made it clear that he planned to stand firm on his past policy themes, like keeping taxes down and fighting the “war on terror.”

He also said Congress would have to address entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “for the sake of younger Americans.”

Mr. Bush said those programs needed to be reformed, “so future generations of Americans can benefit” from them “without bankrupting our country.”

David Stout reported from Washington for this article, and John Holusha reported from New York.

    Trying to Regain Initiative, Bush Looks Ahead, NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/world/middleeast/03cnd-prexy.html?hp&ex=1167886800&en=b1665a4543228c7d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush Says Plan Would Balance Budget by ’12

January 3, 2007
The New York Times
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — President Bush said on Tuesday that he would propose a plan that he insists would, if followed, achieve a balanced budget by 2012, the most optimistic he has been in at least five years, and he said the goal could be achieved without rescinding any of his big tax cuts.

In an op-ed article for the Wednesday issue of the The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bush said his budget proposal for the 2008 fiscal year would for the first time project a deficit that disappears.

“The bottom line is tax relief and spending restraint are good for the American worker, good for the American taxpayer, and good for the federal budget,” Mr. Bush said in the article, which was online Tuesday night. “Now is not the time to raise taxes on the American people.”

Mr. Bush offered no specifics on how he intends to achieve a balanced budget, beyond declaring that his tax cuts had led to economic growth and generated large increases in tax revenue for the past two years.

The White House’s most recent budget forecast, issued last summer, called for the deficit to decline to $127 billion in 2011 from its peak of $412 billion in 2004. Thanks to larger-than-expected revenue gains last year, the shortfall for 2006 declined to $248 billion.

During his re-election campaign in 2004, Mr. Bush promised to cut the deficit in half by 2009. Though the prediction was greeted with widespread skepticism, that goal now looks increasingly plausible even if war costs in Iraq continue at current levels for another year.

Mr. Bush gave no hint in the article about whether the goal of a balanced budget by 2012 was predicated on continued rapid growth in tax revenues or deep new spending cuts in domestic programs.

But Mr. Bush’s budget plans in the past several years have consistently failed to take into account two major costs in the years ahead: the war in Iraq and the cost of restraining or repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax.

War costs are now more than $100 billion a year, and Mr. Bush is expected to ask Congress for a supplemental spending package of more than $110 billion to finance military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year.

The alternative minimum tax is a potentially more costly item. The tax, which was created to prevent rich taxpayers from making too much use of elaborate deductions, is rapidly expanding its reach into the middle class because it is not adjusted for inflation.

Mr. Bush and Democratic leaders have called for a permanent “fix” to the alternative minimum tax, but an outright repeal would cost about $1 trillion over the next 10 years. For the past several years, Mr. Bush and the Congress have kept the tax from expanding by passing a series of one-year measures that could cost more than $70 billion for next year alone.

    Bush Says Plan Would Balance Budget by ’12, NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/washington/03bush.html