History > 2007 > USA > Politics > White House

George W. Bush (V)

Internet Tax Moratorium Goes to Bush

October 30, 2007
Filed at 12:35 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A bill to extend a moratorium on Internet access taxes for seven years was approved 402-0 by the House Tuesday, less than two days before it was set to expire.

The House initially approved a four-year ban, but last week the Senate passed a seven-year prohibition, despite considerable support for a permanent ban.

''Seven years is better than nothing, and that's what we're doing today,'' said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich, during remarks on the House floor.

A House bill that would make the moratorium permanent has 238 House co-sponsors, more than a majority.

The tax ban, first approved in 1998 and twice renewed, is set to expire Nov. 1.

Support for a permanent ban was strong in both the House and Senate, but concerns over the potential long-term impact on state and local governments forced a compromise.

The provision amounts to a moratorium on state and local taxes, said David Quam, director of federal relations with the National Governors Association. And with the Internet changing rapidly, the issue should be revisited periodically, he said.

''The implications could be pretty severe down the road if they got that wrong,'' he said. ''It's actually a decent compromise that state and local governments and industry helped craft.''

Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif. called the bill ''bipartisan legislation at its best'' and noted it was supported by businesses, state and local government organizations and labor unions.

In addition to lengthening the ban from four years to seven years, the legislation also contains a provision aimed at preventing state and local governments from assessing taxes beyond those levied on simple Internet access.

At the urging of Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the legislation specifically prohibits taxation on e-mail and instant messaging services ''that are provided independently or not packaged with Internet access.''

The extension also exempts some states that approved taxes prior to the original enactment.

Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., supported a permanent ban, but helped craft the seven-year compromise. ''Seven years is better than we've ever done before,'' he told The Associated Press. ''I think that's an important place to start.''

The bill now goes to the White House for President Bush's signature.

    Internet Tax Moratorium Goes to Bush, NYT, 30.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Internet-Tax.html

Bush Says Congress Is Wasting Time

October 30, 200
The New York Times
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — President Bush lashed out at Congress today, the third time he has done so in two weeks, this time saying the House had wasted time on “a constant string of investigations” and the Senate had similarly wasted its efforts by trying to rein in the Iraq war. Its failure to send a single annual appropriations bill to his desk, he said, amounted to “the worst record for a Congress in 20 years.”

“Congress is not getting its work done,” the president said in brief remarks from the North Portico of the White House.

He urged Congress to act on defense-funding legislation and on a compromise on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-CHIP.

As he spoke, Mr. Bush was flanked by two senior Republicans, Representative John Boehner of Ohio, the minority leader, and Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the minority whip.

The three had emerged from a meeting in the East Room of the House Republican Conference, and perhaps reflecting the campaign season under way, the president’s words took on a partisan edge.

According to The Associated Press, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, responded by saying: “President Bush’s rally this morning reminds us that Congressional Republicans remain ready and willing to rubber-stamp the Bush agenda: no to children’s health care; no to a new direction in Iraq; and no to investing in America’s future.”

Republicans have chafed amid the nearly continuous investigations, many by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which that panel’s Democratic leadership describes as accountability.

Referring to the current congressional session, Mr. Bush said: “We’re near the end of the year, and there really isn’t much to show for it. The House of Representatives has wasted valuable time on a constant stream of investigations, and the Senate has wasted valuable time on an endless series of failed votes to pull our troops out of Iraq.”

Members of the Democratic-led Congress, he added, hadn’t “seen a bill they could not solve without shoving a tax hike into it.”

”Proposed spending is skyrocketing under their leadership,” he said.

But Democrats, and some Republicans, have regularly criticized the administration for spending increases since Mr. Bush came to office.

The president again criticized Democrats over the S-CHIP bill, saying the Senate had taken up a second version of the legislation passed by the House “despite knowing it does not have a chance of becoming law.”

While the president vetoed the first version, saying it spent too much money and covered not just the poor children it is intended to help but some middle-class children and adults, he said this version would spend even more.

“After going alone and going nowhere, Congress should instead work with the administration on a bill that puts poor children first,” he said. “We want to sit down in good faith and come up with a bill that is responsible.”

Mr. Bush was also sharply critical of a reported plan by congressional leaders to combine the Defense Department appropriations bill with bills for domestic departments.

“It’s hard to imagine a more cynical political strategy than trying to hold hostage funding for our troops in combat and our wounded warriors in order to extract $11 billion in additional social spending,” he said.

The president had used scathing language about the Democratic majority during an Oct. 17 news conference, saying Congress was dragging its feet on a range of important legislation while spending time debating whether the deaths of more than a million Armenians in the early 20th century amounted to a genocide at Turkish hands.

The president had continued his denunciations of Congress last Friday, saying its leaders had also failed to act yet to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general, despite Democrats’ complaints about a lack of leadership at the Justice Department. “This is not what congressional leaders promised when they took control of Congress earlier this year,” he said then.

    Bush Says Congress Is Wasting Time, NYT, 30.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/washington/30cnd-policy.html?hp

Editorial

Trash Talking World War III

October 29, 2007
The New York Times

America’s allies and increasingly the American public are playing a ghoulish guessing game: Will President Bush manage to leave office without starting a war with Iran? Mr. Bush is eagerly feeding those anxieties. This month he raised the threat of “World War III” if Iran even figures out how to make a nuclear weapon.

With a different White House, we might dismiss this as posturing — or bank on sanity to carry the day, or the warnings of exhausted generals or a defense secretary more rational than his predecessor. Not this crowd.

Four years after his pointless invasion of Iraq, President Bush still confuses bullying with grand strategy. He refuses to do the hard work of diplomacy — or even acknowledge the disastrous costs of his actions. The Republican presidential candidates have apparently decided that the real commander in chief test is to see who can out-trash talk the White House on Iran.

The world should not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but there is no easy fix here, no daring surgical strike. Consider Natanz, the underground site where Iran is defying the Security Council by spinning a few thousand centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel. American bombers could take it out, but what about the even more sophisticated centrifuges the administration accuses Iran of hiding? Beyond the disastrous diplomatic and economic costs, a bombing campaign is unlikely to set back Iran’s efforts for more than a few years.

The neocons pushing an attack on Iran admit that a prolonged bombing campaign would be necessary and would likely only delay Iran’s program. But it is still worth it, they say, and if everybody gets lucky maybe the attacks will unleash that popular uprising against the mullahs they’ve been promising for years.

That is the same kind of rose-petal thinking that was used to sell Americans a fantasy about the invasion of Iraq. Large numbers of Iranians are fed up with their government’s corruption and repression and with being branded a pariah state. Rain down American bombs, however, and the mullahs and Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are more likely to be turned into national heroes than hung from lampposts. And that’s not even calculating the international fury or the additional mayhem Tehran could wreak in Iraq or what would happen to world oil prices.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is the other great hope (after Defense Secretary Robert Gates) for holding off a war. She still wants to give sanctions and diplomacy a chance. But, as with everything else she does, there’s nowhere near enough follow-through. If the stakes are really that high — and they are — then Ms. Rice and her boss must tell Moscow, Beijing and the Europeans that relations will be judged on whether they are willing to place a lot more pressure on Iran.

They also need to offer Iran a credible way back in from the cold — and clear rewards and security guarantees if it is willing to give up its nuclear ambitions. If it’s really that important — and we believe it is — then it’s time to send somebody higher ranking than the American ambassador in Baghdad to deliver the message.

For this to have any chance, Mr. Bush will have to tone down the rhetoric. Sure, a lot of these countries are letting greed cloud their judgment, when they balk at restricting trade with Iran. But it’s a lot easier to justify when they say they’re not giving the crazy American government an excuse for another war.

Maybe the country will get lucky and Mr. Bush will listen to the exhausted generals. But this isn’t just about surviving the rest of his presidency. Fifteen more months of diplomatic drift will bring Iran 15 months closer to figuring out how to make a nuclear weapon.

    Trash Talking World War III, NYT, 29.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/opinion/29mon1.html

Bush Says He'll Veto Health Bill Again

October 26, 2007
Filed at 11:09 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush accused Democratic lawmakers on Friday of wasting time by passing legislation to expand children's health coverage, knowing that he would veto it again. At the same time, he criticized Congress for failing to approve spending bills to keep the government running.

Bush said Congress had ''set a record they should not be proud of: October 26 is the latest date in 20 years that Congress has failed to get a single annual appropriations bill to the president's desk.''

He also complained that Congress had failed to pass a permanent extension of a moratorium on state and local taxes on Internet access, and that the Senate had not yet confirmed Michael Mukasey as attorney general. Further, he chided Congress for failing to approve more money for Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Senate on Thursday night approved a seven-year extension of the Internet tax moratorium; differences with a House-passed version still have to be worked out.

Bush made his comments to reporters in the Roosevelt Room a day after the House passed new legislation to expand children's health coverage. Bush vetoed an earlier version, and the latest bill was little changed from the earlier measure. The bill -- approved with less than the two-thirds majority needed to overturn another veto -- now goes to the Senate. The House vote was 265-142.

Bush said that Congress needs to ''stop wasting time and get essential work done on behalf of the American people.''

Democrats said Republicans were making a mistake in opposing the children's health bill.

''They won't take yes for an answer,'' Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., said of Republicans.

He said that in the week since they failed to override Bush's first veto, Democrats had systematically addressed earlier complaints that the bill failed to place a priority on low-income children, did not effectively bar illegal immigrants from qualifying for benefits and was overly generous to adults.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, mocked the suggestion that Democrats -- and Emanuel in particular -- were acting on principle. ''I think the last principal Rahm Emanuel knew was in high school.'' Told of the remark, Emanuel chuckled.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland raised the possibility that additional changes were possible before the bill would be sent to the White House.

At the same time, he added, ''I don't want to be strung along'' by Republicans merely feigning an interest in bipartisan compromise.

Senate passage is highly likely, particularly with senior Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah among the bill's most persistent supporters.

The legislation is designed chiefly to provide coverage for children whose families make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to purchase private insurance.

In general, supporters said it would extend coverage to children of families making up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $62,000 for a family of four.

At that level, congressional officials said, it would cover about 4 million children who now go without, raising the total for the program overall to 10 million kids. The $35 billion cost over five years would be covered by an increase in the tobacco tax of 61 cents a pack.

The vote unfolded one week after the House failed to override Bush's earlier veto, and indicated that the changes Democrats had made failed to attract much, if any, additional support.

The 265 votes cast for the measure came up seven shy of the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto. In addition, 14 Republicans who voted to sustain Bush's original veto were absent.

Public opinion polls show widespread support for the issue, and the political subtext was never far from the surface on a day of acrimony.

    Bush Says He'll Veto Health Bill Again, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Childrens-Health.html

Editorial

Another $200 Billion

October 25, 2007
The New York Times

President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children’s health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president’s distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children’s health care.

Mr. Bush is threatening to veto most of the 12 domestic spending bills now before Congress because Democrats want to provide $22 billion more than the $933 billion he has requested. His argument? Something about the president’s responsibility to rein in lawmakers’ “temptation to overspend.”

This from a leader who turns federal surpluses into deficits, believes that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can be financed on a separate set of books with borrowed money, and keeps having to go back to Congress for “emergency funding” because he cannot or will not tell the truth about what it is costing to fight these wars.

Mr. Bush’s latest emergency request is for $46 billion. That would bring the 2008 price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan to $196.4 billion. Starting at Sept. 11, 2001, war-fighting expenses total a staggering $800 billion or more. The nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says that by the end of the year spending on Iraq will probably surpass that on the Vietnam War.

Mr. Bush has said most of the new money would go for “day-to-day” military operations and “basic needs” like bullets, body armor and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, which are designed to withstand bomb attacks, a rising threat to American forces in Iraq. The troops need safer vehicles and better armor, but it is beyond our ken why Mr. Bush could not cover this in his original budget submission, unless he wanted to confuse the public and limit Congressional oversight.

And there is no end in sight. Mr. Bush clearly plans to keep fighting this pointless war until his last day in office. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told The Times that he will press Congress to sustain current military spending levels even after the Iraq war ends so the Pentagon can repair and replace worn-out weapons and rebuild ground forces.

The Pentagon will certainly need help recovering, but the country cannot keep signing blank checks. The next president, and Congress, will finally have to impose some discipline, starting with an honest review of what is needed to keep America safe, not just enrich military contractors and their lobbyists.

Democrats have failed repeatedly to end the Iraq war or to substantially change its course. Now they face another test. Mr. Bush will try to ram his spending request through Congress before Christmas, using the impending holiday to create a false sense of urgency. They must resist that, and try again to use their power of the purse to force the president to begin serious planning for a swift and orderly exit from Iraq. They cannot have it both ways — opposing the war and enabling Mr. Bush to keep it going full speed and full cost ahead.

If the Republicans block that, then the Democrats must at least insist on the fiscal prudence that Mr. Bush and his party claim to believe in so fervently. Representative David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is already calling for a war tax. That, at least, would be a more honest and responsible way to ensure that all Americans share the financial burden of this war.

    Another $200 Billion, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/opinion/25thur1.html

Wars May Cost $2.4 Trillion Over Decade

October 24, 2007
Filed at 2:56 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost as much as $2.4 trillion through the next decade, according to a new analysis Wednesday that the White House brushed off as ''speculation.''

The analysis, by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, provides the most comprehensive and far-reaching estimate to date, taking into account costs previously not counted and assuming large number of forces would remain in the regions.

According to CBO, the U.S. has spent about $600 billion to date on both wars, including $39 billion in diplomatic operations and foreign aid.

If the U.S. cuts the number of troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan to 75,000 six years from now, it would cost the U.S. another $1 trillion for military and diplomatic operations and $705 billion in interest payments to pay for the wars through 2017.

Democrats say voters won't stand for it, and so they would consider paying for the military campaigns in brief installments, instead of full one-year terms.

The White House brushed off the estimate as too conditional.

''It's just a ton of speculation,'' said White House press secretary Dana Perino. ''We don't know how much the war is going to cost in the future.''

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., said voters were suffering from ''sticker shock.''

''America's future is being held hostage by the cost of the war,'' he said.

    Wars May Cost $2.4 Trillion Over Decade, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

Bush Stands by Plan for Missile Defenses

October 24, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — President Bush on Tuesday strongly defended plans to build missile defenses in Europe, arguing that Iran posed an urgent threat to some NATO allies. He also chided the Democratic-controlled Congress for cutting spending that he called “vital to the security of America.”

“The need for missile defense in Europe is real, and I believe it is urgent,” Mr. Bush said, speaking at the National Defense University here. “Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles of increasing range that could deliver them.”

Mr. Bush’s remarks — part of a broad defense of the administration’s national security strategy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — came only 11 days after his secretaries of state and defense went to Moscow and discussed ways to ease Russia’s concerns over the deployment of missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic.

While Mr. Bush invited Russian cooperation, he also made it clear that the administration intended to proceed with building missile sites as part of a plan to deploy the interceptor missiles in several years. His tone appeared more hawkish than that of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who had said earlier in the day in Prague that while the United States wanted the deployment to move forward, the missiles might not be activated immediately after being deployed.

“We have not fully developed this proposal,” Mr. Gates said, appearing with the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, “but the idea was we would go forward with the negotiations, we would complete the negotiations, we would develop the sites, build the sites, but perhaps delay activating them until there was concrete proof of the threat from Iran.”

At the meetings in Moscow, on Oct. 12 and 13, the Russians called for the United States to freeze the planned deployment of the missiles in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic. While Mr. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ruled that out, the two countries did agree to share information about potential threats from Iran.

Mr. Bush would like to make missile defense a defining legacy of his presidency, though critics say the initial system, with a limited number of missile interceptors in Alaska and California, remains unproven. Missile defense has been a core of Republican ideology since Ronald Reagan proposed what came to be known as the “Star Wars” program in 1983, and it remains hugely popular among the Republican candidates vying to succeed Mr. Bush.

“We should move as quickly as we can to build missile defense,” Rudolph W. Giuliani said during the Republican candidates’ debate on Sunday night in Orlando, Fla. Senator John McCain said that the objections of President Vladimir V. Putin were not an obstacle to deploying a system, but rather a justification of it.

“This is a dangerous person, and he has to understand that there’s a cost to some of his actions,” Mr. McCain said. “And the first thing I would do is make sure that we have a missile defense system in place” in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The Democratic presidential candidates, by contrast, have rarely discussed it and, when they do, usually criticize it for soaking up resources that might be better spent on more pressing threats or domestic needs.

Mr. Bush suggested that missile defenses would be a deterrent the same way that an overwhelming capacity for nuclear retaliation once was with the Soviet Union.

“A terrorist regime that can strike America or our allies with a ballistic missile is likely to see this power as giving them free rein for acts of aggression and intimidation in their own neighborhoods,” he said. “But with missile defenses in place, the calculus of deterrence changes in our favor. If this same terrorist regime does not have confidence their missile attack would be successful, it is less likely to engage in acts of aggression in the first place.”

In speaking at the National Defense University, Mr. Bush was returning to the place where he first pledged to build a national missile defense more than six and a half years ago. But critics questioned the urgency of the threat, and even Mr. Bush said that intelligence agencies did not believe that Iran could build a ballistic missile capable of striking the United States before 2015 — and then only with foreign assistance.

“There are a lot of ifs, ands and buts,” Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, said of Iran’s missile abilities.

The administration hopes to reach agreements by year’s end with Poland and the Czech Republic and to break ground on the missile sites before Mr. Bush leaves office.

Mr. Bush raised the issue again now, aides said, to fend off Congressional efforts to cut spending, which he said would delay the deployments in Europe “for a year or more.” Mr. Bush, who the day before asked Congress to approve $196 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other programs, complained that Congress was proposing cutting $290 million from the $8.9 billion he proposed for missile defense in the current fiscal year.

Representative Ellen O. Tauscher of California, a Democrat, dismissed Mr. Bush’s criticism. She said there was bipartisan support for defenses focused on more immediate threats of shorter-range missiles that could strike American allies or forces in the Middle East and Europe.

“There’s no need for us to rush ahead to deal with an emerging threat,” she said, referring to Iran’s possible development of intercontinental missiles, “when we have such gaps now for the current threat.”

    Bush Stands by Plan for Missile Defenses, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24prexy.html

Bush Moving on California Wildfires

October 24, 2007
Filed at 4:12 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush mobilized federal emergency assistance Tuesday on behalf of Southern California officials struggling with devastating wildfires, and scheduled a visit to the stricken region on Thursday.

''The president wants to travel to California to witness firsthand what the people there are going through with these wildfires,'' White House press secretary Dana Perino said. ''He wants to ensure that the state and local governments are getting what they need from the federal government and he wants to make sure to deliver a message in person to the victims that he has them in his thoughts and prayers.''

To make the trip, Bush is canceling a previously scheduled trip to St. Louis, where he was to deliver remarks on the budget and headline a fundraiser for the national Republican Party. Vice President Dick Cheney was going to fill in for the president, but the White House later decided to reschedule the events.

Earlier Tuesday, Perino said that it was premature to talk about a presidential visit to California, saying: ''The last thing California needs right now is a trip from the president to take away assets.'' Later, she said Bush and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed during a phone call that Thursday was the best day for Bush to come.

The dozen wildfires in California have set ablaze 375,000 acres -- 585 square miles -- and forecasts call for hotter temperatures and high winds that most expect to dramatically increase the destruction.

Perino also announced that Bush was convening a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday morning for a briefing from FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison and his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The top federal disaster officials were arriving in California on Tuesday night to see what more could be done from Washington and were to address the president and the Cabinet via secure videoconference.

Ahead of the Cabinet meeting, Bush held a half-hour conference call Tuesday night with several officials involved in the federal effort, with all receiving an initial update from the ground from Chertoff and Paulison. Chertoff reported that weather conditions are hampering efforts to contain the fires, and said top immediate priorities include helping with evacuation and shelter, providing relief for weary firefighters and sending medical teams, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

Schwarzenegger sent a letter to Bush late Tuesday asking him to declare a major disaster in California due to the fires. The move would pave the way for the federal government to provide financial assistance to those who lost possessions in the fire.

Bush briefly departed from a war on terror speech at the National Defense University to offer prayers for those losing houses and businesses -- or about to lose them.

''All of us across this nation are concerned for the families who have lost their homes and the many families who have been evacuated from their homes,'' he said. ''We send the help of the federal government.''

Just before 4 a.m. EDT, he declared a federal emergency for seven California counties, a move that will speed disaster-relief efforts. But it will take a major disaster declaration to help victims with property losses.

Perino said the federal government is applying lessons learned from a disaster that deeply damaged Bush's presidency -- Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast in 2005 -- to do a better job now. Such an improved response -- mainly in terms of swift communication with state and local officials -- has been evident in previous disasters, such as after tornadoes in Kansas and Alabama, and a major bridge collapse in Minnesota, she said.

''Clearly those lessons were learned, and they're being applied,'' Perino said.

To dramatize federal efforts and head off any suggestion of indifference of the kind that dogged Bush after Katrina, Perino showed slides at her daily briefing that detailed Washington's contribution so far in California. It includes 32 firefighting crews and dozens of fire engines from the Agriculture Department, 1,239 federal firefighters, 25,000 cots and 280,000 bottles of water.

California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer complained on Capitol Hill Tuesday that the ability of the state's National Guard to respond to disasters like the fires has been compromised because too much of its equipment and personnel are committed in Iraq.

Perino said there are other places to get the needed resources to do the job.

''When you are a nation at war you have to use assets available to you and sometimes those come from the National Guard,'' Perino said. ''The president has said we will get them what they need.''

The wildfires have burned more than 1,300 homes, required at least 500,000 people to be evacuated, claimed at least one life and injured dozens, including many firefighters.

------

Associated Press writer Erica Werner contributed to this story.

    Bush Moving on California Wildfires, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/pages/aponline/index.html

Bush Touting Cuban Life After Castro

October 24, 2007
Filed at 3:15 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush, ever pushing for a Cuba without Fidel Castro, wants allies around the world to offer money and political support so the island can be ready to transform itself.

It is Bush's vision for Cuban regime change: providing help on the outside, prodding change on the inside.

Seizing on Castro's fading health as a rare opening, Bush was to ask other nations Wednesday to help Cuba become a free society.

In remarks prepared for delivery at the State Department -- his first standalone address on Cuba in four years -- Bush looks to the day when Castro is gone. Bush describes a nation in which Cuban people choose a representative government and enjoy basic freedoms, with support from a broad international coalition.

For now, though, Castro is still the island's unchallenged leader, as he has been for almost 50 years. And he remains a nemesis to Bush, whom he accuses of being obsessed with Cuba and of threatening humanity with nuclear war. At the age of 81, Castro is ailing and rarely seen in public. But life has changed little on the island under the authority of his brother, 76-year-old Raul Castro, who has been his elder brother's hand-picked successor for decades.

Bush was expected to tout peaceful, pro-democracy movements in Cuba and call on other countries to get behind them. In a direct appeal to ordinary citizens in Cuba, he was to tell them they have the power to change their country, but the White House says that is not meant to be a call for armed rebellion.

Bush proposes at least three initiatives: the creation of an international ''freedom fund'' to help Cuba's potential rebuilding of its country one day; a U.S. licensing of private groups to provide Internet access to Cuban students, and an invitation to Cuban youth to join a scholarship program.

The latter two offerings help the Bush administration underscore the kind of real-life limitations that Cubans now face, from blocked Internet access to restricted information about their leaders to denial of legal protections. The creation of the international fund is meant to speed up societal transformation.

''We all know that Cuba is going to face very significant requirements to rebuild itself,'' said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting the president. ''There's a whole set of challenges that Cuba is going to face. The United States will clearly want to help the Cubans as they define what it is they need, but we think the international community should be thinking that way as well.''

Washington's decades-old economic embargo on Cuba prohibits U.S. tourists from visiting the island and chokes off nearly all trade between both countries. Bush will ask Congress to maintain the embargo, which has come under scrutiny and calls for reassessment from some lawmakers.

Cuba staged municipal elections on Sunday, the first step in a process that will determine whether Fidel Castro is re-elected or replaced next year. The Communist Party is the only one allowed, and while candidates do not have to be members, critics claim they are the only ones who ever win.

Bush, increasingly, is speaking of a Castro-free Cuba. As he put it earlier this month: ''In Havana, the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing an end.''

------

On the Net:

CIA World Factbook on Cuba:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cu.html 

    Bush Touting Cuban Life After Castro, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Cuba.html

Bush Wants $46 Billion More for Wars

October 22, 2007
Filed at 12:48 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will ask Congress for another $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finance other national security needs, The Associated Press has learned.

The figure, which Bush was expected to announce later Monday at the White House, brings to $196.4 billion the total requested by the administration for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for the budget year that started Oct. 1. It includes $189.3 billion for the Defense Department, $6.9 billion for the State Department and $200 million for other agencies.

The figures were disclosed by congressional officials briefed on the request and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made.

To date, Congress has already provided more than $455 billion for the Iraq war, with stepped-up military operations running about $12 billion a month. The war has claimed the lives of more than 3,830 members of the U.S. military and more than 73,000 Iraqi civilians.

The White House originally asked for $141.7 billion for the Pentagon to prosecute the Iraq and Afghanistan missions and asked for $5.3 billion more in July. The latest request includes $42.3 billion more for the Pentagon -- already revealed in summary last month -- and is accompanied by a modified State Department request bringing that agency's total for the 2008 budget year to almost $7 billion.

The State Department is requesting $550 million to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America, $375 million for the West Bank and Gaza and $239 million for diplomatic costs in Iraq.

Top House lawmakers have already announced that they do not plan to act on Bush's request until next year, though they anticipate providing interim funds when completing a separate defense funding bill this fall.

Congress already has approved more than $5 billion for new vehicles whose V-shaped undercarriages provide much better protection against mines and roadside bombs. It's likely that Congress will quickly grant $11 billion more to deliver more than 7,000 of the vehicles.

The delays in submitting the remaining war funding request were in part due to unease among congressional Republicans about receiving it during the veto override battle involving a popular bill reauthorizing a children's health insurance program.

The request also includes $724 million for U.N. peacekeeping efforts in the war-torn Darfur region in Sudan, $106 million in fuel oil or comparable assistance to North Korea as a reward for the rogue nation's promises to cease its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Another $350 million would go to fight famine in Africa.

------

Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report in Washington.

    Bush Wants $46 Billion More for Wars, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-War-Spending.html

Bush and Congress Honor Dalai Lama

October 18, 2007
The New York Times
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — Over furious objections from China and in the presence of President Bush, Congress on Wednesday bestowed its highest civilian honor on the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists whom Beijing considers a troublesome voice of separatism.

Dressed in flowing robes of dark burgundy and bright orange, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, beamed and bowed as the president and members of Congress greeted him with a standing ovation and then praised him as a hero of the Tibetan struggle. President Bush called him “a man of faith and sincerity and peace.”

But the Dalai Lama said he felt “a sense of regret” over the sharp tensions with China unleashed by his private meeting on Tuesday with Mr. Bush and by the Congressional Gold Medal conferred on him in the ornate Capitol Rotunda.

In gentle language and conciliatory tones, he congratulated China on its dynamic economic growth and recognized its rising role on the world stage, but also gently urged it to embrace “transparency, the rule of law and freedom of information.”

The 72-year-old spiritual leader made clear that “I’m not seeking independence” from China, something that is anathema to Beijing. Nor, he said, would he use any future agreement with China “as a steppingstone for Tibet’s independence.”

What he wanted, he said, was “meaningful autonomy for Tibet.”

The Dalai Lama has lived in exile in India since the Chinese Army crushed an uprising in his homeland in 1959.

Speeches by the president and the top leaders of each party emphasized the Dalai Lama’s humble beginnings and humanitarian achievements, as well as a long history of American support for him. He was also lauded by the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a previous winner of the Congressional Gold Medal, which is cast in the image of the recipient.

When the speaker of the House, Representative Nancy Pelosi, noted that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had given the Dalai Lama, then very young, a watch that displayed the phases of the moon — and that he still had it — the honored guest tugged on his robe, held his wrist out before President Bush, tapped on the watch and grinned.

Earlier, Beijing offered a sharp new rebuke of the award ceremony, which the top Chinese religious affairs official condemned as a “farce.”

“The protagonist of this farce is the Dalai Lama,” said Ye Xiaowen, director general of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, Reuters reported. Other officials have warned, without specifying, of a “serious impact” on relations between the United States and China.

Mr. Bush, during a news conference, appeared unconcerned.

“I don’t think it ever damages relations,” he said, “when an American president talks about, you know — religious tolerance and religious freedom is good for a nation.”

The two have met three times before. But in the face of the Chinese broadsides, their encounter on Tuesday was held with the maximum discretion: in the White House residence, not the Oval Office, with no cameras present, and shorn of the trappings of a meeting of the president and a political leader.

Mr. Bush reminded reporters that he had told President Hu Jintao of China, when they met recently in Sydney, Australia, that he would meet the Dalai Lama. During the award ceremony, he urged the Chinese to do the same.

“They will find this good man to be a man of peace and reconciliation,” he said.

Apparently in a protest over the award, China pulled out of a multiparty meeting this month to discuss Iran. It also canceled a human rights meeting with Germany, displeased by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s meeting last month with the Dalai Lama.

    Bush and Congress Honor Dalai Lama, NYT, 18.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/washington/18lama.html

Bush Pushes for Telecom Immunity

October 10, 2007
Filed at 12:44 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Wednesday that he will not sign a new eavesdropping bill if it does not grant retroactive immunity to U.S. telecommunications companies that helped conduct electronic surveillance without court orders.

A proposed bill unveiled by Democrats on Tuesday does not include such a provision. Bush, appearing on the South Lawn as that measure was taken up in two House committees, said the measure is unacceptable for that and other reasons.

''Today the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees are considering a proposed bill that instead of making the Protect America Act permanent would take us backward,'' the president said.

Bush wants legislation that extends and strengthens a temporary bill passed in August. Democrats want a bill that rolls back some of the new powers it granted the government to eavesdrop without warrants on suspected foreign terrorists.

Under pressure to close what Bush officials called a dangerous gap in intelligence collection, Congress hastily passed a the temporary bill before leaving Washington for a summer break. Democratic leaders in Congress set the law to expire in six months so that it could be fine-tuned, and civil liberties groups are saying the changes they've already legislated gave too much new latitude to the administration and provided too little protection against government spying on Americans without oversight.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governs when the government must obtain eavesdropping warrants from a secret intelligence court.

This year's update to the law allows the government to eavesdrop without a court order on communications conducted by a person reasonably believed to be outside the U.S., even when the communications flow through the U.S. communications network -- or if an American is on one end of the conversation -- so long as that person is not the intended focus or target of the surveillance. The Bush administration said this was necessary because technological advances in communications had put U.S. officials at a disadvantage.

The original law generally prohibited surveillance inside the U.S., unless a court first approved it.

Seeking to increase the pressure on the Democratic-controlled Congress, Bush said the update has already been effective, with intelligence professionals able ''to gather critical information that would have been missed without this authority.''

''Keeping this authority is critical to keeping America safe,'' he said.

The temporary law requires court review, but only four months after the fact and only involving the administration's general process of collecting the intelligence, not individual cases. Until then, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general would oversee and approve the process of targeting foreign terrorists.

Setting a collision course with the administration, the Democratic bill would provide greater jurisdiction to the secret FISA court.

If the government wants to eavesdrop on a foreign target or group of targets located outside the United States, and there is a possibility they will be communicating with Americans, the government can get an ''umbrella'' or ''blanket'' court order for up to one year. In an emergency, the government could begin surveillance without a blanket order as long as it applies for court approval within seven days, under the Democratic bill.

A top Democratic leader opened the door on Tuesday to allowing an immunity provision. But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the Bush administration must first detail what the companies did. About 40 pending lawsuits name telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping laws.

Bush detailed criteria that the bill must meet before he would sign it, including the immunity provision and the broad requirement that it ''ensure that protections intended for the American people are not extended to terrorists overseas who are plotting to harm us.''

''Congress must make a choice,'' he said. ''Will they keep the intelligence gap closed by making this law permanent. Or will they limit our ability to collect this intelligence and keep us safe, staying a step ahead of the terrorists who want to attack us.''

    Bush Pushes for Telecom Immunity, NYT, 10.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Terrorist-Surveillance.html

Bush Pushes Congress on 'No Child' Law

October 10, 2007
Filed at 4:47 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said that he's open to new ideas for changing the ''No Child Left Behind'' education law but will not accept watered-down standards or rollbacks in accountability.

The president and lawmakers in both parties want changes to the five-year-old law -- a key piece of his domestic policy legacy, which faces a tough renewal fight in Congress.

''There can be no compromise on the basic principle: Every child must learn to read and do math at, or above, grade level,'' he said in a statement Tuesday from the Rose Garden that was directed at Congress and critics of the law. ''And there can be no compromise on the need to hold schools accountable to making sure we achieve that goal.''

The law requires annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight and once in high school. Schools that miss benchmarks face increasingly tough consequences, such as having to replace their curriculum, teachers or principals.

Earlier, Bush and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings met with civil rights leaders, educators and advocates for minority and disadvantaged students.

Almost everyone agrees the law should be changed to encourage schools to measure individual student progress over time instead of using snapshot comparisons of certain grade levels.

There also is broad agreement that the law should be changed so that schools that miss progress goals by a little don't face the same consequences as schools that miss them by a lot.

There are, however, deep divisions over some proposed changes, including merit pay for teachers and whether schools should be judged based on test scores in subjects other than reading and math.

Opponents to some of the legislative proposals come from the conservative and liberal wings of Congress.

National Urban League President Marc Morial, who was in the meeting with Bush, said the law hasn't been funded even to the levels authorized in the original legislation. But he and others did not lay the blame entirely at Bush's feet.

''Both Congress and the president should make the collective funding of this act a priority,'' Morial said.

Morial said he and others also talked to Bush about addressing the disparity in the amount of money committed to educating children in different parts of the country, and about strengthening a provision in the law calling for after-school services to help children who fall behind.

Bush listed several ways for enhancing the law:

--Give local leaders more flexibility and resources.

--Offer other educational options to families of children stuck in low-performing schools.

--Increase access to tutoring programs.

--Reward good teachers who improve student achievement in low-income schools.

--Expand access to advanced placement courses.

--Improve math and science instruction.

The president noted national test results released last month that showed elementary and middle schoolers posting across-the-board gains in math and more modest improvements in reading. But he also noted that nearly half of Hispanic and black students still do not graduate from high school on time.

------

AP Education Writer Nancy Zuckerbrod contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS that Laura Bush did not attend event.)

    Bush Pushes Congress on 'No Child' Law, NYT, 10.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Bush, Texas at Odds Over Death Case

October 7, 2007
Filed at 12:09 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- To put it bluntly, Texas wants President Bush to get out of the way of the state's plan to execute a Mexican for the brutal killing of two teenage girls.

Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the execution of Jose Ernesto Medellin in what has become a confusing test of presidential power that the Supreme Court ultimately will sort out.

The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated their rights to legal help as outlined in the 1963 Vienna Convention.

That is the same court Bush has since said he plans to ignore if it makes similar decisions affecting state criminal laws.

''The president does not agree with the ICJ's interpretation of the Vienna Convention,'' the administration said in arguments filed with the court. This time, though, the U.S. agreed to abide by the international court's decision because ignoring it would harm American interests abroad, the government said.

Texas argues strenuously that neither the international court nor Bush, his Texas ties notwithstanding, has any say in Medellin's case.

Ted Cruz, the Texas solicitor general, said the administration's position would ''allow the president to set aside any state law the president believes is inconvenient to international comity.''

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case Wednesday.

Medellin was born in Mexico but spent much of his childhood in the United States. He was 18 in June 1993, when he and other members of the Black and Whites gang in Houston encountered Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena on a railroad trestle as the girls were taking a shortcut home.

Ertman, 14, and Pena, 16, were gang-raped and strangled. Their bodies were found four days later.

Medellin was arrested a few days after the killings. He was told he had a right to remain silent and have a lawyer present, but the police did not tell him that he could request assistance from the Mexican consulate under the 1963 treaty.

Medellin gave a written confession. He was convicted of murder in the course of a sexual assault, a capital offense in Texas. A judge sentenced him to death in October 1994.

Medellin did not raise the lack of assistance from Mexican diplomats during his trial or sentencing. When he did claim his rights had been violated, Texas and federal courts turned him down because he had not objected at his trial.

Then, in 2003, Mexico sued the United States in the International Court of Justice in The Hague on behalf of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death row in the U.S. who also had been denied access to their country's diplomats following their arrests.

Mexico has no death penalty. Mexico and other opponents of capital punishment have sought to use the court, also known as the World Court, to fight for foreigners facing execution in the U.S.

The international court ruled for Mexico in 2004, saying the sentences and convictions should be reviewed by U.S. courts.

Medellin's case was rejected by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal. While it was pending in Washington, Bush issued a memo to his attorney general declaring that state courts must enforce the international court's ruling.

Two weeks after the memo, Bush said the U.S. was withdrawing from an international accord that lets the world court have the final say when citizens claim they were illegally denied access to their diplomats when they are jailed abroad.

The treaty had been used by the United States in its lawsuit against Iran for taking Americans hostages in 1979.

The Supreme Court weighed in next, dismissing Medellin's case while state courts reviewed Bush's order. Texas courts again ruled against Medellin, saying Bush overstepped his authority by intruding into the affairs of the independent judiciary.

In April, the Surpeme Court stepped in for a second time, putting Bush and the state he governed on opposite sides and setting up an unusual alliance of interests.

Foreign inmates on death rows in California, Florida, Texas and up to a dozen other states could be affected by the outcome.

Four of Medellin's fellow gang members also received the death penalty and one, Sean O'Brien, was executed last year. Two others had their death sentences commuted to life in prison in 2005 when the Supreme Court barred executions for those who were age 17 at the time of their crimes. Another defendant does not have an execution date.

A sixth participant, Medellin's brother, Vernancio, was 14 at the time. He was tried as a juvenile and is serving 40 years in prison.

Ertman's parents said they want to see the older Medellin brother put to death, pointing out in court papers that his case has been going on longer than their daughter lived.

The case is Medellin v. Texas, 06-984.

------

On the Net:

International Court of Justice: http://tinyurl.com/yotzz7

    Bush, Texas at Odds Over Death Case, NYT, 7.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Mexican-National.html

Bush Says Interrogation Methods Aren’t Torture

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

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 — President Bush, reacting to a Congressional uproar over the disclosure of secret Justice Department legal opinions permitting the harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, defended the methods on Friday, declaring, “This government does not torture people.”

The remarks, Mr. Bush’s first public comments on the memorandums, came at a hastily arranged Oval Office appearance before reporters. It was billed as a talk on the economy, but after heralding new job statistics, Mr. Bush shifted course to a subject he does not often publicly discuss: a once-secret Central Intelligence Agency program to detain and interrogate high-profile terror suspects.

“I have put this program in place for a reason, and that is to better protect the American people,” the president said, without mentioning the C.I.A. by name. “And when we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re going to detain them, and you bet we’re going to question them, because the American people expect us to find out information — actionable intelligence so we can help protect them. That’s our job.”

Without confirming the existence of the memorandums or discussing the explicit techniques they authorized, Mr. Bush said the interrogation methods had been “fully disclosed to appropriate members of Congress.”

But his comments only provoked another round of recriminations on Capitol Hill, as Democrats ratcheted up their demands to see the classified memorandums, first reported Thursday by The New York Times.

“The administration can’t have it both ways,” Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement after the president’s remarks. “I’m tired of these games. They can’t say that Congress has been fully briefed while refusing to turn over key documents used to justify the legality of the program.”

In two separate legal opinions written in 2005, the Justice Department authorized the C.I.A. to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

The memorandums were written just months after a Justice Department opinion in December 2004 declared torture “abhorrent.”

Administration officials have confirmed the existence of the classified opinions, but will not make them public, saying only that they approved techniques that were “tough, safe, necessary and lawful.”

On Friday, the deputy White House press secretary, Tony Fratto, took The Times to task for publishing the information, saying the newspaper had compromised America’s security.

“I’ve had the awful responsibility to have to work with The New York Times and other news organizations on stories that involve the release of classified information,” Mr. Fratto said. “And I could tell you that every time I’ve dealt with any of these stories, I have felt that we have chipped away at the safety and security of America with the publication of this kind of information.”

The memorandums, and the ensuing debate over them, go to the core of a central theme of the Bush administration: the expansive use of executive power in pursuit of terror suspects.

That theme has been a running controversy on Capitol Hill, where Democrats, and some Republicans, have been furious at the way the administration has kept them out of the loop.

The clash colored Congressional relations with Alberto R. Gonzales, the former attorney general. And by Friday, it was clear that the controversy would now spill over into the confirmation hearings for Michael B. Mukasey, the retired federal judge whom Mr. Bush has nominated to succeed Mr. Gonzales in running the Justice Department.

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Mr. Mukasey asking him whether, if confirmed, he would provide lawmakers with the Justice Department memorandums.

And Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat and Judiciary Committee member, said he expected the memorandums would become a central point in the Mukasey confirmation debate.

“When the president says the Justice Department says it’s O.K., he means Alberto Gonzales said it was O.K.,” Mr. Schumer, who has been a vocal backer of Mr. Mukasey, said in an interview.

“Very few people are going to have much faith in that, and we do need to explore that.”

The administration has been extremely careful with information about the C.I.A. program, which had been reported in the news media but was, officially at least, a secret until Mr. Bush himself publicly disclosed its existence in September 2006.

At the time, the president confirmed that the C.I.A. had held 14 high-profile terrorism suspects — including the man thought to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — in secret prisons, but said the detainees had been transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The 2005 Justice Department opinions form the legal underpinning for the program. On Friday, the director of the C.I.A., Gen. Michael V. Hayden also defended the program, in an e-mail message to agency employees.

“The story has sparked considerable comment,” General Hayden wrote, referring to the account in The Times, “including claims that the opinion opened the door to more harsh interrogation tactics and that information about the interrogation methods we actually have used has been withheld from our oversight committees in Congress. Neither assertion is true.”

    Bush Says Interrogation Methods Aren’t Torture, NYT, 6.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/us/nationalspecial3/06interrogate.html

Bush Vetoes Children’s Health Insurance Bill

October 3, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — President Bush vetoed the children’s health insurance bill today, as he had promised to do, setting the stage for more negotiations between the White House and Congress.

Mr. Bush wielded his pen with no fanfare just before leaving for a visit to Lancaster, Pa. “He’s not going to change his mind,” Dana Perino, the chief White House spokeswoman, said this morning just before the president cast only his fourth veto.

The bill was approved by Congress with unusual bipartisan support, as many Republicans who side with the president on almost everything else voted to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or Schip, from its current enrollment of about 6.6 million children to more than 10 million.

The measure would provide $60 billion over the next five years, $35 billion more than current spending and $30 billion more than the president proposed. Mr. Bush and his backers argue that the bill would steer the program away from its core purpose of providing insurance for poor children and toward covering children from middle-class families.

Democrats immediately issued statements expressing their anger.

“Today we learned that the same president who is willing to throw away half trillion dollars in Iraq is unwilling to spend a small fraction of that amount to bring health care to American children,” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said the “heartless veto” showed how “detached President Bush is from the priorities of the American people.”

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said, “Today the president showed the nation his true priorities: $700 billion for a war in Iraq, but no health care for low-income kids.”

Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey said: “Once again, President Bush has missed an opportunity to display compassionate leadership. Instead, he has resorted to political and ideological gamesmanship rather than seek a bipartisan solution that would protect this nation’s most vulnerable children.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said: “We have no choice but to try to override his veto. The Senate already has the votes to do it, so it is now up to the holdouts in the House to decide whether to vote their conscience or join the president in putting ideology above kids.”

Mr. Schumer put his finger on the numbers working against supporters of the bill. It cleared the Senate by a veto-proof 67 to 29, but the vote in the House was 265 to 159, a couple dozen short of the two-thirds needed to override Mr. Bush’s veto.

Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the House Republican whip, told The Associated Press he was “absolutely confident” that there was strong enough opposition in the House to sustain a veto. But Mr. Blunt’s counterpart in the Senate, Trent Lott of Mississippi, said Congress should be able to reach a compromise with the president. “We can work it out,” Mr. Lott told the A.P.

    Bush Vetoes Children’s Health Insurance Bill, NYT, 3.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/washington/03cnd-veto.html?hp

Bush to Veto Child Health Plan

October 3, 2007
Filed at 3:51 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush is ready to escalate his battle with Congress over children's health insurance, planning a veto of a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded the program.

It would be only the fourth veto of Bush's presidency, and one that some Republicans fear could carry steep risks for their party in next year's elections.

The White House sought as little attention as possible for the veto on Wednesday, saying the president planned to execute it behind closed doors without any fanfare or press coverage.

The State Children's Health Insurance Program is a joint state-federal effort that subsidizes health coverage for 6.6 million people, mostly children, from families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford their own private coverage.

The Democrats who control Congress, with significant support from Republicans, passed the legislation to add $35 billion over five years to allow an additional 4 million children into the program. It would be funded by raising the federal cigarette tax by 61 cents to $1 per pack.

The president had promised to veto it, saying the Democratic bill was too costly, took the program too far from its original intent of helping the poor, and would entice people now covered in the private sector to switch to government coverage. He wants only a $5 billion increase in funding.

Bush argued that the congressional plan would be a move toward socialized medicine by expanding the program to higher-income families.

Democrats deny that, saying their goal is to cover more of the millions of uninsured children and noting that the bill provides financial incentives for states to cover their lowest-income children first. Of the over 43 million people nationwide who lack health insurance, 9 percent, or over 6 million, are under 18 years old.

Eighteen Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate, enough to override Bush's veto. But this was not the case in the House, where despite sizable Republican support, supporters of the bill are about two dozen votes short of a successful override.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Democrats were imploring 15 House Republicans to switch positions but had received no agreements so far.

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said he was ''absolutely confident'' that the House would be able to sustain Bush's expected veto.

Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss., said Congress should be able to reach a compromise with Bush once he vetoes the bill. ''We should not allow it to be expanded to higher and higher income levels, and to adults. This is about poor children,'' he said. ''But we can work it out.''

It took Bush six years to veto his first bill, when he blocked expanded federal research using embryonic stem cells last summer. In May, he vetoed a spending bill that would have required troop withdrawals from Iraq. In June, he vetoed another bill to ease restraints on federally funded stem cell research.

In the case of the health insurance program, the veto is a bit of a high-stakes gambit for Bush, pitting him against both the Democrats who have controlled both houses of Congress since January, but also many members of his own party and the public.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched radio ads Monday attacking eight GOP House members who voted against the bill and face potentially tough re-election campaigns next year.

And Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, said a coalition of liberal groups planned more than 200 events throughout the nation to highlight the issue.

    Bush to Veto Child Health Plan, NYT, 3.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Childrens-Health.html

At Climate Meeting, Bush Does Not Specify Goals

September 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — President Bush said Friday that the nations that contribute most to global warming should all set goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But he did not specify what those goals should be and repeated his stand that nations should not be held to mandatory targets for capping carbon dioxide emissions.

At the close of a two-day meeting here of 16 major carbon-emitting nations, Mr. Bush also proposed an international fund to help developing nations benefit from clean energy technology. He instructed the Treasury Department to begin work on the proposal, but the administration offered no details.

“We will set a long-term goal for reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions,” the president said in a morning speech at the State Department. “Each nation must decide for itself the right mix of tools and technologies to achieve results that are measurable and environmentally effective.”

He added, “No one country has all the answers, including mine.”

The delegates to the conference listened impassively to Mr. Bush’s 20-minute address, interrupting him with applause only once, when he pledged that the United States would participate in global warming negotiations overseen by the United Nations. The Bush administration has been a less-than-enthusiastic partner in United Nations-sponsored climate change talks and has not joined the Kyoto Protocol, intended to halt and then reverse the spread of climate-altering carbon emissions.

Mr. Bush quickly left the auditorium after delivering his remarks, which ended 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Some of the delegates, representing the major industrialized nations plus Brazil, China, India and South Africa, said they were less than impressed.

“The president made his speech,” said the chief Brazilian delegate to the talks, Everton Vargas. “We took note of his speech.”

Mr. Vargas, a senior official in Brazil’s ministry of external relations, seemed puzzled by the purpose of the Washington meeting, which came at the end of a week when the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, pledged the organization’s full efforts toward negotiating a new agreement to take the place of the Kyoto Protocol after most of its provisions expire in 2012.

“The whole agenda was set by the American government,” Ambassador Vargas said. “The American government didn’t bring any new ideas, any new proposals in terms of the American position.”

The ambassador did, however, speak approvingly of the still-vague proposal for a clean technology fund, but said he was unsure about how it would be structured and financed.

The president’s calls for each country to decide for itself how to rein in pollution, and his refusal to embrace mandatory measures, have set the United States apart from other countries, and his appearance at the State Department conference probably did not do much to lessen that isolation.

“Smart technology does not just materialize by itself,” John Ashton, a special adviser on climate change to the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, said afterward. Mr. Ashton, who has said that voluntary measures are ineffective, said “smart technology” requires government commitment and investment.

Mr. Ashton also questioned the purpose of the Washington meeting, saying it had produced nothing of substance.

“We could have another 20 years of talking about talking,” Mr. Ashton said. “We need to start deciding about doing.”

Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense, one of the nation’s largest and most influential environmental groups, addressed the meeting on Thursday and came away discouraged by the lack of tangible progress.

“It was a lost opportunity,” he said. “America needs to lead, and we can lead, but now the spotlight shifts to the Congress because the president has refused to accept the only path that’s ever solved an air pollution problem — and that’s mandatory legal limits.”

There are at least a half-dozen bills before Congress that would set such mandatory caps, as well as energy legislation passed by the House and Senate that would help curb greenhouse gases, which President Bush has threatened to veto.

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, attended Friday’s speech.

“My fear is that the president has set aspirational goals that are really procrastinational,” he said.

    At Climate Meeting, Bush Does Not Specify Goals, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/washington/29climate.html

Bush Seeks New Image on Global Warming

September 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:09 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Myth: The president refuses to admit that climate change is real and that humans are a factor. Myth: The U.S. is doing nothing to address climate change. Myth: The United States refuses to engage internationally.

So begins a hand-sized handout, easy for reporters to pocket, issued at the State Department where President Bush on Friday was to cap two days of talks at a White House-sponsored climate change conference that is as much about salesmanship as it is about diplomacy.

Unwilling to cut U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, which make up a fourth of the world's total output, Bush is turning to China, India and the other biggest polluters to swap green technology and other voluntary ways of doing something about global warming.

His administration also has set about creating a process for more such talks and a possible long-term global goal for reducing emissions, with each nation permitted to draw up its own strategies and plans.

Representatives from among the gathering of 16 nations, along with the European Union and the United Nations, expressed skepticism that not much more than talking and political goals might be accomplished, but also optimism that at least the United States was willing to become part of such talks.

Until recently, said Emil Salim, an economist and member of the Indonesian president's council of advisers, Bush offered ''no dialogue on the Kyoto Protocol whatsoever. This time, the members of the Kyoto Protocol are invited to discuss. So from that point of view, there is some improvement,'' he said in an interview. ''But on the other hand, I think it has more to do with the domestic politics, because you have election.''

Though Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N.-brokered international treaty intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions that is due to expire in 2012, he is seeking ideas for what should come next. Critics have said they fear he might use his talks to undermine the next round of negotiations in December in Bali, Indonesia.

But on Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson countered that the United States is serious about global warming and making progress to slow its growth rate in carbon dioxide and other industrial warming gases.

''I want to stress that the United States takes climate change very seriously, for we are both a major economy and a major emitter,'' Rice said. ''Climate change is a global problem and we are contributing to it, therefore we are prepared to expand our leadership to address the challenge. That is why President Bush has convened this meeting.''

They also gave reassurances that the U.S. intent is to contribute to the U.N. negotiations on climate change, even though those emphasize mandatory controls on carbon dioxide that Bush opposes. Bush rejected the Kyoto accord because he said it unfairly harmed the economies of rich nations like the United States and excluded developing nations like China and India from having to cut greenhouse gases.

''We want this year's U.N. climate change conference in Indonesia to succeed,'' Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said.

Bush's two-day conference, ending Friday, followed a U.N. meeting Monday at which Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon tried to build support among 80 world leaders for reaching agreement at the planned December talks. Other participants at the State Department conference were from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Australia and South Africa.

The meeting Thursday also drew about 70 demonstrators from Greenpeace and other environmental groups outside the State Department, where dozens were arrested for refusing to leave the premises after two hours of protest. The activists labeled the conference a fraud for not backing mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases.

The Bush administration proposes new ''processes'' and work teams for negotiating solutions. However, James Connaughton, who heads the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told the nations' representatives that their efforts must ''be about more than presentations'' and that ''we need to take collective action to advance new technologies.''

Yvo de Boer, the top U.N. climate official, told the 16 nations participating in the White House-led meeting that ''this relatively small group of countries holds a key to tackling a big part of the problem'' but that their response can succeed only by ''going well beyond present efforts,'' especially among rich, industrialized nations.

------

On the Net:

State Department: http://www.state.gov

    Bush Seeks New Image on Global Warming, NYT, 28.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Global-Warming.html

Bush Signs Bill Boosting Aid to Students

September 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:33 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Thursday signed legislation designed to make college more affordable for students from poor and middle-class families, swallowing objections to a bill that enjoyed veto-proof majorities in Congress.

The new law achieves a goal Bush shares with lawmakers: boosting aid for needy students. The action allows both the Bush administration and Congress to say they have done something to ease the burden of paying for college, a popular political priority.

''I have the honor of signing a bill that will help millions of low-income Americans earn a college-degree,'' Bush said in a ceremony, with lawmakers and students by his side.

The legislation boosts the maximum Pell grant, which goes to the poorest college students, from $4,310 a year to $5,400 a year by 2012.

It also cuts in half the interest rates on federally backed student loans -- from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent -- over the next four years.

The increase in financial aid is designed to come from cuts in subsidies that the government makes to banks, totaling roughly $20 billion.

The boost in financial aid to college students was one of a half-dozen domestic priorities Democrats set when they took control of Congress this year.

Bush at one point threatened to veto the bill on grounds that it included hidden costs and was an expensive expansion of federal programs. Yet he went along, despite what his administration calls budget ''gimmicks'' in the legislation, mainly because of the increased aid for poor students, one of his longtime priorities.

Congress overwhelmingly backed a compromise version of the student-aid bill earlier this month. The House approved it 292-97; the Senate vote was 79-12. All the lawmakers who voted against the bill were Republicans.

    Bush Signs Bill Boosting Aid to Students, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Senate Urges Bush to Declare Iran Guard a Terrorist Group

September 27, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — The Senate approved a resolution on Wednesday urging the Bush administration to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, and lawmakers briefly set aside partisan differences to approve a measure calling for stepped-up diplomacy to forge a political solution in Iraq.

Since last month, the White House has been weighing whether to declare the Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group or to take a narrower step focusing on only the Guard’s elite Quds Force. Either approach would signal a more confrontational posture by declaring a part of the Iranian military a terrorist operation.

Appearances by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday at Columbia University and on Tuesday at the United Nations, where he said Iran would ignore Security Council resolutions about its nuclear program, seemed to toughen the resolve of Senate Democrats, who had been hesitant to take an overly aggressive stance.

The Senate resolution, which is not binding, also calls on the administration to impose economic sanctions on Iran.

Even if the White House took that step, policy experts said, it was unclear that it would be anything more than a symbolic gesture without the cooperation of nations that, unlike the United States, still had substantial business dealings with Iran.

The measure, proposed by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who usually votes with Republicans on war issues, relied heavily on testimony earlier this month by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, the top American political official in Baghdad.

In negotiations, two crucial paragraphs were deleted from the measure in an attempt to reassure critics who had said the proposal seemed to urge the Bush administration to deal with Iran on a war footing.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat and the majority leader, voted for the proposal after initially urging caution. “We certainly don’t want to be led down the path, slowly but surely, until we wind up with the situation like we have in Iraq today,” he said Tuesday. “So I am going to be very, very cautious.”

Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, warned Tuesday that an early draft of the proposal “could be read as tantamount to a declaration of war.”

“What do we do with terrorist organizations if they are involved against us?” Mr. Webb asked in a speech on Tuesday. “We attack them.”

Even with the two paragraphs deleted, Mr. Webb voted against the resolution. So did a number of other Democrats who are among the harshest critics of the Bush administration’s handling of the war. The measure passed by a vote of 76 to 22.

Among those voting against it was Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who said he feared that the administration could use the measure to justify military action against Iran.

In a separate vote, by 75 to 23, the Senate approved a resolution by Mr. Biden calling for greater diplomatic efforts with Iraq, and in particular, a focus on partitioning Iraq into federal regions in hopes of reaching a political solution and more swiftly ending the war.

While Democrats sought to portray the vote on the Biden proposal as a potential breakthrough in reaching other legislative compromises that might force President Bush to shift his war strategy, Republicans quickly made clear that this was not so.

Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, praised Mr. Biden’s measure but also predicted that any effort by Senate Democrats to dictate war strategy to the president would fail. “We will not see a measure reach 60 votes,” he said, the number needed to overcome a filibuster.

Mr. Biden’s resolution called on the United States “to actively support a political settlement in Iraq based on the final provisions of the Constitution of Iraq,” which would essentially divide the country into loosely allied, semi-autonomous regions.

And it said the United States should call on the international community to help and on Iraq’s neighbors not to “intervene in or destabilize” Iraq.

In an interview, Mr. Biden said such an approach would be a striking shift from the Bush administration’s insistence on a strong and unified Iraqi federal government and would permit a quicker withdrawal of American troops. “This is a fundamentally different goal, and it requires fundamentally fewer American forces,” he said.

    Senate Urges Bush to Declare Iran Guard a Terrorist Group, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/washington/27cong.html

Bush, Karzai Review Afghan Security

September 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:01 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- President Bush said Wednesday that Afghanistan is becoming a safer, more stable country, thanks to the efforts of President Hamid Karzai.

''Mr. President, you have strong friends here,'' Bush told Karzai after they met for about an hour at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel here. ''I expect progress and you expect progress and I appreciate the report you have given me today.''

The two leaders made no direct mention of Afghanistan's soaring drug trade, the unsuccessful search for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden or the resurgence of the Taliban. Karzai said the liberation of Afghanistan is often overlooked these days.

''I don't know if you feel it in the United States but we feel it immensely in Afghanistan,'' Karzai said. ''Afghanistan has indeed made progress,'' he said, citing improvements in basic services such as roads and education.

Afghan opium poppy cultivation has hit a record high this year, fueled by Taliban militants and corrupt officials in Karzai's government, a U.N. report found last month. The country produces nearly all the world's opium, and Taliban insurgents are profiting.

Also, Afghanistan remains in a fight for basic security, a constant threat to its growth as a new democracy. Karzai is pledging to work hard on peace talks with the Taliban to draw the insurgents and their supporters ''back to the fold,'' as he put it this week.

The United States has more than 20,000 troops in Afghanistan. Aides say it is natural for Bush to meet Karzai to review progress, but no single issue prompted their sit-down.

Bush, in New York for the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly, made only brief mention of the war in Afghanistan during his speech to world leaders Tuesday. He said the people of Afghanistan -- and Iraq and Lebanon -- were in a deadly fight for survival.

''Every civilized nation has a responsibility to stand with them,'' Bush said.

Bush also was to pivot to his domestic agenda Wednesday before wrapping up three days in New York.

He planned to tout new national test scores as evidence that the No Child Left Behind Act, his signature education law, is working and deserving of renewal by Congress.

Those new national test results, released Tuesday, show elementary and middle schoolers posted solid gains in math. The students made more modest improvements in reading, however.

Bush scheduled a meeting with Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City's school system, which has won the nation's top prize for urban districts. The district garnered the honor chiefly for reducing achievements gaps among poor and minority kids, a key educational goal for Bush.

The president intends to miss no chance to talk up the No Child Left Behind law, which is up for renewal in Congress. Many lawmakers say it is too narrow and punitive.

Before leaving town, Bush was to speak at a private fundraiser for the Republican National Committee. Back in Washington, more international diplomacy awaited.

The president was hosting a two-day climate meeting, starting Thursday, of major industrialized nations, the United Nations and a few developing countries.

Bush tried to emphasize throughout his meetings in New York that his efforts on climate change were in support of -- not in competition with -- a U.N. conference in December in Indonesia. That later session will be a time of negotiations on a new international climate agreement.

On the sidelines of the U.N. meeting, Bush pressed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Tuesday to move on stalled measures deemed critical to political reconciliation. Much-delayed action, such as a national oil law, have bogged down in the Iraqi parliament amid factional bickering, which, in turn, has only deepened frustration among U.S. lawmakers.

    Bush, Karzai Review Afghan Security, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Bush Urges U.N. to Spread Freedom

September 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:24 a.m. ET
The New York Times

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- President Bush announced new sanctions Tuesday against the military dictatorship in Myanmar, accusing it of imposing ''a 19-year reign of fear'' that denies basic freedoms of speech, assembly and worship. ''Americans are outraged by the situation in Burma,'' the president said in an address to the U.N. General Assembly.

Bush is expected to mention Iran in his speech -- but only briefly, citing Iran in a list of countries where people lack freedoms and live in fear. The White House wants to avoid giving any more attention to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose splash of speeches and interviews has dominated the days leading to the U.N. meeting.

Instead of Iran, the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, also known as Burma, was drawing Bush's ire. He was announcing new visa restrictions and financial sanctions against the regime and those who provide it financial aid.

The policies come as Myanmar's military government issued a threat Monday to the barefoot Buddhist monks who led 100,000 people marching through a major city. It was the strongest protest against the repressive regime in two decades.

Bush spent Monday trying to revive the Mideast peace process. He was reminded of the hurdles as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insisted that a U.S. peace conference deal with ''issues of substance'' -- a sign of old skepticism that accompanies new hope.

Late Tuesday morning, Bush planned to meet with another friend under tense circumstances, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The Iraqi leader is deeply frustrated over the killing of 11 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater USA security guards.

By calling on the U.N. to take up a ''mission of liberation,'' Bush was posing a challenge to the U.N. to uphold its original goal of ensuring freedom in many forms -- from tyranny, disease, illiteracy and poverty. He was expected to lean heavily on the U.N.'s Declaration of Human Rights, approved more than 50 years ago.

His aim is to remind the body that the expansion of freedom is not a Western goal, nor even just a Bush doctrine, but rather one that underpins the U.N. itself. The president heads to the forum, though, with his clout weakened by the plodding war in Iraq.

His speech, said White House spokesman Dana Perino, is about ''upholding the promise of the U.N. founding.'' Bush aides say that by design, the address will stick to broad themes.

What it is not about, Perino said plainly, is Iran.

''The president wanted this speech to focus on many other issues that are facing the world -- issues that people in Sudan and Zimbabwe and Burma and countless other countries are dealing with,'' she said.

Still, Iran's leader, Ahmadinejad, managed to cause a stir.

In an interview with The Associated Press, he denied all the chief accusations against Iran: that it is providing weapons to kill U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, supporting terrorism or breaking international law by developing nuclear weapons.

Behind the scenes, the U.S. is aggressively pushing for a new round of Security Council sanctions against Iran for its defiance on the nuclear issue.

Bush did not expect to cross paths with Ahmadinejad in the U.N. building.

The Iranian leader also would not be attending the president's reception for fellow world leaders at his hotel in the evening.

''Lost in the mail,'' Perino said of Ahmandinejad's invitation.

Bush later will participate in a roundtable on democracy; take part in a U.N. Security Council session on crisis in Africa; host a reception; and attend a dinner of leaders.

He had spent Monday trying to add some life to the Mideast peace process.

Appearing before reporters with Abbas after an hour-long meeting that also included Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Bush didn't mention the fall conference he has championed.

He promised the United States ''will be a strong partner'' in establishing an independent state for Palestinians. ''I believe that the vision of two states side by side in peace is achievable,'' Bush said.

But Abbas said the meeting should be the precursor to ''full negotiations on the permanent status.'' A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity to more freely discuss the president's private talks, said ''there will not be a negotiation'' at the November meeting.

    Bush Urges U.N. to Spread Freedom, NYT, 25.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Bush.html?hp

Bush: Strengthen Eavesdropping Law

September 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:49 p.m. ET
The New York Times

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) -- President Bush said Wednesday that a law hastily passed in August to temporarily give the government more power to eavesdrop without warrants on foreign terror suspects must be made permanent and expanded.

If this doesn't happen, Bush said, ''Our national security professionals will lose critical tools they need to protect our country.''

''Without these tools, it will be harder to figure out what our enemies are doing to train, recruit and infiltrate operatives into America,'' he said on a visit to the super-secret National Security Agency's headquarters in suburban Fort Meade, Md. ''Without these tools, our country will be much more vulnerable to attack.''

The 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governs when warrants for eavesdropping must be obtained from a secret intelligence court. This year's update -- approved by the Senate and House just before Congress adjourned for an August break -- allows more efficient interceptions of foreign communications.

Under the new law -- the Protect America Act -- the government can eavesdrop, without a court order, on communications conducted by a person reasonably believed to be outside the United States, even if an American is on one end of the conversation -- so long as that American is not the intended focus or target of the surveillance.

That change was urgently requested by the Bush administration, which said that the modernization of communications technology had created a dire gap in the nation's terrorism intelligence collection capabilities.

Such surveillance was generally prohibited under the original FISA law if the wiretap was conducted inside the United States, unless a court approved it. Because of changes in telecommunications technology, many more foreign communications now flow through the United States. The new law allows those to be tapped without a court order.

But civil liberties groups and many Democrats say the new changes go too far. Congress' Democratic leaders set it to expire in six months so that it could be fine-tuned, and that process is beginning on Capitol Hill now.

Democrats hope to change the law to provide additional oversight when the government eavesdrops on U.S. residents communicating with overseas parties.

Bush timed his visit to the NSA facility to press his case.

''The threat from al Qaida is not going to expire in 135 days,'' he said, ''so I call on Congress to make the Protect America Act permanent.''

He also pleaded with lawmakers to expand the law, not restrict it. One provision particularly important to the administration, but opposed by many Democrats, would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies which may have helped the government conduct surveillance prior to January 2007 without a court order.

Bush was joined at the podium in an NSA hallway by Vice President Dick Cheney, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and others.

The president received private briefings from intelligence officials and mingled with employees in the National Threat Operations Center. While cameras and reporters were in the room, the large video screens that lined the walls displayed unclassified information on computer crime and signal intelligence.

Along one wall at NSA is a sign that says, ''We won't back down. We never have. We never will.''

    Bush: Strengthen Eavesdropping Law, NYT, 19.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Eavesdropping.html

Bush Names Choice for Successor to Gonzales

September 17, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 — President Bush said this morning that he will nominate Michael B. Mukasey, a former federal judge from New York who has presided over some high-profile terrorism trials, as his next attorney general.

“Judge Mukasey is clear-eyed about the threat our nation faces,” Mr. Bush said in the Rose Garden of the White House, with Mr. Mukasey by his side. He called the retired judge “a sound manager and a strong leader.”

The president urged the Senate to confirm him promptly, and White House officials said the administration was hoping the Senate would do so before the lawmakers leave for their next recess on Oct. 8.

Mr. Mukasey will begin making courtesy calls on Senators on Tuesday.

If he is confirmed, Mr. Mukasey (pronounced mew-KAY-see) would become the third attorney general to serve under Mr. Bush. As the top law enforcement officer in the United States, he would preside over a Justice Department that has been buffeted by Congressional inquiries into the firing of federal prosecutors and the resignation of the previous attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales.

Unlike Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Mukasey is not a close confidant of the president. Nor is he a Washington insider. But people in both political parties say he possesses the two qualities that Mr. Bush has been looking for in a nominee: a law-and-order sensibility that dovetails with the president’s agenda for the fight against terror, and the potential to avoid a bruising confirmation battle with the Democrats who now run the Senate. With 16 months left in office, Mr. Bush can ill afford a drawn-out confirmation fight.

Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, said this morning that the president was not “afraid of any fight.” But she said of Mr. Mukasey, I think he can be confirmed quickly. I think that’s important.”

One Senate Democrat, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who led the fight to oust Mr. Gonzales, issued a statement on Sunday evening praising Mr. Mukasey — a suggestion that Democrats, who are already challenging Mr. Bush over the war in Iraq, have little appetite for another big fight.

“While he is certainly conservative,” Mr. Schumer said, “Judge Mukasey seems to be the kind of nominee who would put rule of law first and show independence from the White House, our most important criteria. For sure we’d want to ascertain his approach on such important and sensitive issues as wiretapping and the appointment of U.S. attorneys, but he’s a lot better than some of the other names mentioned and he has the potential to become a consensus nominee.”

In accepting the president’s offer, Mr. Mukasey spoke this morning of the challenges the Justice Department faces, adding that he hoped he would be able to give the department’s prosecutors “the support and leadership they deserve.”

Even as he said those words, Mr. Gonzales loomed large. Through the months that Mr. Gonzales faced withering criticism from Senate Democrats, Mr. Bush staunchly defended him, and did so again today, calling him Mr. Gonzales “a dear friend and a trusted advisor.” Mr. Mukasey said Mr. Gonzales telephoned him this morning to offer congratulations.

Mr. Mukasey himself has attracted criticism, notably from civil liberties advocates, who say he has been too supportive of law enforcement while on the bench. But he has sometimes such critics, as he did with his handling of the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen suspected of membership in Al Qaeda. Although Mr. Mukasey backed the White House by ruling that Mr. Padilla could be held as an enemy combatant — a decision overturned on appeal — he also defied the administration by saying Mr. Padilla was entitled to legal counsel.

Some critics cite the decision as a sign of Mr. Mukasey’s independence, and such issues will undoubtedly be front and center during confirmation hearings.

Beyond Mr. Schumer, who in 2003 suggested Mr. Mukasey as a possible Supreme Court nominee, the former judge is not well known on Capitol Hill, and it is impossible to predict how the hearings would go.

When another Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, was asked on Sunday about him, he said Mr. Mukasey would have to prove he was “not just the president’s lawyer, but the country’s lawyer” as well.

“He has to pass that test for me, go through that filter,” Mr. Biden said on Fox News Sunday.

White House officials refused to discuss the selection on Sunday. But Mr. Mukasey spent the afternoon at the White House, and by evening the news that he would be the nominee spilled out. Some White House allies spoke about the selection as if Mr. Bush had already announced it.

“I think the president, by reaching outside the inner circle, by reaching outside the usual suspects, is bringing someone who is really going to restore a lot of integrity to the department,” said Jay Lefkowitz, a former domestic policy adviser to Mr. Bush who now practices law in New York.

Mr. Mukasey, 66, was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, and retired last year to go into private practice. He spent 19 years as a federal judge in New York, including as chief judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan. Before that, he was a prosecutor in Manhattan. He and his son, Marc, are advisers to Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign.

But Mr. Mukasey is not viewed as a political partisan, which has troubled conservatives, many of whom were hoping the president would select Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general, as his nominee. Mr. Olson seemed to be moving to the top of the president’s short list last week until Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said Mr. Olson could not be confirmed.

Over the weekend, the White House appeared to be floating Mr. Mukasy’s name with conservatives. A sign that he would pass muster with them came Saturday night, when William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, endorsed Mr. Mukasey.

In 1993, Mr. Mukasey presided over the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheik, whom he sentenced to life in prison for his role in a plot to blow up New York landmarks and tunnels.

He has spoken in support of provisions of the Patriot Act, and last month wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal on “the inadequacy of the current approach to terrorism prosecutions,” a view that the Bush administration has expressed.

Still, he has garnered praise in some surprising quarters. Glenn Greenwald, a frequent critic of the administration who writes about legal issues for Salon.com, assessed Mr. Mukasey’s part in the Padilla case in an article over the weekend and praised him as “very smart and independent, not part of the Bush circle.”

    Bush Names Choice for Successor to Gonzales, NYT, 17.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/washington/17cnd-attorney.html?hp

In Bush Speech, Signs of Split on Iran Policy

September 16, 2007
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — While scrutiny this week focused on the debate over troop strength, President Bush also used the occasion to turn up the pressure on Iran, using his speech on Thursday to stress the need to contain Iran as a major reason for the continued American presence in Iraq.

The language in Mr. Bush’s speech reflected an intense and continuing struggle between factions within his administration over how aggressively to confront Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been arguing for a continuation of a diplomatic approach, while officials in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office have advocated a much tougher view. They seek to isolate and contain Iran, and to include greater consideration of a military strike.

Mr. Bush’s language indicated that the debate, at least for now, might have tilted toward Mr. Cheney. By portraying the battle with Iran as one for supremacy in the Middle East, Mr. Bush turned up the language another, more bellicose, notch. “If we were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened,” Mr. Bush said. “Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region.”

The debate between the factions in the administration will play out soon in other ways, including the decision over whether to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, or a unit of it, a terrorist organization and subject to increased financial sanctions.

The tensions between Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney have existed for a long time; they began during the administration’s first term, when, as national security adviser, she had to mediate turf battles between a coalition of Mr. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, and Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state.

Now, as secretary of state, Ms. Rice has increasingly come to reflect the more diplomatic view advocated by the State Department, which has pushed for a more restrained tone in America’s dealings with the world in general, and Iran in particular.

Mr. Cheney and hawks in his office, however, have become increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of progress in curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Allies of Mr. Cheney continue to say publicly that the United States should include a change in Iran’s leadership as a viable policy option, and have argued, privately, that the United States should encourage Israel to consider a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The testimony this week of Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, that the diplomatic talks with Iran have done little to restrain what he called Iran’s “malign” influence in Iraq, also fueled the disquiet in Mr. Cheney’s office, one administration official said.

That is intensifying the debate over the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

While some White House officials and some members of the vice president’s staff have been pushing to blacklist the entire Revolutionary Guard, administration officials said, officials at the State and Treasury Departments have been pushing a narrower approach that would list only the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, or perhaps, only companies and organizations with financial ties to that group.

The designation would make it easier for the United States to block financial accounts and other assets controlled by the group.

The administration is still pressing ahead with other efforts to turn up the pressure on Iran. The State Department has asked top officials from the five other world powers seeking to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions to come to Washington on Friday for a meeting in which R. Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, will press for stronger United Nations sanctions against Iran.

On Sept. 28, Ms. Rice will meet with her counterparts from Europe, Russia and China to discuss the Iran sanctions issue.

Beyond its nuclear program, Iran has emerged as an increasing source of trouble for the Bush administration, American officials said, by inflaming the insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza, where it has provided military and financial support to the militant Islamic group Hamas.

In its report to Congress on Friday, the administration accused Iran of providing Shiite militias with training, money and weapons, including rockets, mortars and explosively formed projectiles, which the administration said accounted for an increased percentage of American combat deaths. The report said that “coalition and Iraqi operations against these groups, combined with a growing rejection of Shia violence by top government of Iraq officials, has led to some progress in reducing violent attacks from Shia extremists.”

The American military in Iraq still has custody of several Iranian officials who were detained there on suspicion of involvement in providing aid to Shiite militias.

Iran’s government has denied the charges. Its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Friday that Mr. Bush’s Middle East policies had failed and that Mr. Bush would one day be put on trial for the “tragedies” he had created in Iraq.

But a belief has been growing in Iran, which administration officials have pointedly not tried to stem, that the Bush administration was considering military strikes against Iran. An Israeli airstrike in Syria last week kicked up speculation in the Iranian press that Israel, in alliance with the United States, was really trying to send a message to Iran that it could strike Iranian nuclear facilities if it chose to.

“If I were the Iranians, what I’d be freaked out about is that the other Arab states didn’t protest” the airstrike, said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The Arab world nonreaction is a signal to Iran, that Arabs aren’t happy with Iran’s power and influence, so if the Israelis want to go and intimidate and violate the airspace of another Arab state that’s an ally of Iran, the other Arab states aren’t going to do anything.”

During the talks next week, the United States, France and Britain will try to get Russia, China and Germany to sign on to a stronger set of United Nations Security Council sanctions against members of Iran’s government.

The sanctions are aimed at getting Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium. The international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been complicated by America’s conflict with Iran in Iraq, which Russia and some European countries argue should take a back seat to the nuclear issue.

Further complicating things has been a dispute over a pact reached last month between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency for Iran to answer questions about an array of suspicious past nuclear activities.

Gregory L. Schulte, the American delegate to the agency, suggested that Tehran “has no intention of coming clean.”

    In Bush Speech, Signs of Split on Iran Policy, NYT, 16.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/washington/16diplo.html?hp

After Speech, Bush Seeks to Overcome Doubts on Iraq

September 14, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney offered upbeat views of Iraq before friendly audiences today as they sought to build on momentum from the president’s Thursday prime-time address to the country.

But back in Washington, Democratic lawmakers renewed their attacks on Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy, and they were armed with documents from within the administration. One report found only marginal improvement by the Iraqi government in meeting important military and political objectives, while the other found that religious freedom has continued to deteriorate in Iraq despite this year’s increase in American troop strength.

Mr. Bush, in a visit to the Quantico Marine Corps base in Virginia, said he was heartened by the spirit of young lieutenants with whom he talked. “I made it clear that the sacrifices that they and their families were going to make were necessary for the short term and long term security of our country,” Mr. Bush said after a private meeting with the marines.

Meanwhile, Mr. Cheney declared that “the United States and our coalition are getting things right in Iraq.”

“Tough work lies ahead,” Mr. Cheney told an invited audience at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. “But the evidence from the theater of war 6,000 miles away is beyond question: The troop surge has achieved solid results, and in a relatively short period of time.”

In his Quantico remarks, the president urged Congress to “listen very carefully” to what Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker said this week “and support the troop levels that these two men think are necessary to achieve our objective.”

“I also expect the Congress to support our men and women in uniform and their families and those who have worn the uniform,” Mr. Bush said.

Democrats seized on the report showing slow progress by the Iraqi government.

“As hard as they may have tried to spin it, today’s assessment by the White House on the political situation in Iraq once again shows that the President’s flawed escalation policy is not working,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “It certainly does not justify keeping 130,000 soldiers mired in an open-ended civil war, as the President has chosen to do.”

“According to this latest report card, the president’s war policy is still flunking,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey. “It’s clear that Iraq is light-years away from security or political stability, and it’s clear that four years of this war policy has brought us to this point.”

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said: “This Administration is in deep denial. Their misguided account is out of touch with every recent independent Iraq assessment.”

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a former Army officer and a member of the Armed Services Committee, scheduled a news conference on Capitol Hill this afternoon on the situation in Iraq. Mr. Reed, the Democrats’ designated point man in rebutting the president’s Thursday night speech, called it essentially a warmed-over recitation of a failed policy.

Mr. Cheney said that, as far as troop withdrawals are concerned, “President Bush will make his decisions based on the national interest and nothing else — not by artificial measures, not by political calculations, and not by poll numbers.”

The real action moves next week to Congress, where Democrats will try to force the president to decrease troop strength faster and impose a timetable for “withdrawal,” a word Mr. Bush did not use on Thursday night. Most Republicans plan to oppose any attempts to tie Mr. Bush’s hands, and they will be aided in the Senate by rules requiring 60 votes to shut off debate.

The assessment of the Iraq government’s progress was less than glowing. It found only marginal improvement since a preliminary report in July, saying that the Iraqis had satisfactorily met only half the benchmarks for progress set by Congress, most of them in matters involving security. The White House reported that the Iraqis fell short in meeting seven other benchmarks, though for some of those the reviews were mixed.

Tony Snow, the chief White House spokesman, declared in his last day on the job that “broad context is necessary” in gauging the assessment. Oil revenues in Iraq are being distributed in an increasingly fair manner, and there has been marked improvement in provincial government effectiveness — “precisely the ‘effects’ the benchmarks were intended to produce, even if the formal benchmarks themselves have not been met,” Mr. Snow said.

The bleak report on religious freedom in Iraq, no surprise given the frequent sectarian violence, was contained in the State Department’s annual document on the status of religious freedom worldwide. Members of all religions in Iraq are “victims of harassment, intimidation, kidnapping, and killings,” the report said.

John Hanford 3d, the State Department ambassador at large for religious freedom, said the new Iraqi constitution actually provides “rather robust guarantees” for religious freedom, especially for the Middle East.

“What we’re dealing with in Iraq is really a security situation that makes it difficult for religious practice to occur in a normal way,” Mr. Hanford said.

    After Speech, Bush Seeks to Overcome Doubts on Iraq, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/washington/14cnd-policy2.html?hp

Bush Says Success Allows for Troop Cuts

September 14, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — President Bush contended on Thursday night that his plan to begin withdrawing some troops from Iraq gradually was based on a principle he called “return on success,” saying that progress made so far could be squandered by the deeper and speedier reductions that the war’s opponents have demanded.

Mr. Bush called for an “enduring relationship” with Iraq that would keep American forces there “beyond my presidency,” arguing that a free and friendly Iraq was essential to the security of the region and the United States. He cast the war in Iraq as a vital part of a strategy in the Middle East to defeat Al Qaeda and counter Iran.

Evidently sensitive to how lower troop levels might be seen — by enemies abroad and critics at home — he emphasized in his address that early drawdowns were now possible only because the strategy of sending more troops to Iraq eight months ago had worked. He did not once use the word withdrawal.

“The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home,” Mr. Bush said, trying once again to win support for a war in Iraq that remains deeply unpopular.

The speech was the first time since the war began four and a half years ago that Mr. Bush had outlined a plan for troop reductions, to bring levels down from the current high of 169,000. He held out the prospect of more reductions but committed only to a plan that would withdraw by next July the additional combat units he ordered there in January, leaving a main body of more than 130,000 troops intact.

In the Democratic response, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate, said that Mr. Bush was making the case for an “endless and unlimited military presence in Iraq,” and he vowed that Congress would prevent it.

“Once again, the president failed to provide either a plan to successfully end the war or a convincing rationale to continue it,” said Mr. Reed, an author of a Democratic proposal that would withdraw most combat troops by next spring, but still leave a significant force in Iraq to provide training and security.

Mr. Bush’s 18-minute address culminated several weeks of political stagecraft that included several speeches and a presidential trip to Iraq but also relied heavily on Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, to make the public case for a strategy overseen by the commander in chief.

While promoting progress in Iraq, Mr. Bush conceded that his vision for Iraq would be a difficult one to achieve. That acknowledgment was punctuated with macabre timing by the assassination on Thursday of a Sunni sheik, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, who had led a group of tribal leaders into an alliance with the United States and who had met the president during his trip to Iraq only 10 days ago.

The White House clearly sought to maximize the political benefits from the announcement of a troop reduction, which some military officials said would have had to happen anyway unless the administration took the politically unpalatable step of extending troops’ tours in Iraq to longer than 15 months. The first 5,700 troops affected by the pullback would leave Iraq this year — “by Christmas,” Mr. Bush said — and roughly 18,000 more would do so by mid-July 2008.

Still, other forces of what came to be called “the surge” could remain and new ones could be sent, administration and military officials said Thursday. As a result, the number of troops in Iraq could be higher in the summer of 2008 than it was in the fall of 2006 before the surge began, a fact likely to infuriate Mr. Bush’s critics and upset even some Republican supporters.

Mr. Bush’s approach sets the stage for a legislative clash beginning next week in the Senate as Democrats renew their efforts to put together a bipartisan coalition to win approval of legislation forcing a change in policy in Iraq. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said Mr. Bush was “trying to run out the clock on his failed strategy and leave the hard decisions to the next president.”

Many Democrats, including the presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have said some American military presence should continue in Iraq beyond Mr. Bush’s presidency. But his critics take it for granted that Mr. Bush envisions a presence much bigger and longer than the Democrats would endorse.

Mr. Bush, in his remarks, seemed to hope that by beginning a withdrawal, it would mollify those who were increasingly alarmed by the size and cost of the commitment and unite Americans behind the war in a way they have rarely been from the start. “The way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together,” he said.

That seemed unlikely.

Democratic leaders did not wait for the formal remarks before they began to render a judgment. “He wants an open-ended commitment with an open wallet by the American people,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

As he has in previous addresses, the president sought to recast, or at least rephrase, the war’s overarching purpose. While the war began with an American invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush said the United States and Iraq’s current government had the same “moral and strategic imperatives” — to forge an alliance with political, economic and military ties.

“We must help Iraq defeat those who threaten its future and also threaten ours,” he said, citing the role played in Iraq by Iran and its allies, and by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the home-grown Sunni militant group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is unclear.

“If we were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened,” Mr. Bush said. “Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. Extremists could control a key part of the global energy supply.”

At times, Mr. Bush offered a more upbeat assessment of conditions in Iraq than others have, including a flurry of reports that preceded Thursday’s speech. At times, his view seemed even rosier than General Petraeus’s did.

His descriptions noted positive developments — “Ordinary life is beginning to return,” he said — while leaving out the grim realities of life in the shadow of death, without basic regular electricity or other services.

He warned that pulling out of Iraq could cause “a humanitarian nightmare” but did not acknowledge that millions of Iraqis have already been displaced or have fled to neighboring countries.

He noted that Iraq’s government was “sharing oil revenues with the provinces” without mentioning that discussions on a draft law to institutionalize the process — a key benchmark dictated by Congress — appear to have collapsed.

Mr. Bush and other officials had pointed to the new alliance with the Sunni tribes in Anbar Province as one of the most hopeful developments in Iraq since the “surge” began. The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, told the president of Sheik Abdul Sattar’s death just as Mr. Bush finished his daily political briefing on Thursday morning.

This week’s testimony of General Petraeus and the American ambassador in Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, had elated White House officials, who by midweek said they felt they would easily avoid any significant defections by Republican lawmakers and thus face no real legislative constraints in how the administration conducts the war.

Some Republican strategists, in fact, expressed concern that Mr. Bush even gave Thursday night’s speech, suggesting, on condition of anonymity to shield themselves from retribution, that it would have been better to let the general have the last word.

Still, it has been clear this week that the Democrats have too few votes to impose any real constraints on Mr. Bush’s policy, leaving the war’s harshest critics frustrated and angry. With so many troops remaining in Iraq well into 2008, the debate over the war is likely to intensify during the presidential campaign.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, on Thursday night expressed confidence that the Republicans could continue to block any effort to set a withdrawal date, and he said he believed that most of his colleagues were satisfied with the president’s approach.

“The plan General Petraeus has laid out meets a demand that many of my members have been looking for, which is some sign of success that will allow us to reduce our forces in the near future,” Mr. McConnell said.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, on his way back from a two-day trip to Iraq, continued to herald signs of success he saw. But Mr. Boehner himself became part of the bitter debate over Iraq, saying in response to a question posed on CNN that “the investment that we’re making today will be a small price if we’re able to stop Al Qaeda here.”

Democrats seized on the remark, accusing him of demeaning the death toll in Iraq, which as of Wednesday stood at 3,765, though aides said he referred only to the financial costs.

    Bush Says Success Allows for Troop Cuts, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/washington/14prexy.html?hp

In Bush’s Words: Assessing the War Today, and the Risks to Avoid Tomorrow

September 13, 2007
The New York Times

The following is the transcript of the address that President Bush delivered Thursday night from the Oval Office, as transcribed by the Federal News Service, a private transcription agency.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Good evening.

In the life of all free nations, there come moments that decide the direction of a country and reveal the character of its people. We are now at such a moment.

In Iraq, an ally of the United States is fighting for its survival. Terrorists and extremists who are at war with us around the world are seeking to topple Iraq's government, dominate the region and attack us here at home. If Iraq's young democracy can turn back these enemies, it will mean a more hopeful Middle East and a more secure America.

This ally has placed its trust in the United States, and tonight our moral and strategic imperatives are one. We must help Iraq defeat those who threaten its future and also threaten ours.

Eight months ago, we adopted a new strategy to meet that objective, including a surge in U.S. forces that reached full strength in June. This week General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before Congress about how that strategy is progressing. In their testimony, these men made clear that our challenge in Iraq is formidable. Yet they concluded that conditions in Iraq are improving, that we are seizing the initiative from the enemy, and that the troop surge is working.

The premise of our strategy is that securing the Iraqi population is the foundation for all other progress.

For Iraqis to bridge sectarian divides, they need to feel safe in their homes and neighborhoods. For lasting reconciliation to take root, Iraqis must feel confident that they do not need sectarian gangs for security. The goal of the surge is to provide that security and to help prepare Iraqi forces to maintain it. As I will explain tonight, our success in meeting these objectives now allows us to begin bringing some of our troops home.

Since the surge was announced in January, it has moved through several phases. First was the flow of additional troops into Iraq, especially Baghdad and Anbar province. Once these forces were in place, our commanders launched a series of offensive operations to drive terrorists and militias out of their strongholds. And finally, in areas that have been cleared, we are surging diplomatic and civilian resources to ensure that military progress is quickly followed up with real improvements in daily life.

Anbar province is a good example of how our strategy is working. Last year, an intelligence report concluded that Anbar had been lost to al Qaeda. Some cited this report as evidence that we had failed in Iraq and should cut our losses and pull out. Instead, we kept the pressure on the terrorists. The local people were suffering under the Taliban-like rule of al Qaeda, and they were sick of it. So they asked us for help.

To take advantage of this opportunity, I sent an additional 4,000 Marines to Anbar as part of the surge. Together, local sheikhs, Iraqi forces, and coalition troops drove the terrorists from the capital of Ramadi and other population centers. Today, a city where al Qaeda once planted its flag is beginning to return to normal. Anbar citizens who once feared beheading for talking to an American or Iraqi soldier now come forward to tell us where the terrorists are hiding. Young Sunnis who once joined the insurgency are now joining the army and police.

And with the help of our Provincial Reconstruction Teams, new jobs are being created and local governments are meeting again.

These developments do not often make the headlines, but they do make a difference. During my visit to Anbar on Labor Day, local Sunni leaders thanked me for America's support. They pledged they would never allow al Qaeda to return. And they told me they now see a place for their people in a democratic Iraq. The Sunni governor of Anbar Province put it this way: Our tomorrow starts today.

The changes in Anbar show all Iraqis what becomes possible when extremists are driven out. They show al Qaeda that it cannot count on popular support, even in a province its leaders once declared their home base. And they show the world that ordinary people in the Middle East want the same things for their children that we want for ours -- a decent life and a peaceful future.

In Anbar, the enemy remains active and deadly. Earlier today, one of the brave tribal sheikhs who helped lead the revolt against al Qaeda was murdered. In response, a fellow Sunni leader declared: We are determined to strike back and continue our work. And as they do, they can count on the continued support of the United States.

Throughout Iraq, too many citizens are being killed by terrorists and death squads. And for most Iraqis, the quality of life is far from where it should be. Yet General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker report that the success in Anbar is beginning to be replicated in other parts of the country.

One year ago, much of Baghdad was under siege. Schools were closed, markets were shuttered, and sectarian violence was spiraling out of control. Today, most of Baghdad's neighborhoods are being patrolled by coalition and Iraqi forces who live among the people they protect.

Many schools and markets are reopening. Citizens are coming forward with vital intelligence. Sectarian killings are down, and ordinary life is beginning to return.

One year ago, much of Diyala province was a sanctuary for al Qaeda and other extremist groups, and its capital of Baqubah was emerging as an al Qaeda stronghold. Today Baqubah is cleared. Diyala province is the site of a growing popular uprising against the extremists, and some local tribes are working alongside coalition and Iraqi forces to clear out the enemy and reclaim their communities.

One year ago, Shi'a extremists and Iranian-backed militants were gaining strength and targeting Sunnis for assassination. Today these groups are being broken up, and many of their leaders are being captured or killed.

These gains are a tribute to our military, they are a tribute to the courage of the Iraqi security forces, and they are the tribute to a -- an Iraqi government that has decided to take on the extremists.

Now the Iraqi government must bring the same determination to achieving reconciliation. This is an enormous undertaking after more than three decades of tyranny and division. The government has not met its own legislative benchmarks, and in my meetings with Iraqi leaders, I have made it clear that they must.

Yet Iraq's national leaders are getting some things done. For example, they have passed a budget. They are sharing oil revenues with the provinces. They are allowing former Ba'athists to rejoin Iraq's military or receive government pensions. Local reconciliation is taking place. The key now is to link this progress in the provinces to progress in Baghdad. As local politics change, so will national politics.

Our troops in Iraq are performing brilliantly. Along with the Iraqi forces, they have captured or killed an average of more than 1,500 enemy fighters per month since January.

Yet ultimately, the way forward depends on the ability of Iraqis to maintain security gains. According to General Petraeus and a panel chaired by retired General Jim Jones, the Iraqi army is becoming more capable, although there is still a great deal of work to be done to improve the national police. Iraqi forces are receiving increased cooperation from local populations, and this is improving their ability to hold areas that have been cleared.

Because of this success, General Petraeus believes we have now reached the point where we can maintain our security gains with fewer American forces. He has recommended that we not replace about 2,200 Marines scheduled to leave Anbar province later this month; in addition, he says it will soon be possible to bring home an Army combat brigade; for a total force reduction of 5,700 troops by Christmas. And he expects that by July we will be able to reduce our troop levels in Iraq from 20 combat brigades to 15.

General Petraeus also recommends that in December we begin transitioning to the next phase of our strategy in Iraq. As terrorists are defeated, civil society takes root and the Iraqis assume more control over their own security, our mission in Iraq will evolve. Over time, our troops will shift from leading operations, to partnering with Iraqi forces, and eventually to overwatching those forces. As this transition in our mission takes place, our troops will focus on a more limited set of tasks, including counterterrorism operations and training, equipping, and supporting Iraqi forces.

I have consulted with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other members of my national security team, Iraqi officials, and leaders of both parties in Congress.

I have benefited from their advice and I have accepted General Petraeus's recommendations. I have directed General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker to update their joint campaign plan for Iraq, so we can adjust our military and civilian resources accordingly. I have also directed them to deliver another report to Congress in March. At that time, they will provide a fresh assessment of the situation in Iraq and of the troop levels and resources we need to meet our national security objectives.

The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq is return on success. The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home. And in all we do, I will ensure that our commanders on the ground have the troops and flexibility they need to defeat the enemy.

Americans want our country to be safe and our troops to begin coming home from Iraq. Yet those of us who believe success in Iraq is essential to our security, and those who believe we should bring our troops home, have been at odds. Now, because of the measure of success we are seeing in Iraq, we can begin seeing troops come home.

The way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together.

This vision for a reduced American presence also has the support of Iraqi leaders from all communities. At the same time, they understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency. These Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship in a way that protects our interests in the region and requires many fewer American troops.

The success of a free Iraq is critical to the security of the United States.

A free Iraq will deny al Qaeda a safe haven. A free Iraq will counter the destructive ambitions of Iran. A free Iraq will marginalize extremists, unleash the talent of its people and be an anchor of stability in the region. A free Iraq will set an example for people across the Middle East. A free Iraq will be our partner in the fight against terror, and that will make us safer here at home.

Realizing this vision will be difficult, but it is achievable. Our military commanders believe we can succeed. Our diplomats believe we can succeed. And for the safety of future generations of Americans, we must succeed.

If we were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened. Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. Extremists could control a key part of the global energy supply. Iraq could face a humanitarian nightmare. Democracy movements would be violently reversed. We would leave our children to face a far more dangerous world. And as we saw on September the 11th, 2001, those dangers can reach our cities and kill our people.

Whatever political party you belong to, whatever your position on Iraq, we should be able to agree that America has a vital interest in preventing chaos and providing hope in the Middle East. We should be able to agree that we must defeat al Qaeda, counter Iran, help the Afghan government, work for peace in the Holy Land and strengthen our military, so we can prevail in the struggle against terrorists and extremists.

So tonight I want to speak to members of the United States Congress. Let us come together on a policy of strength in the Middle East. I thank you for providing crucial funds and resources for our military, and I ask you to join me in supporting the recommendations General Petraeus has made and the troop levels he has asked for.

To the Iraqi people: You have voted for freedom, and now you are liberating your country from terrorists and death squads. You must demand that your leaders make the tough choices needed to achieve reconciliation. As you do, have confidence that America does not abandon our friends, and we will not abandon you.

To Iraq's neighbors who seek peace: The violent extremists who target Iraq are also targeting you. The best way to secure your interests and protect your own people is to stand with the people of Iraq. That means using your economic and diplomatic leverage to strengthen the government in Baghdad. And it means the efforts by Iran and Syria to undermine that government must end.

To the international community: The success of a free Iraq matters to every civilized nation. We thank the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq and the many others who are helping that young democracy. We encourage all nations to help -- by implementing the international compact to revitalize Iraq's economy, by participating in the neighbors conferences to boost cooperation and overcome differences in the region, and by supporting the new and expanded mission of the United Nations in Iraq.

To our military personnel, intelligence officers, diplomats and civilians on the frontlines in Iraq: You have done everything America has asked of you. And the progress I have reported tonight is in large part because of your courage and hard effort. You are serving far from home. Our nation is grateful for your sacrifices and the sacrifices of your families.

Earlier this year, I received an e-mail from the family of Army Specialist Brandon Stout of Michigan. Brandon volunteered for the National Guard and was killed while serving in Baghdad.

His family has suffered greatly. Yet in their sorrow, they see larger purpose. His wife, Audrey, says that Brandon felt called to serve and knew what he was fighting for. And his parents, Tracy and Jeff, wrote me this: We believe this is a war of good and evil, and we must win, even if it cost the life of our own son. Freedom is not free.

This country is blessed to have Americans like Brandon Stout, who make extraordinary sacrifices to keep us safe from harm. They are doing so in a fight that is just, and right and necessary. And now it falls to us to finish the work they have begun.

Some say the gains we are making in Iraq come too late. They are mistaken. It is never too late to deal a blow to al Qaeda. It is never too late to advance freedom. And it is never too late to support our troops in a fight they can win.

Good night, and God bless America.

    In Bush’s Words: Assessing the War Today, and the Risks to Avoid Tomorrow, NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/washington/15full-text.html

Pro - Bush Group Airs New War Ads

September 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:48 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A political group supporting President Bush's Iraq war strategy with a multimillion dollar ad campaign is airing a new TV ad denouncing a liberal group's sharp criticism of Gen. David Petraeus.

The ad campaign is the second rollout of ads by the group, Freedom's Watch, and capitalizes on Democratic Party unease over a newspaper ad run this week by MoveOn.org, one of the leading anti-war voices among liberal activists.

The MoveOn ad appeared Monday in The New York Times on the morning of Petraeus' first appearance before Congress to testify about conditions in Iraq. The ad accused Petraeus of ''cooking the books'' for the White House. ''General Petraeus or General Betray Us?'' it asked, playing off his name.

The ad has become a rallying point for Republicans, who have demanded that Democrats disavow it.

Some Democrats have voiced concern. On Monday, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called the ad ''over the top.''

The Freedom's Watch ad states: ''Name calling, charges of betrayal it's despicable. It's what MoveOn shamefully does -- and it's wrong. America and the forces of freedom are winning. MoveOn is losing. Call your Congressman and Senator. Tell them to condemn MoveOn.''

Freedom's Watch also plans to run a print ad in the New York Times responding to MoveOn.

Freedom's Watch launched a $15 million advertising blitz last month to pressure lawmakers, including Republicans, whose backing of the war was seen as wavering.

The group is financed by former White House aides and Republican fundraisers and was organized as a nonprofit organization under IRS rules. It is not required to identify its donors or the amounts they give.

Among those who have been publicly identified with the effort are billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a fundraiser for Bush and chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., and conservative philanthropist John M. Templeton Jr. of Bryn Mawr, Pa. Both men have been major contributors to conservative causes.

Also backing Freedom's Watch are top Republican donors Anthony Gioia, Mel Sembler and Howard Leach, all former ambassadors in the Bush administration. Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer is a founding member of the group.

    Pro - Bush Group Airs New War Ads, NYT, 13.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-War-Ads.html

Low Approval Persists for Bush, Congress

September 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Only a third of the public is satisfied with the job President Bush is doing and even fewer are pleased with Congress, according to a poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos released Thursday.

With the clash between Bush and congressional Democrats over Iraq continuing to dominate the news, 33 percent said they approve of Bush's performance. That essentially matched his all-time low of 32 percent measured several times in the AP-Ipsos survey, a level that has barely changed since late last year.

Bush's approval on various issues ranged from 40 percent on foreign policy and terrorism to 33 percent on Iraq. But he wasn't the only one whose popularity was in the doldrums.

Congress' 26 percent approval was also about the same as its low point since Democrats took control this year, which was 24 percent in July.

Only 28 percent think the country is moving in the right direction, consistent with people's feelings since last year. Half of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, plus large majorities of Democrats and independents, think the country is on the wrong track.

The survey was conducted Sept. 10-12, and involved telephone interviews with 1,000 adults. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

    Low Approval Persists for Bush, Congress, NYT, 13.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Congress-AP-Poll.html

Officials: Bush to Announce Troop Cut

September 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:18 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will tell the nation Thursday evening that he plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by as many as 30,000 by next summer but will condition those and further cuts on continued progress, The Associated Press has learned.

In a 15-minute address from the White House at 9 p.m. EDT, Bush will endorse the recommendations of his top general and top diplomat in Iraq, following their appearance at two days of hearings in Congress, administration officials said. The White House plans to issue a written status report on the troop buildup on Friday, they said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Bush's speech is not yet final. Bush was rehearsing and polishing his remarks even as the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker were presenting their arguments for a second day on Capitol Hill.

In the speech, the president will say he understands Americans' deep concerns about U.S. involvement in Iraq and their desire to bring the troops home, they said. Bush will say that, after hearing from Petraeus and Crocker, he has decided on a way forward that will reduce the U.S. military presence but not abandon Iraq to chaos, according to the officials.

The address will stake out a conciliatory tone toward Congress. But while mirroring Petraeus' strategy, Bush will place more conditions on reductions than his general did, insisting that conditions on the ground must warrant cuts and that now-unforeseen events could change the plan.

Petraeus recommended that a 2,000-member Marine unit return home this month without replacement. That would be followed in mid-December with the departure of an Army brigade numbering 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers. Under the general's plan, another four combat brigades would be withdrawn by July 2008.

That could leave the U.S. with as few as 130,000-135,000 troops in Iraq, down from about 168,000 now, although Petraeus was not precise about whether all the about 8,000 support troops sent with those extra combat forces would be withdrawn by July.

Petraeus said he foresaw even deeper troop cuts beyond July, but he recommended that Bush wait until at least March to decide when to go below 130,000 -- and at what pace.

At the White House, Bush met with House and Senate lawmakers of both parties and he publicly pledged to consider their views. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the president didn't talk about the nationwide address.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush appears poised merely to bring the country back to where it was before the election that put Democrats in control of Congress -- with 130,000 troops in Iraq.

''Please. It's an insult to the intelligence of the American people that that is a new direction in Iraq,'' she said. ''We're as disappointed as the public is that the president has a tin ear to their opinion on this war.''

In his speech, Bush will adopt Petraeus' call for more time to determine the pace and scale of future withdrawals and offer to report to Congress in March, one official said.

As Petraeus and Crocker have, Bush will acknowledge difficulties, and the fact that few of the benchmarks set by Congress to measure progress of the buildup have been met, the official said. Yet, he will stress that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would be a catastrophe for Iraq and U.S. interests.

The president will discuss ''bottom up'' security improvements, notably in Anbar Province, which he visited on Labor Day and where Sunni leaders have allied themselves with U.S. forces to fight insurgents. And, he will note incremental progress on the political front despite unhelpful roles played by Iran and Syria, the official said.

Crocker was particularly keen on detailing diplomatic developments, including Saudi Arabia's move to open an embassy in Baghdad and a third conference of Iraqi neighbors to be hosted by Turkey in Istanbul at the end of October.

In Congress, cracks in Republican support for the Iraq war remained, as epitomized by heated questioning Tuesday of Petraeus.

''Is this a mission shift?'' asked Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. ''Are we continuing down the same path that we have laid out before, entirely reliant on the ability of the Iraqis to come together to achieve that political reconciliation?''

Sen. Norm Coleman said he wants a longer-term vision other than suggestions that Petraeus and Crocker return to Capitol Hill in mid-March to give another assessment. ''Americans want to see light at the end of the tunnel,'' said Coleman, R-Minn.

Many rank-and-file Republicans say they are deeply uneasy about keeping troops in Iraq through next summer, but they also remain reluctant to embrace legislation ordering troops home by next spring. Democrats, under substantial pressure by voters and politically influential anti-war groups, had anticipated that a larger number of Republicans by now would have turned against Bush on the war because of grim poll numbers and the upcoming 2008 elections.

Indeed, Petraeus' testimony helped to solidify support elsewhere in the GOP, keeping Democrats far from the 60 votes they needed to pass legislation ordering troops home.

''Americans should be happy that we can begin to reduce troop levels months ahead of schedule,'' said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

''I'm optimistic that when the votes are counted, they'll be roughly the same as they have been all year,'' said McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. ''As you know, we've lost some, but not a lot and I think that's a likely outcome again.''

Echoing testimony given to the House on Monday, Petraeus and Crocker acknowledged that Iraq remains largely dysfunctional but said violence had decreased since the influx of added U.S. troops.

Crocker said he fears that announcing troop withdrawals, as Democrats want, would focus Iraqi attention on ''building the walls, stocking ammunition and getting ready for a big nasty street fight'' rather than working toward reconciliation. ''It will take longer than we initially anticipated'' for Iraq's leaders to address the country's problems, he said.

The two days of testimony seemed to turn the debate away from the list of 18 benchmarks by which the White House and Iraq's government had said earlier this year that they preferred to measure progress. The administration has protested more recently that the benchmarks offer an unrealistic or incomplete look at the situation.

The hearing fell on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In an unusual admission, Petraeus said he was not sure whether his proposal on Iraq would make America safer.

A visibly heated Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked the question to which Petraeus said: ''Sir, I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted that out in my mind. What I have focused on and riveted on is how to accomplish the mission of the multinational force Iraq.''

    Officials: Bush to Announce Troop Cut, NYT, 11.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

Advisers Tell Bush to Stand Pat on Iraq

September 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:48 a.m. ET
The new York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush's senior advisers on Iraq have recommended he stand by his current war strategy, and he is unlikely to order more than a symbolic cut in troops before the end of the year, administration officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The recommendations from the military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker come despite independent government findings Tuesday that Baghdad has not met most of the political, military and economic markers set by Congress.

Bush appears set on maintaining the central elements of the policy he announced in January, one senior administration official said after discussions with participants in Bush's briefings during his surprise visit to an air base in Iraq on Monday.

Although the addition of 30,000 troops and the focus on increasing security in Baghdad would not be permanent, Bush is inclined to give it more time in hopes of extending military gains in Baghdad and the formerly restive Anbar province, officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe decisions coming as part of the White House report on Iraq due to Congress next week.

The plan they described is fraught with political risk. While Republican leaders on Tuesday suggested the GOP may be willing to support keeping troops in the region through spring, it is unclear whether rank-and-file party members who face tough elections next year will be willing to follow their lead.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters he would like to ensure a long-term U.S. presence in the Middle East to fight al-Qaida and deter aggression from Iran.

''And I hope that this reaction to Iraq and the highly politicized nature of dealing with Iraq this year doesn't end up in a situation where we just bring all the troops back home and thereby expose us, once again, to the kind of attacks we've had here in the homeland or on American facilities,'' said McConnell, R-Ky.

With Monday's back-to-back review sessions in Iraq, Bush has now heard from all the military chiefs, diplomats and other advisers he planned to consult before making a widely anticipated report to Congress by Sept. 15. Petraeus and Crocker are to testify before Congress on their recommendations next week.

The United States would be hard-pressed to maintain the current level of 160,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, but Bush is not expected to order more than a slight cut before the end of the year, officials said.

Bush himself suggested that modest troop cuts may be possible if military successes continue, but he gave no timeline or specific numbers. Options beyond a symbolic cut this year include cutting the tour of duty for troops in Iraq from 15 months back to the traditional 12 months, one official said. If adopted, that change would not come before the spring.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday during a trip to Australia, Bush restated his view that decisions about troop levels should be based on recommendations from military commanders and noted that Petraeus and Crocker would be delivering reports soon enough.

''Whether or not that's part of the policy I announce to the nation ... why don't we see what they say and then I'll let you know,'' Bush said.

Adm. William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, said Tuesday he saw signs of broad progress in Iraq.

''In the less than six months I've been in this job, I have seen a substantial change and it gives me some significant optimism that this place may just work out the way we had envisioned, or some had envisioned, when the tasks were undertaken,'' Fallon said in remarks to the Commonwealth Club of California, a public affairs forum.

A Pentagon official said Petraeus has not specifically recommended trimming tours by three months. Bush's troop increase will end by default in April or May, when one of the added brigades is slated to leave, unless Bush makes other changes to hold the number steady.

In an interview with ABC News, Petraeus suggested a drawdown next spring would be needed to avoid further strain on the military. Asked if March would be that time, he said, ''Your calculations are about right.''

Republican support could hinge on Petraeus' testimony next week. If he can convince lawmakers that the security gains won in recent months are substantial and point toward a bigger trend, GOP members might be more likely to hold out until next spring. They also might be more easily persuaded if Bush promises some small troop drawdowns by the end of the year, as was suggested to the White House by Sen. John Warner of Virginia, an influential Republican on security matters.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., returning from a weekend trip to Iraq, said Tuesday a small round of troop withdrawals might be the ticket to forcing political progress in Iraq. The position was a new one for the senator, who faces a tough election next year.

''I think the unmistakable message has to be sent to the Shiite leadership that there is no blank check for Iraq,'' Coleman told reporters on a conference call.

Also Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative and auditing arm, reported that Iraq has failed to meet 11 of its 18 political and security goals.

The study was slightly more upbeat than initially planned. After receiving substantial resistance from the White House, the GAO determined that four benchmarks -- instead of two -- had been partially met.

But the GAO stuck with its original contention that only three goals out of the 18 had been fully achieved. The goals met include establishing joint security stations in Baghdad, ensuring minority rights in the Iraqi legislature and creating support committees for the Baghdad security plan.

U.S. Comptroller David Walker said the GAO did not soften its report due to pressure from the administration and reached its conclusions on its own. Walker said Congress should ask itself what it wants to achieve in Iraq and can do so realistically.

''After we answer that, we can reassess what the appropriate goal is of U.S. forces,'' he said in an interview Tuesday.

Democrats said the GAO report showed that Bush's decision to send more troops to Iraq was failing because Baghdad was not making the political progress needed to tamp down sectarian violence.

''No matter what spin we may hear in the coming days, this independent assessment is a failing grade for a policy that simply isn't working,'' said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

The report does not make any substantial policy recommendations, but says future administration reports ''would be more useful to the Congress'' if they provided more detailed information.

Associated Press writers Anne Flaherty and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

    Advisers Tell Bush to Stand Pat on Iraq, NYT, 5.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

Bush Defends Iraq Buildup

September 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:23 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- President Bush vigorously defended his troop buildup in Iraq on Wednesday, and got a boost when Australian Prime Minister John Howard said his country's forces there won't change for the foreseeable future.

''Our commitment to Iraq remains,'' pledged Howard, one of Bush's few remaining staunch war allies. ''This is not the time for any proposals of a scaling down of Australian forces.'' The two men spoke at a news conference.

Bush, his voice rising before he had even been asked a question about the war, spoke forcefully about the 30,000 additional American troops he sent to Iraq this year. His decision raised troop levels in Iraq to about 160,000.

Bush said it was important ''that we hang in there with the Iraqis and help them.''

Australia participated in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and still has about 1,600 troops in and around the country, 550 of them in combat roles. Yet the war remains unpopular here, and Howard faces an aggressive challenge in elections expected to be called within three months.

Bush made a surprise, 8-hour stop in Iraq on the way to Australia and filled Howard in on what he learned. Like he does with U.S. lawmakers and other coalition partners around the world, he urged that decisions about troops be based on conditions on the ground rather than internal politics.

''The security situation is changing,'' Bush said. ''There's more work to be done. But reconciliation is taking place.''

Bush returns to Washington this weekend ahead of an expected showdown with war opponents on Capitol Hill, kicked off next week with testimony from the top U.S. commander and diplomat in Iraq and their release of a progress report on the fighting.

Administration officials said Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are recommending that Bush stand by his current war strategy. The officials also said the president is unlikely to order more than a symbolic cut in troops before the end of the year.

Bush's troop increase will end by default in April or May, when one of the added brigades is slated to leave, unless Bush makes other changes to hold the number steady.

The president would not elaborate on his comments at the start of the trip -- in Iraq and then on the flight to Australia -- in which he hinted at troop withdrawals if security conditions keep improving. He reiterated his belief that troop-level decisions should be based on recommendations from military commanders.

''Whether or not that's part of the policy I announce to the nation ... why don't we see what they say and then I'll let you know,'' Bush said, referring to Petraeus and Crocker.

Bush was spending much of Wednesday with Howard ahead of a 21-nation Asia-Pacific summit later in the week. The two leaders exchanged pleasantries before talks at the Commonwealth Parliament Offices within sight of Sydney Harbor.

Later, Bush and Howard took a 20-minute boat ride across the harbor's choppy waters to Garden Island, where they had lunch with Australian troops under a tent.

''Thanks for making the sacrifice necessary for peace,'' the president told the Australian armed forces. ''And we're going to win and we're going to succeed.''

Bush's visit was expected to be accompanied by a series of protests by groups unhappy with the summit's pro-business agenda, the Iraq war and the Howard government's support for it.

An Australian reporter, beginning a question, mentioned how the extraordinary security for Bush's visit had transformed Sydney. This prompted Bush to break in with an apology.

''Look I don't want to come to a community to say what a pain it is to have the American president. Unfortunately, however, this is what authorities thought was necessary to protect people,'' he said. ''I apologize to the Australian people if I have caused this inconvenience.''

As host of the Pacific Rim forum, Howard has put a declaration on climate change and curbing global warming high on the agenda.

Bush was expected to push for a new climate change deal more to his liking. But he resisted the idea that he is unconcerned about global warming because of his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

''That's urban legend that is preposterous,'' the president said. He and Howard said they agreed climate change must be addressed with the development of efficient energy technologies and the involvement of all major economies, including China.

Polls show Howard, in office for 11 years, trailing opposition leader Kevin Rudd, who has promised to pull combat troops out of Iraq if he wins.

Howard is the last leader among the major original ''coalition of the willing'' partners still serving. Among those who paid a political price for standing with Bush on the war are former Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain, Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Jose Maria Aznar of Spain.

Bush has voiced strong support for Howard, saying during their news conference that ''I wouldn't count the man out.'' Howard has been equally effusive about Bush. Still, Bush meets Rudd on Thursday.

Before their news conference, Bush and Howard signed a defense cooperation treaty intended to reduce roadblocks hampering the exchange of defense goods and services.

Bush and Howard said they were committed to reaching a global trade agreement with other nations, through talks that have been stalled.

The trip also was intended to show Bush is not neglecting the region, and he has a busy schedule of one-on-one meetings with Asia-Pacific leaders on the sidelines of the APEC forum. He'll sit down with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Japanese Prime Minister Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and Indonesian President Bambang Yudhoyono.

But Bush was leaving before APEC's final weekend session to be back in Washington for the Iraq debate and the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Asked about a report that China's military had hacked into the Pentagon's computers, Bush largely steered away from the question, saying ''We understand that we're vulnerable in some systems.'' China has said the allegations are ''groundless.''

Instead, Bush used the opportunity to offer a broad defense of the U.S-China relations ahead of his meeting with Hu, sessions that always feature a long list of difficulties and grievances.

''We're able to talk with them openly and candidly,'' he said.

    Bush Defends Iraq Buildup, NYT, 5.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Bush.html

Editorial

Another Iraq Photo Op

September 5, 2007
The New York Times
 

Iraq is a long way to go for a photo op, but not for President Bush, who is pulling out all the stops to divert public attention from his failed Iraq policies and to keep Congress from demanding that he bring the troops home. As Americans and Iraqis continue to die — and Iraqi politicians refuse to reconcile — Mr. Bush stubbornly refuses to recognize that what both countries need is a responsible exit strategy for the United States, not more photo ops and disingenuous claims of success.

With Congress launching a series of pivotal hearings this week, Mr. Bush’s eight-hour stopover in Iraq on Sunday won him major play in the news media, including photos of smiling American military forces with their commander in chief. But the facts of the visit undermined his claims that his troop escalation is working and deserves more time and more lives to bear fruit.

Mr. Bush’s only destination was an isolated, well-fortified air base in Anbar Province, not Baghdad where his so-called surge was supposed to bring stability and persuade Iraqi politicians that they had more to gain from reconciliation than score-settling. We suppose Mr. Bush could claim one success for his visit: he did manage to get Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to visit the Sunni-dominated province.

Mr. Bush pumped up his headlines by suggesting continued gains in security could allow for a reduction in troops as his critics have been demanding and most Americans desperately want. But this is a cruel tease and a pathetic attempt to repackage old promises. Mr. Bush has been dangling that same as-soon-as-possible drawdown for years. The Pentagon had a plan to do just that in 2004. Today, the troop level stands at 160,000, up 30,000 from the start of this year.

Despite all Mr. Bush’s cheerleading, a new report by nonpartisan Congressional investigators tells a much grimmer and closer to reality tale, concluding that the Iraqi government has failed to meet 11 of 18 military and political benchmarks to which it had agreed.

The report by the Government Accountability Office said that Iraq’s government has failed to eliminate militia control of local security forces, failed to increase the number of army units capable of operating independently, failed to enact long-promised legislation essential for political reconciliation and even raised doubts whether the government is capable of spending $10 billion in reconstruction funds.

And that was the buffed-up version. An earlier draft of the G.A.O. report had the Iraqis failing on 15 of the 18 goals, until the Pentagon protested that the grading was too harsh.

Mr. Bush clearly has no strategy to end this conflict, which has no end in sight. The American people deserve considered judgments not come-ons from their leaders. Congress needs to insist on a prudent formula that will withdraw American forces and limit the hemorrhaging.

    Another Iraq Photo Op, NYT, 5.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/opinion/05wed1.html

News Analysis

Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq

September 5, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.

That shift in emphasis was implicit in Mr. Bush’s decision to bypass Baghdad on his eight-hour trip to Iraq, stopping instead in Anbar Province, once the heart of an anti-American Sunni insurgency. By meeting with tribal leaders who just a year ago were considered the enemy, and who now are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a president who has unveiled four or five strategies for winning over Iraqis — depending on how one counts — may now be on the cusp of yet another.

It is not clear whether the Democrats who control Congress will be in any mood to accept the changing measures. On Tuesday, there were contentious hearings over a Government Accountability Office report that, like last month’s National Intelligence Estimate, painted a bleak picture of Iraq’s future.

It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change.

The White House insists that Mr. Bush’s fresh embrace of Sunni leaders simply augments his consistent support of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But some of Mr. Bush’s critics regard the change as something far more significant, saying they believe it amounts to a grudging acknowledgment by the White House of something these critics themselves have long asserted — that Iraq will never become the kind of cohesive, unified state that could be a democratic beacon for the Middle East.

“They have come around to the inevitable,” said Peter W. Galbraith, a former American diplomat whose 2006 book, “The End of Iraq,” argued that Mr. Bush was trying to rebuild a nation that never really existed, because Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds had never adopted a common Iraqi identity. “He has finally recognized that fact, and is now trying to work with it,” Mr. Galbraith said Tuesday.

Still, like the other strategies Mr. Bush has embraced, this one is fraught with risks.

There is no assurance that the willingness of Sunnis in Anbar to join in common cause with the United States against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia can be replicated elsewhere in Iraq. And as reporters who have been embedded with units working to enlist the support of the Sunni sheiks have written, in vivid accounts from the scene, there are many reasons to question how sustained the Sunnis’ loyalty will be.

The sheiks and their followers have been barred from the Iraqi military, and it is unclear whether Mr. Maliki’s government will let large numbers of Sunnis sign up in the future. That creates the risk that the Sunni groups, once better trained and better armed, will ultimately turn on the central government or its patron, the American military.

Then there is the worry that, even if Mr. Bush is successful in working in promoting “moderate” Sunnis in Anbar and “moderate” Shiites in the south, the result will be exactly the kind of partitioned state — with all its potential for full-scale civil war — that the White House has long insisted must be avoided.

“Those are real risks, and they explain in part why the strategy was not pursued before late in 2006,” said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who, as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House until he left this summer, was one of the architects of the “New Way Forward,” the plan Mr. Bush unveiled in January.

“But the first principle we embraced in the new strategy is that Iraq is a mosaic,” Mr. Feaver said, “and that the risks of approaching it that way were deemed worth taking, given the alternative.”

The White House insists that by flying into the tribal areas, Mr. Bush is not undercutting Mr. Maliki or cutting him loose. Instead, White House officials say that ever since his January speech, Mr. Bush has been pursuing a dual strategy, pressing for “top down” change from Baghdad as well as “bottom up” change from the provinces.

The current focus on the provinces, they say, reflects the fact that the White House overestimated what could be achieved by Mr. Maliki and his government, and underestimated the degree to which the local tribes developed a deep hatred for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.

“It’s not that they love us Americans,” said one senior administration official. “It’s that Al Qaeda was so heavy-handed, taking out Sunnis just because they were smoking a cigarette. In the end, that may be the best break we’ve gotten in a while.”

As he flew from Iraq to Australia on Monday, Mr. Bush cast the Sunni leaders he had met in the deserts of Anbar in the most positive light possible.

“They were profuse in their praise for America,” he told reporters on Air Force One, according to a pool report. He said they “had made the decision that they don’t want to live under Al Qaeda,” adding that “they got sick of them.”

Mr. Bush, of course, has had similar public praise for just about every Iraqi leader he has met, even a few leaders now disparaged by White House officials as unreliable, powerless or two-faced.

Mr. Bush himself has told associates that in the end, the Iraq experiment depends on whether Mr. Maliki and his aides are truly willing to share power, or whether they are determined to keep the Sunnis down.

For now, however, the White House is arguing that the ground-up relationships they are building in places like Anbar are more important than keeping a scorecard of legislation passed or stalled in Baghdad. Whether that argument is enough to keep a few wavering Republicans on board may determine whether Mr. Bush gets a bit more time to try his latest strategy.

    Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq, NYT, 5.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/world/middleeast/05assess.html?hp

Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible

September 4, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD and STEVEN LEE MYERS

AL ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq, Sept. 3 — President Bush made a surprise eight-hour visit to Iraq on Monday, emphasizing security gains, sectarian reconciliation and the possibility of a troop withdrawal, thus embracing and pre-empting this month’s crucial Congressional hearings on his Iraq strategy.

His visit, with his commanders and senior Iraqi officials, had a clear political goal: to try to head off opponents’ pressure for a withdrawal by hailing what he called recent successes in Iraq and by contending that only making Iraq stable would allow American forces to pull back.

Mr. Bush’s visit to Iraq — his third — was spent at this remote desert base in the restive Sunni province of Anbar, where he had summoned Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and others to demonstrate that reconciliation among Iraq’s warring sectarian factions was at least conceivable, if not yet a fact.

After talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said that they “tell me that if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”

Mr. Bush did not say how large a troop withdrawal was possible. Nor did he say whether he envisioned any forces being withdrawn sooner than next spring, when the first of the additional 30,000 troops Mr. Bush sent to Iraq this year are scheduled to come home anyway.

Still, his remarks were the clearest indication yet that a reduction would begin sometime in the months ahead, answering the growing opposition in Washington to an unpopular war while at the same time trying to argue that any change in strategy was not a failure.

“Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground — not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media,” Mr. Bush told a gathering of American troops, who responded with a rousing cheer. “In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home.”

To ensure security, the White House shrouded Mr. Bush’s visit in secrecy, issuing a misleading schedule that said he would leave the White House on Monday and Air Force One would refuel in Hawaii. Instead, the president left the White House on Sunday night, traveled to Andrews Air Force Base without the usual motorcade and after an overnight flight arrived in Iraq on a sweltering summer afternoon when temperatures reached 110 degrees.

Mr. Bush flew with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, an extraordinary gathering of top leaders in a war zone. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Iraq separately and joined them.

The Anbar region is a Sunni stronghold where in recent months there have been significant improvements in security. Administration officials have been touting the gains as evidence that the increase in American troops has proved a success — a word Mr. Bush used eight times in his public remarks on Monday.

Mr. Hadley, briefing reporters, recalled a military intelligence officer’s dire warning a year ago that Al Qaeda controlled the provincial capital, Ramadi, and other towns in the region. “Anbar Province is lost,” he quoted the analyst as saying then. Mr. Hadley was apparently referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign led. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.

On Monday, after meeting with some of the local Sunni leaders who only months ago led the struggle against the American presence in the region, Mr. Bush held up Anbar as a model of the progress that was possible.

“When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like,” he said, night having fallen at the base.

During his visit, Mr. Bush did not leave the base, a heavily fortified home to about 10,000 American troops about 120 miles west of Baghdad. Mr. Hadley said planning for the trip had started five or six weeks ago.

Administration officials rejected the notion that the trip was a publicity stunt. They said Mr. Bush wanted to meet face-to-face with General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker, who are to testify before Congress about progress in Iraq next week, and with Iraqi leaders he has been pressing from afar to take steps toward political reconciliation.

By summoning Mr. Maliki and other top officials to the Sunni heartland, a region the Shiite prime minister has rarely visited, Mr. Bush succeeded in forcing a public display of unity. Meeting with the Iraqi leaders in a buff-colored one-story building near the runway, Mr. Bush effusively greeted President Jalal Talabani, the last of the five officials to enter the small conference room. “Mr. President, Mr. President, the president of the whole Iraq,” Mr. Bush said, kissing Mr. Talabani three times on the cheeks.

The other Iraqi officials there were Vice President Adel Abdul-Mehdi, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region.

“The government they represent, of course, is based in Baghdad,” Mr. Bush said, appearing with Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates in front of two parked Humvees at the base, “but they’re here because they know the success of a free Iraq depends on the national government’s support from the bottom up.”

Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who was visiting neighboring Iran when Mr. Bush and the other top administration officials arrived, was conspicuously absent. Mr. Zebari, a Kurd, said he had been aware that high-level visitors from the United States were coming but that his trip to Iran had been planned long in advance and that the timing was strictly a coincidence.

In Washington, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said the president’s visit and his assertions about progress would do little to persuade skeptics. “Despite this massive P.R. operation, the American people are still demanding a new strategy,” the spokesman, Jim Manley, said in a telephone interview.

Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the reversal in Anbar had less do with American strategy than with local frustration over the extremism of Al Qaeda fighters trying to impose their doctrine. Mr. Cordesman suggested it was more of an anomaly than a model that could be applied elsewhere in Iraq, where sectarian divisions and strife appear to be worsening.

“We are spinning events that don’t really reflect the reality on the ground,” he said.

While some administration officials have recently described the Sunni shift in Anbar as serendipitous, they portrayed the improvements as an outgrowth, at least in part, of the decision to send nearly 4,000 additional marines to the province as part of the White House strategy to increase troops. “This is not serendipity,” Mr. Hadley told reporters.

Distrust remains deep between Sunnis in Anbar and the Maliki government — and it is clear that Mr. Maliki sees effort by the American military to organize armed groups of Sunnis to assist American troops as a policy that amounts to assisting his enemies. Nor is it clear that the same model can be made to work in areas of Iraq where Sunnis and Shiites live together.

Sunnis, for their part, complain that the Maliki government has long failed to deliver services and to share oil revenue with Anbar. Describing the meeting Monday between the tribal sheiks and Iraqi officials from Baghdad, Mr. Gates said, “There was a sense of shared purpose among them and some good-natured jousting over resources.”

It remained unclear whether Mr. Bush planned to announce any specific troop withdrawals when he delivers the congressionally mandated report later this month.

Several administration officials say Mr. Bush and his commanders and military advisers have neared a consensus on beginning a reduction in American forces. Speaking to reporters traveling with him, Mr. Gates said Monday that he had formulated his opinion, though he declined to disclose it.

Asked about Mr. Bush’s comments on possible troop reductions, Mr. Gates added, “Clearly that is one of the central issues that everyone has been examining — what is the security situation, what do we expect the security situation to be in the months ahead?” He went on to say, “What opportunities does that provide in terms of maintaining the security situation while perhaps beginning to bring the troop level down?”

As he did in Washington late last week, Mr. Bush urged lawmakers to withhold judgment on the situation in Iraq until hearing first-hand reports next week from General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker. At the same time, though, he has used the White House’s considerable platform to assert his own views.

“The strategy we put into place earlier this year was designed to help the Iraqis improve their security so that political and economic progress could follow,” Mr. Bush said after meeting with Mr. Maliki and the other Iraqi leaders. “And that is exactly the effect it is having in places like Anbar.”

Maliki Claims Political Progress


BAGHDAD, Sept. 3 — Earlier on Monday, at a news conference here, Mr. Maliki made his own effort to underscore political progress his government had achieved in recent weeks. He said that a long-discussed law allowing former members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein to return to jobs in government had been submitted to Parliament.

“This law has been approved by the political leaders, and by the national political council,” Mr. Maliki said. “It is now before the parliament to discuss it and approve it.”

Agreement on the law, part of a package of requirements pressed by the Bush administration, would be an important milestone.

“We believe that this law represents the minimum accepted level of our ambitions,” said Salman al-Jumaili, a lawmaker from the main Sunni coalition.

An earlier agreement on a law broke down after Shiite leaders in southern Iraq voiced opposition.

James Glanz contributed reporting from Cairo. David S. Cloud reported from Al Asad Air Base and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

    Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible, NYT, 4.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/world/middleeast/04iraq.html?hp

Bush and Top Aides Visit Iraq Days Ahead of Assessment

September 3, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

AL ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq, Sept. 3 — President Bush and his top national security advisers made a surprise joint visit to Iraq today for talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus and top Iraqi officials a week before the American commander is scheduled to deliver a long-awaited assessment of the situation in Iraq.

Administration officials said Mr. Bush decided to travel to Iraq along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to meet face-to-face with General Petraeus and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki because it was his last chance to do so before completing a review of his Iraq strategy.

“He has assembled essentially his war cabinet here, and they are all convening with the Iraqi leadership to discuss the way forward,” the Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said. “This will be the last big gathering of the president before the president makes a decision on the way forward,” he added, noting that Mr. Bush would l leave here for a trip to Australia to meet with leaders of Asian and Pacific nations.

It was the first time Mr. Bush was in Iraq with his top advisers, and his third trip to the country.

Ms. Rice and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made a joint visit to Baghdad last year, shortly after Mr. Maliki took office.

Mr. Bush held talks today with his commanders and then he and the American delegation met with Iraqi officials including Mr. Maliki and President Jalal Talabani. The group sat across a narrow conference table facing one another.

Mr. Talabani had been delayed getting to the meeting, but when he arrived, Mr. Bush greeted him warmly, according to Mr. Morrell.

“Mr. President. Mr. President. The president of the whole country,” Mr. Bush said to Mr. Talabani, before shaking his hand and sharing a traditional Middle Eastern greeting.

Mr. Bush’s one-day stop at this desert air base in Anbar Province underscored the administration’s intention as part of the strategy review to bolster support for the Sunni Arab region, where former insurgents are increasingly cooperating with American forces.

But the dramatic meeting also had a clear political goal — to shift the focus this week away from Congress, where a series of hearings on reports critical of the progress of the administration strategy are planned, and to buttress White House assertions that its efforts in Iraq are beginning to produce results.

Administration officials rejected the idea that the trip was a publicity stunt ahead of the reports.

“There are some people who might try to derive this trip as a photo opportunity,” the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said. “We wholeheartedly disagree.”

“This is an opportunity for the president to meet with his commander on the ground and his ambassador on the ground while they are in fact all on the ground together,” Ms. Perino said. “It’s also a chance for him to meet with Prime Minister Maliki and other national government leaders. And he will be able to look Prime Minister Maliki in the eye and talk with him about the progress that is starting to happen in Iraq, what we hope to see and the challenges that remain.”

After meeting with top military advisers last week in Washington, Mr. Bush approved an acceleration of a new program to intensify assistance directly to Sunni areas of Iraq, officials have said. Mr. Gates’s trip seemed aimed at least in part in explaining the American concept for stepped-up assistance to officials in Iraq’s government, who have raised strong concerns about the idea of assisting their Sunni rivals, before it is announced publicly.

General Petraeus is widely expected to ask that additional troops sent to Iraq earlier this year be kept in place at least until next spring, a course Mr. Bush appears to support. But a senior Defense Department official said the gathering would be “instrumental” in formulating recommendations to Mr. Bush on possible adjustments to the plan. The move to increase aid to Sunni groups is one example of the adjustments that are coming out of the strategy review, and the move reflects frustration that Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government has not taken advantage of improvements in security to move forward on reconciliation with Sunni rivals.

But the administration has seized on the Sunni tribes’ sudden willingness to cooperate in fighting the homegrown extremist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a promising political development that they hope will convince members of Congress, especially Republicans who have been calling for withdrawals from Iraq, that political progress is happening, albeit from the ground up, not from the top down, as the administration strategy initially envisioned.

While backing Sunni groups is an attempt to circumvent Mr. Maliki, Bush administration officials stress that the goal is not to undermine his government but to broaden its support.

Mr. Maliki has been deeply worried that outreach to Sunni tribes, which has included American support for setting up armed neighborhood watch groups in Anbar and other Sunni areas, amounted to backing his enemies.

But the senior Defense Department official said the American aid to the Sunni tribes comes with “a quid pro quo” — the need to recognize the legitimacy of the Mr. Maliki’s government in Baghdad.

The official added that spending in Anbar province by military commanders would be increased.

Mr. Bush and his cabinet members were also scheduled to meet today with Sunni tribe leaders from Anbar, many of whom until recently opposed the American presence. Mr. Maliki and other top Iraqi officials had scheduled a rare trip into the Sunni heartland for the talks with the American delegation but it was unclear if Mr. Maliki intended to hold talks with the Sunnis during his visit.

Mr. Bush and Gates planned to press the two sides to move forward on reconciliation and to discuss such steps as provincial elections that are aimed at drawing the former Sunni insurgents into a closer relationship with Mr. Maliki, the senior Defense Department official traveling with Mr. Gates said.

“One of the great concerns many have is that it not be a temporary marriage of convenience,” he said, referring to the growing American relationship with Sunni tribes. The goal, he added, was to ensure that “Sunnis in Anbar are drawing closer to the central government.”

Aides said that Mr. Bush and Mr. Gates also wanted to speak face-to-face with General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, as he considers recommendations for adjusting strategy in Iraq.

The high-level visit was conducted with extraordinary security precautions. American officials said the measures, which included withholding disclosure of Mr. Gates’s arrival after Mr. Bush was on the ground, were necessary because of the top officials from Iraq and from the United States who were present. Although Mr. Gates arrived on a C-17 transport plane, Mr. Bush traveled on Air Force One, which could be seen sitting on the air base’s baking tarmac.

There had been intense speculation among the White House press corps that the president would make such a trip either on his way to or back from Australia, and the White House went to great lengths to keep the secret. The president slipped out of a side entrance at the White House on Sunday evening. Instead of taking Marine One, the presidential helicopter, he was driven to Andrews Air Force base with just one car accompanying him, as opposed to the two dozen or so vehicles that ordinarily make up a presidential motorcade.

Mr. Bush typically takes a small, rotating, pool of reporters with him aboard Air Force One. The members of the pool assigned to travel aboard the president’s plane to Sydney were summoned to the White House over the weekend for face-to-face meetings with Mr. Bush’s top press aides.

They were told to show up at Andrews Sunday between 6p.m. and 6:30p.m., not this morning, as had been publicly announced. Reporters were permitted to inform their spouses and just one editor, who could tell no one else, and were asked not to pass the information by cellphone. When they boarded Air Force One inside a hangar, not on the tarmac, as is typical, the shades were drawn and Secret Service agents took their pager devices and cellphones until shortly before the plane landed in Iraq.

The president is expected to spend about six hours on the ground in Iraq before leaving for Australia.

Though Mr. Bush and General Petraeus had met as recently as last week by video hookup, the seemingly last-minute nature of the trip and the array of top officials from both governments who attended did not mean there were deep disagreements among President Bush’s top advisers about strategy in Iraq, they said.

“Nothing beats the opportunity to look Dave Petraeus in the eye and Ambassador Crocker and say, ‘What do you think? What do we need to do?’” said a senior Defense official traveling with Mr. Gates.

Mr. Bush has been touting developments in Anbar recently and wanted to meet with Sunni sheiks who have formed alliances with the United States this year. Some of the tribal leaders he is expected to meet with were likely involved in operations against American forces before switching their allegiances.

“You don’t reconcile with your friends; you reconcile with your enemies,” Mr. Morrell said, explaining the decision to met with the tribal leaders.

The meetings were held at Al Asad air base rather than in Baghdad because Mr. Bush wanted to see first hand the progress in Anbar, he said, although the president is not scheduled to leave the base, a sprawling complex far from the province’s population centers.

The air base, the second largest in Iraq, is a parched, sunny, dusty place. Troops here said temperatures today were about average for this time of year—about 115 degrees.

After his tarmac greeting, Mr. Bush, wearing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt and slacks, posed for pictures before being taken by motorcade to a building where a marine gave him a short briefing.

Mr. Bush leaned slightly forward, both hands on a makeshift table, and listened to the marine, with a pointer in hand, as he gave an overview.

The marine said there was progress being made with Iraqi security forces in Anbar, handling more urban duties, allowing the Marines to hunt for insurgents, according to a pool report. But he also said that there is a problem with the short home leaves — five months — which he said strains training, not to mention family life.

“Morale? How is morale?” Mr. Bush was overhead asking.

“Very high, sir,” the marine responded.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington, and Christine Hauser from New York.

    Bush and Top Aides Visit Iraq Days Ahead of Assessment, NYT, 3.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/world/middleeast/03cnd-prexy.html?hp

In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy

September 2, 2007
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — When President Bush is asked what he plans to do when he leaves office, he often replies curtly: “I don’t have that much time to think beyond my presidency” or “I’m going to sprint to the finish.”

But in an interview with a book author in the Oval Office one day last December, he daydreamed about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.

First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75” thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of money.”

Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where he will be running what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute” promoting democracy around the world. But he added, “I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch.”

For now, though, Mr. Bush told the author, Robert Draper, in a later session, “I’m playing for October-November.” That is when he hopes the Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said later, “stay longer.”

But fully aware of his standing in opinion polls, Mr. Bush said his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would perhaps do a better job selling progress to the American people than he could.

In his nearly seven years as president, Mr. Bush has rarely let his guard down with journalists to reveal much of his personal side. But over the course of six roughly hourlong interviews with Mr. Draper, Mr. Bush shared his inner life at the White House. He at times mused philosophically and introspectively, and at others spoke forcefully about his confidence in his own decisions.

Mr. Draper agreed to share parts of his transcripts from those interviews, and the book itself, with The New York Times under the agreement that they would not be published until shortly before the book, “Dead Certain” (Free Press), is officially released on Tuesday.

The transcripts and the book show Mr. Bush as being keenly interested in what history will say about his term despite his frequent comments to the contrary; as being in a reflective mode as his time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue dwindles; and, ultimately, as being at once sorrowful and optimistic — but virtually alone as commander in chief, and aware of it.

Aides said Mr. Bush agreed to speak so freely with Mr. Draper only after years of lobbying, in which Mr. Draper said he finally convinced Mr. Bush and his aides that he was writing about him as “a consequential president” for history, not for the latest news cycle. And aides said they saw the book as the first effort to write about Mr. Bush in the context of nearly his entire presidency.

The lobbying culminated at a meeting at the White House last August in which Mr. Bush grilled Mr. Draper on why he should cooperate with him of all the authors likely to come knocking. Mr. Draper replied that his book could provide “the raw material” for others after him, a point Mr. Bush apparently came to embrace.

Mr. Draper, a Texan like Mr. Bush and a former writer for Texas Monthly, spent hours interviewing Mr. Bush and his close circle of aides in 1998, when he wrote an early, defining article on Mr. Bush’s budding presidential candidacy for GQ magazine.

Mr. Draper’s family also has a history with Mr. Bush’s. Mr. Bush’s father in 1982 was an honorary pallbearer at the funeral of Mr. Draper’s grandfather, Leon Jaworski, a special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal.

As Mr. Draper described it, Mr. Bush began the interview process over lunch last Dec. 12, in a week when he suddenly had free time because his highly anticipated announcement of a new Iraq strategy had been postponed.

Sitting in an anteroom of the Oval Office, he eschewed the more formal White House menu for comfort food — a low-fat hotdog and ice cream — and bitingly told an aide who peeked in on the session that his time with Mr. Draper was “worthless anyway.”

But as Mr. Draper described it, and as the transcripts show, Mr. Bush warmed up considerably over the intervening interviews, chewing on an unlit cigar, jubilantly swatting at flies between making solemn points, propping his feet up on a table or stopping him at points to say emphatically, “I want you to get this” or “I want this damn book to be right.”

Mr. Bush went on to share private thoughts that appeared to reflect a level of sorrow and presidential isolation that he strongly implied he took pains to hide, a state of being that he seemed to view as coming with the presidency and with which he professed to be at peace.

Telling Mr. Draper he likes to keep things “relatively light-hearted” around the White House, he added in May, “I can’t let my own worries — I try not to wear my worries on my sleeve; I don’t want to burden them with that.”

“Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Draper, by way of saying he sought to avoid it. “This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.”

In the same interview, Mr. Bush seemed to indicate that he had his down moments at home, saying of his wife, Laura, “Back to the self-pity point — she reminds me that I decided to do this.”

And in apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq, he continued, “This group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one person that can decide, and that’s the president.”

Mr. Draper said Mr. Bush took issue with him for unearthing details of a meeting in April 2006 at which he took a show-of-hands vote on the future of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was among his closest advisers. Mr. Bush told Mr. Draper he had no recollection of it, but he said he disagreed with the implication that he regularly governed by staff vote. (According to Mr. Draper’s book, the vote was 7 to 4 for Mr. Rumsfeld’s ouster, with Mr. Bush being one of the no votes. Mr. Rumsfeld stayed on months longer.)

In response to Mr. Draper’s observance that Mr. Bush had nobody’s “shoulder to cry on,” the president said: “Of course I do, I’ve got God’s shoulder to cry on, and I cry a lot.” In what Mr. Draper interpreted as a reference to war casualties, Mr. Bush added, “I’ll bet I’ve shed more tears than you can count as president.”

Yet Mr. Bush said his certainty that Iraq would turn around for the better was not for show. “You can’t fake it,” he told Mr. Draper in December.

Mr. Bush conveyed a level of sanguinity with his unpopularity. Mr. Draper recalled that in their last meeting, in May, Mr. Bush pointed outside to his dog, Barney, and said, “That guy who said if you want a friend in Washington get a dog, knew what he was talking about.”

He otherwise addressed his unpopularity as a tactical issue. For instance, in May he said that this fall it would be up to General Petraeus to convince the public that the Iraq strategy is working.

“I’ve been here too long,” Mr. Bush said, according to Mr. Draper. “Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and then it doesn’t make it on the news.”

But he said he saw his unpopularity as a natural result of his decision to pursue a strategy in which he believed. “I made a decision to lead,” he said, “One, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance, and that may be true. But the fundamental question is, is the world better off as a result of your leadership?”

Mr. Bush has often said that will be for historians decide, but he said during his sessions with Mr. Draper that they would have to consult administration documents to get to the bottom of some important questions.

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

Mr. Bush said he believed that Mr. Hussein did not take his threats of war seriously, suggesting that the United Nations emboldened him by failing to follow up on an initial resolution demanding that Iraq disarm. He had sought a second measure containing an ultimatum that failure to comply would result in war.

“One interesting question historians are going to have to answer is: Would Saddam have behaved differently if he hadn’t gotten mixed signals between the first resolution and the failure of the second resolution?” Mr. Bush said. “I can’t answer that question. I was hopeful that diplomacy would work.”

It did not, but soon enough, somebody else will make the decisions on Iraq. And then, Mr. Bush said, he would still be pursuing his “freedom agenda” at his institute, modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where young democratic leaders from around the world would study.

“Sixty-two is really young,” Mr. Bush said, “and yet I’ll be through with my presidency.”

    In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy, NYT, 2.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/washington/02book.html?hp

Bush Plans a Limited Intervention on Mortgages

September 1, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — Democrats praised President Bush’s proposals to help low-income homeowners on Friday but indicated they would continue to press measures opposed by the administration to expand the federal role in housing, making it likely that the issue will set off partisan battles this year and next.

Mr. Bush, in formally announcing administration proposals that had been outlined the day before for a handful of news organizations, said the measures were intended to help families keep their homes through a mixture of actions, legislation and persuasion. But he said the administration would not bail out “speculators” in the housing industry.

“The government has got a role to play, but it is limited,” Mr. Bush said. “A federal bailout of lenders would only encourage a recurrence of the problem. It’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators, or those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could never afford.”

Administration officials said that Mr. Bush’s statement reflected the president’s determination to oppose Democratic proposals for the federal government to help set up trust funds or use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing companies, to rescue families in danger of losing their homes.

The administration initiatives formally announced Friday included steps to make it easier for low-income homeowners to get federal mortgage insurance and plans for federal “jawboning” of private mortgage lenders to persuade them not to foreclose on homeowners without giving the borrowers a chance to renegotiate payments.

Several of the administration’s proposals were endorsements of existing Democratic measures, including a proposal to reduce taxes for homeowners whose debt is forgiven. Ordinarily, the amount of a loan that is forgiven is taxed as income. A chorus of prominent Democrats who have called for more federal action welcomed Mr. Bush’s initiative, some of them saying that it represented the first sign that the administration was willing to engage in a bipartisan approach on a major budget or economic issue.

Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said Mr. Bush and Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, had adopted a more pragmatic approach on housing. In a speech in Wyoming on Friday, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed would take a more aggressive approach on the regulation of mortgages to discourage predatory practices.

“I think it’s a major step by them,” Mr. Frank said. “They are basically acknowledging that they have been insufficiently aware of the need for more of a regulatory and institutional response to this situation.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, went further, saying that Mr. Bush sounded a little bit like a Democrat. “The best point of all here is that the president has gotten out of his ideological straitjacket,” the senator said.

But Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said Mr. Bush still needed to “get serious about this problem” and go further.

Democrats say the plight of the estimated two million homeowners who face higher costs because payments on their adjustable-rate mortgages are expected to rise has become a potent political issue. They intend to keep it an issue as the 2008 election heats up, just as they have continued to assail the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, even two years after the storm.

But the administration says that it is one thing to help people caught between falling home prices and rising interest rates, and another to bail out speculators who find themselves unable to make a quick profit.

An administration official who asked not to be identified said there would be no single solution for the problems facing lenders and borrowers.

This official estimated that of the two million mortgage holders facing new interest rates, 500,000 are at risk of foreclosure because of missed payments.

The administration’s announcement Friday will affect only 80,000 homeowners through actions that it can take through the Federal Housing Administration, without Congressional participation. How many would be helped by future legislation was not clear to administration officials or others.

    Bush Plans a Limited Intervention on Mortgages, NYT, 1.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/business/01home.html

Bush Fights Back on Iraq Reports

September 1, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — President Bush, appearing confident about sustaining support for his Iraq strategy, met at the Pentagon on Friday with the uniformed leaders of the nation’s armed services and then pointedly accused the war’s opponents of politicizing the debate over what to do next.

“The stakes in Iraq are too high and the consequences too grave for our security here at home to allow politics to harm the mission of our men and women in uniform,” Mr. Bush said in a statement after his meeting with the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines in a briefing room known as the Tank.

The meeting, which lasted an hour and a half, was among the president’s last Iraq strategy sessions before he leaves for Australia to meet with leaders of Asian and Pacific nations. It came on the eve of a string of reports and hearings that, starting next week, could determine the course of the remaining 16 months of Mr. Bush’s presidency.

Beginning on Tuesday, when Congress returns from its August recess, lawmakers are prepared to debate what to do in Iraq in daily hearings that will culminate on Sept. 10 and Sept. 11 with appearances by the ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, and the military commander there, Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Congress has mandated a progress report from the White House before Sept. 15, and Mr. Bush chided lawmakers for calling for a change in policy before hearing the views of the two men who are, as administration officials repeatedly point out, “on the ground in Iraq.”

“Congress asked for this assessment,” Mr. Bush said in the statement, “and members of Congress should withhold judgment until they have heard it.”

That has not stopped Mr. Bush from making an impassioned defense of the increase in American troops that he ordered in January, making the judgment that the new strategy was working and deserved a chance to continue doing so. In recent speeches, Mr. Bush has highlighted what he and others have called an improvement in security in Iraq and signs of political compromise that have so far been absent among Iraq’s political leaders.

Other reports — including a National Intelligence Estimate released last week, an early draft of a Government Accountability Office study, and a grim assessment of the Iraqi national police by a commission established by Congress — have tempered some of Mr. Bush’s claims, setting the stage for a furious debate with lawmakers in September.

“What we’re hearing is a pretty consistent message of failure on the political front in Iraq,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, who visited Iraq in August.

In a telephone interview from Iowa on Friday, where he was campaigning for Senator Barack Obama, Mr. Durbin said the White House had distorted remarks made upon his return in which he noted an improvement in security following the increase in American troops to more than 160,000.

On Friday, Mr. Durbin expressed hope that more Republicans would join in forcing the president to begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq.

The cacophony of reports has done little to unify lawmakers, giving each side of the debate evidence to support their arguments. “All these reports will almost cancel each other out,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former Reagan administration defense official, who published a recommendation for a withdrawal for the Center for American Progress.

An administration official said Mr. Bush would present his Congressionally mandated report only after Mr. Crocker and General Petraeus appeared on Capitol Hill. All indications, however, suggest that the president has settled on maintaining a sizable commitment of American forces in Iraq well into next year, with only a gradual reduction of troops from the current levels.

At the Pentagon, officials said Mr. Bush’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Gen. George W. Casey Jr. of the Army, Adm. Michael G. Mullen of the Navy, Gen. T. Michael Moseley of the Air Force, and Gen. James T. Conway of the Marine Corps — was part of a process to air a variety of views, including those favoring a faster or deeper reduction than the commanders in the field think is appropriate.

Vice President Dick Cheney joined the meeting on Friday, as did Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman. General Pace and Mr. Gates returned to the White House with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for further talks, officials said, declining to discuss the substance of the meetings.

All the chiefs have expressed concerns about the strains that repeated and extended deployments have placed on the military, though they have not publicly made clear whether they would recommend a significant reduction as a result.

A senior Pentagon official said after the meeting, “Secretary Gates wanted the joint chiefs to have an opportunity to present the president with their assessments of the surge and the impact it is having on our forces, and that’s what happened today.”

General Casey and General Pace are said by several Defense Department officials to be considering recommending steep reductions in troops by the end of 2008, perhaps to half of the 20 combat brigades now in Iraq.

“Our force is stretched and out of balance,” General Casey said Thursday at a ceremony. “The tempo of our deployments are not sustainable, our equipment usage is five times the normal rate and continuously operating in harsh environments.”

Pentagon officials have said publicly that the goal of Mr. Bush’s meetings on Iraq strategy was not necessarily to produce a consensus among Mr. Bush’s military advisers, an unusual depiction of a process in which disagreements are normally shielded from public view.

Rather, the officials said, the goal was to ensure that Mr. Bush was hearing a diversity of views. It may become difficult, however, for the White House to avoid acknowledging that there are growing differences between officers in Washington and in Iraq.

The administration has made an aggressive effort to hold on to Republicans who returned to their constituencies this month at a time of rising antiwar sentiment. The White House scheduled conference calls for lawmakers with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Aug. 14 and with Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman this past Tuesday.

Democrats balked at participating in the briefing with Mr. Edelman, who in July caused a furor when he rebuffed a request from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to see Pentagon contingency plans for withdrawing from Iraq by accusing her of assisting enemy propaganda.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said the Democrats had asked for Mr. Gates to brief them instead, but were refused.

“Why in the world would any United States senator want to get a briefing from Eric Edelman?” Mr. Manley said in an indication of the partisan tensions the question of Iraq has fueled.

General Petraeus told an Australian newspaper in an interview published Friday that he envisioned a gradual reduction in the roughly 30,000 additional American troops sent to Iraq this year.

He gave no timetable for that reduction, but most Army officials believe those troops will have to begin leaving by the spring unless the White House extends tours longer than 15 months.

The general’s remarks suggested that he would not provide the news that many Democrats in Congress would like to hear. “Obviously we have some months with the surge forces,” General Petraeus told The Sydney Morning Herald.

    Bush Fights Back on Iraq Reports, NYT, 1.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/washington/01policy.html?hp

Bush Gets Mounting Reports of Iraq Woes

August 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:26 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush huddled with top military leaders about the Iraq war Friday, and Pentagon officials defended efforts to rid the Iraqi national police of sectarian bias and corruption, even as an independent review found the force too tainted to continue.

In an hour and a half meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a secure Pentagon room dubbed ''the Tank,'' Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney heard from leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, who are worried about strains that are building on the forces -- and on troops' families -- as a result of lengthy and repeated tours in Iraq.

In a fresh sign of U.S. frustration with the Iraqi government in Baghdad, a senior U.S. commander said in an Associated Press interview that he is aggravated by the slow pace of action by Iraq's central government to ensure that its security forces are properly led, supplied and equipped on the battlefield.

''I have not seen any improvement really in the year I've been here in that regard,'' said Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq. He said the Iraqi army is doing ''pretty well'' in fighting the insurgency alongside U.S. troops, but they are not getting sufficient support from Baghdad.

''Progress is slower than it should be inside the (Iraqi) army in particular'' with regard to proper support and direction from national leaders in Baghdad, Mixon said by telephone, adding that the problem lies in a combination of bureaucratic obstacles and sectarian-based decisions about army leadership appointments.

Two independent assessments of the situation in Iraq already have been previewed this week -- the latest finding that Iraq's national police are so corrupt and influenced by sectarianism that the corps should be scrapped and replaced with a smaller force.

An independent commission established by Congress to study Iraq's security forces will recommend starting over and reshaping the troubled 25,000-member police organization with a more elite force, a defense official said Friday. He said the report was more positive about progress being made by the Iraqi army.

The report from a commission headed by the former commander of U.S. troops in Europe, retired Gen. James Jones, is to be presented to Congress next week but Gates and other officials were briefed about it this week, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not been publicly released.

Asked the Pentagon's view on this, press secretary Geoff Morrell said there already is a program under way to fix the problem of sectarian influence in the national police. He said he had not seen the Jones report.

''It should come as no surprise to anyone that there have been problems with sectarianism within the Iraqi national police force, and we have been working on it along with the Iraqi government for some time to fix that problem,'' Morrell said.

''We believe we now have a program in place which is showing progress, and that is by what we like to call `reblooming' the Iraqi national police force. We are revetting, retraining and then reintroducing forces into the Iraqi national police force,'' he added. ''The intent of the program is to rid the Iraqi national police force of their sectarian biases that have been present from the get-go.''

At least five of the nine police brigades have been taken off duty and sent to be retrained and reintegrated into the force, said Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman. He said the Iraqi government also recently approved a plan to hire some 2,000 internal affairs personnel to investigate problems in the force.

In his remarks to the AP, Mixon said he agrees the Iraqi national police should undergo retraining, adding that their biggest problem is a lack of experienced leadership. Sectarianism had been a problem in one of the two main national police units in his area, but that has since been corrected, he said.

''Certainly some retraining would be beneficial,'' Mixon said, but he did not endorse the idea of scrapping the current force and starting over. ''There is no question that the government of Iraq needs some type of police force that is mobile, that can move into certain areas that require police strengthening for selected periods of time. If that's the way they reshape them I think that would be a good idea.''

The Iraqi National Police, a paramilitary organization run by the Interior Ministry, has long been feared and distrusted by the Iraqi people and is considered the weak link in the Iraqi security system. Many of its early senior officers were veterans of the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia formed in Iran from among Shiite refugees who had fled Saddam Hussein's rule.

The national police are separate from the far more numerous local police.

The U.S. has been working to weed out corrupt members, taking whole police units out of service and retraining them, as well as removing a number of commanders.

The report on Iraqi forces follows circulation earlier this week of a draft report by the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress that found the Iraqi government has failed to meet political and security goals.

A third report -- by the nation's intelligence agencies last week -- found there has been some progress, but that violence remains high, the Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months and its security forces have not improved enough to operate without outside help.

Training and equipping an Iraqi Army, police force and border corps is key to handing over responsibility for Iraq's security and bringing U.S. troops home. Commanders have said they hoped to have a 390,000 security forces trained by the end of this year, but that they are not yet capable enough in some areas for the U.S. to reduce its troop levels.

    Bush Gets Mounting Reports of Iraq Woes, NYT, 31.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html?hp

Bush Offers Relief for Some on Home Loans

August 31, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — President Bush, in his first response to families hit by the subprime mortgage crisis, announced several steps today to help Americans who have credit problems meet the rising cost of their housing loans.

In remarks this morning at the White House, Mr. Bush said he would work to “modernize and improve” the Federal Housing Administration “by lowering down payment requirements, by increasing loan limits, and providing more flexibility in pricing.”

Administration officials said in advance of Mr. Bush’s appearance that the goal would be to change its federal mortgage insurance program in a way that would let an additional 80,000 homeowners with spotty credit records sign up, beyond the 160,000 likely to use it this year and next.

“It’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators or those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could never afford,” Mr. Bush said. “Yet there are many American homeowners who can get through this difficult time with a little flexibility from their lenders or little help from their government.”

The administration is offering his plan, which will include what one official called jawboning of lenders to persuade them not to foreclose on some borrowers, at a time of growing attacks on Mr. Bush from Democrats who say he has remained on the sidelines amid increasing anxiety over whether millions of Americans could end up losing their homes. Other elements of the plan would need legislative action, requiring Mr. Bush to win over the Democratic leadership in Congress.

He called for Congress to act quickly.

“The recent disturbances in the subprime mortgage industry are modest — they’re modest in relation to the size of our economy,” Mr. Bush said this morning. “But if your family is — if your family’s one of those having trouble making the monthly payments, this problem doesn’t seem modest at all.”

The main objective of the package, one senior official said, is not to affect the stock markets but to help low-income homeowners, many of them concentrated in certain neighborhoods in several distressed areas of the country, such as Ohio and Michigan.

“The primary focus is to help individuals who have an opportunity to stay in their homes to stay in their homes,” this official said. “The subprime mortgage situation is having a crushing effect on a lot of communities right now.”

Administration officials, who asked not to be identified, briefed a handful of news organizations on the proposals on Thursday evening. Despite the assertion that affecting the markets is not the goal, one administration official said concern about Wall Street’s reaction did affect the timing of the briefing. He said there was a fear that if the White House announced in the morning that Mr. Bush would be making an announcement on housing, there could be confusion as buyers and sellers of mortgage securities guessed what the announcement would be.

But secondarily, this official said, helping homeowners keep their homes and refinance or renegotiate the terms of the mortgages could have a stabilizing effect on the financial institutions that have these mortgages in their portfolios, and help them write down the value of the mortgages or sell them off at a loss.

“You can’t solve the problems in the financial markets unless you can make some progress on the retail end of it,” said this official. “This is also a step to get banks to start loaning again.”

Another factor in the decision to disclose details ahead of time was that Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was planning to give a speech on housing this morning at the Fed’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and that speculation about his comments would also unsettle the markets.

As they put together the proposals, top administration officials consulted with financial institutions, some members of Congress, housing counseling groups, academic specialists, and also with Mr. Bernanke.

Several other steps the administration plans to announce involve seeking legislative changes. Mr. Bush, for example, is expected to endorse proposals backed by Democrats in Congress that would raise the ceiling on the amount of a mortgage that can be refinanced with federal insurance.

He is also expected to support legislation that would provide tax breaks to homeowners whose mortgage debt is forgiven, in whole or in part, by lenders. The federal government currently collects taxes on the amount of a loan that is forgiven.

Democratic presidential candidates and Congressional leaders have hammered the administration in recent weeks, charging Mr. Bush with indifference to the plight of an estimated two million homeowners whose mortgage costs are expected to go up in the next year and a half.

These two million mortgages, all held by homeowners with credit problems and with homes that are declining in value, are valued at $500 billion to $600 billion, administration officials said. The total value of American mortgages is about $10 trillion.

Many of these homeowners are lower-income families caught in the squeeze of variable-rate mortgages whose cost is expected to soar in coming weeks and months. With their home values declining, many are considered likely to default, possibly adding to the global turmoil in the financial markets. The administration officials who briefed reporters sought to underscore Mr. Bush’s willingness to work with Democrats, an unusual display of bipartisanship from an administration that has tangled with Democrats on many economic and budget issues.

The administration’s legislative proposals are likely to be similar to bills that Congressional Democrats have proposed, but there is still room for considerable argument over details. In general, the administration wants home buyers to pay for any measure that might help them, and Democrats want measures that provide extra help to people with low or moderate incomes.

But administration officials said they would continue to oppose one measure that Democrats strongly endorse: an increase in the total dollar value of mortgages that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing-finance companies, can hold in their investment portfolios.

Until now, Mr. Bush and his top economic advisers, particularly Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., have focused on the broad prospects of the American and global economies and the disarray in financial markets.

Two weeks ago, when asked about the problems of mortgage holders, Mr. Bush said that many Americans struggling with their mortgages had failed to read the fine print on the loans.

But some in the administration and some Republicans are also concerned that there has not been enough talk from Mr. Bush about lower-income homeowners. These Republicans have said the administration’s response so far is reminiscent of its initial delays in relief after Hurricane Katrina two years ago.

The plans to be outlined by Mr. Bush are to be in the form of administrative actions taken unilaterally and proposals for enactment by Congress, many of them already in various bills sponsored by leading Democrats.

Among the Democrats with such proposals are Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee; Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee; and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee.

One senior official said, however, that the administration would encourage Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help low-income holders of subprime mortgages refinance or renegotiate the loans, rather than lifting the companies’ investment limits.

Mr. Frank has said that the administration is ideologically opposed to letting the two mortgage agencies play a role in assisting homeowners in the current crisis, but the administration official said that was a misconception.

Mr. Bush also plans to enlist Mr. Paulson and Alphonso R. Jackson, the secretary of housing and urban development, to consider regulating home-lending practices in the future to crack down on predatory practices. In addition, they are to study the role of credit-rating agencies, some of which have been accused of giving unrealistically positive ratings to packages of mortgages, which were then acquired by hedge funds and other institutions.

One official said the administration’s proposals would not include a bailout of institutions that bought mortgages that have plummeted in value.

“We are not using the b-word,” he said, referring to the talk of bailing out lenders.

One economist said the efforts seem well intentioned. The F.H.A. can help provide another option to homeowners who need to refinance, and the government should do what it can to encourage mortgage companies to modify loans, rather than foreclosing on them.

The administration could also help homeowners in higher-priced markets by temporarily raising the $417,000 limit on loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can buy from mortgage companies, said the economist, Thomas Davidoff, an assistant professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

But he noted all the efforts would likely only have a limited impact, given the number of loans resetting to higher interest rates in the coming months.

“This is helpful. But you had millions of people taking loans they should not have been taking, and investors lending money at too low interest rates,” Mr. Davidoff said. “Nothing is going to make those bad decisions go away.”

Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting from San Francisco.

    Bush Offers Relief for Some on Home Loans, NYT, 31.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/business/31home.html?hp

White House Is Gaining Confidence It Can Win Fight in Congress Over Iraq Policy

August 30, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — The White House is growing more confident that it can beat back efforts by Congressional Democrats to shift course in Iraq, a significant turnabout from two months ago, when a string of Republican defections had administration officials worried that President Bush’s troop buildup was in serious danger on Capitol Hill.

Current and former administration officials say they realize that the September battle over the troop buildup will be difficult. But they also say the president’s hand is stronger now than it was in early July, when Republican senators like Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana publicly called for a change of course.

“There is a tonal shift, and that is important, but there is always the chance that it could be ephemeral, in the same way that the panic of early July proved ephemeral,” said Peter D. Feaver, who helped draft the buildup strategy as an official with the National Security Council but recently returned to his post as a political science professor at Duke University. “I don’t detect any triumphalism in the White House.”

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid upstaging the president, said there was “a sense the dynamic has changed.” But the official was also cautious, adding: “I don’t want to portray overconfidence. This is a very important debate, and September is going to be a very important month.”

With Congress in recess in August, no reliable indication of lawmakers’ sentiments will emerge until the House and Senate return next week.

Democratic leaders say they intend to renew their efforts to force Mr. Bush to withdraw troops as soon as possible, and one prominent Republican — Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee — rattled the White House last week when he called for Mr. Bush to begin bringing a small number of troops home by Christmas.

But other Republicans have not embraced Mr. Warner’s plan. At the same time, some Democrats who had been critical of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war have acknowledged that the heightened American troop levels in Iraq do appear to have produced some signs of military progress.

At least one nonpartisan analyst, Charlie Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, an independent newsletter, says the pendulum appears to be swinging — even though the war remains hugely unpopular and Republican lawmakers are under great pressure at home to end it.

“It’s a momentum situation,” he said. “The momentum back in June and early July was really running hard against the war, and it was starting to snowball. But that snowballing stopped, and it has probably kind of reversed itself somewhat.”

Democrats and White House officials say the snowballing could resume in September, with lawmakers back in Washington and the Iraq debate more fully engaged, through hearings and testimony from the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and the top diplomat, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. While lawmakers have been home for summer recess, Mr. Bush has been able to use his presidential platform, delivering speeches to promote what he calls the success of his troop buildup.

But that is about to change, said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

“We’ve got a series of hearings and reports due that will provide a much-needed dose of reality to the spin coming out of the White House,” he said. “Republicans may be breathing a sigh of relief, but the fact is, they’re headed with the president over a cliff.”

The official line from the White House is that Mr. Bush will decide about the future of the troop buildup after hearing from General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker. But people familiar with the thinking of the administration say Mr. Bush is all but certain to press for the strategy that relies on heightened troop levels in Iraq to continue through spring, as initially planned.

To maintain the war effort, the White House will need to win Congressional approval for new financing, in the form of a defense budget for the coming year and a supplemental budget for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. White House officials said Wednesday that the size of the spending request had not been determined.

The supplemental spending bill will provide a vehicle for a Congressional battle over withdrawing troops. But Mr. Cook, the political analyst, predicted that if Democrats could not muster the votes to force a pullout earlier this year, they are unlikely to be able to do so in September.

Allies of the White House are encouraged, said Peter Wehner, a former policy analyst for Mr. Bush who works at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a research organization.

“I think the situation now is that people are confident the strategy is going to go forward until the spring,” he said Wednesday in an interview.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from New Orleans.

    White House Is Gaining Confidence It Can Win Fight in Congress Over Iraq Policy, NYT, 30.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/washington/30policy.html

New Orleans Pauses to Remember Victims of Katrina

August 29, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and ANAHAD O’CONNOR

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 — A day of mourning and remembrance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina began today with a solemn bell ringing at a cemetery at precisely 9:38 a.m., the moment when a key levee breached two years ago and devastated this Gulf Coast town.

All over the city, ceremonies and marches commemorating the hurricane were attended by thousands of mourners, many of whom lost their relatives, their homes, their neighborhoods and much more. At one ceremony, Mayor Ray Nagin broke down briefly, urging people not to forget and saying that 9:38 a.m. on Aug. 25, 2005, was “the moment when the reality of what we were dealing with in this city started to set in. It shocked us, and it shocked the world.”

Much of New Orleans was shut down as people all over the city paused to reflect. Hundreds of people braved the intense heat for a slow march along St. Claude Avenue, with angry demonstrators shouting slogans along the way in protest of President Bush, who was in town today to give a speech at the Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School for Math and Science. Nearby, a ceremony was held at the industrial canal along the edge of the Lower Ninth Ward — the predominantly black, low-income area that was all but wiped out by the storm and which still remains in ruins today.

Prayers were said on a bridge over the canal. In the background, people could be seen gutting their houses and lingering on gritty streets.

At the charter school for math and science, President Bush sought to convince those residents suffering the most that they had not been forgotten.

“Better days are ahead,” Mr. Bush said, adding, “We’re still paying attention. We understand.”

The president and his wife, Laura, were spending the anniversary in New Orleans and Bay St. Louis, Miss., determined to celebrate those he said have “dedicated their lives to the renewal” of the region.

But with New Orleans and the Gulf Coast fighting for aid and struggling to rebound, the president has faced sharp criticism.

Today, the front page of The Times-Picayune carried a scathing editorial that accused the Bush administration of providing a disproportionate amount of federal aid to neighboring Mississippi — which was not hit nearly as hard as Louisiana — because of its Republican allegiance.

“Treat us fairly, Mr. President,” the editorial said. “We ought to get no less help from our government than any other victims of this disaster.”

Adam Nossiter reported from New Orleans, and Anahad O’Connor from New York.

    New Orleans Pauses to Remember Victims of Katrina, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/us/29cnd-katrina.html

2 Years After Katrina, Bush Sees Hope in New Orleans

August 29, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — President Bush toured New Orleans today, delivering a message of hope to a city devastated by wind and flood two years ago and still divided over the speed and effectiveness of federal help.

Mr. Bush led a moment of silence at a school, asking for “the Almighty’s blessings on those who suffered,” then envisioned “a more blessed day” just ahead. “And there’s no better place to do so than in a place of hope, and that’s a school,” he said.

“Hurricane Katrina broke through the levees,” the president said. “It broke a lot of hearts. It destroyed buildings. But it didn’t affect the spirit of a lot of citizens in this community.”

But while Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco accompanied Mr. Bush on his visit to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology, and was praised by the president for being a problem-solver and “an educational reformer,” there were plenty of reminders of the rifts between the Bush administration and state and local officials on whether enough was being done for New Orleans.

Across town, for instance, Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered a bell-ringing to mark the anniversary of the moment when the levees broke, The Associated Press reported. Two years ago, both the governor and the mayor bitterly criticized the slowness of the federal response, whose shortcomings were symbolized, especially for the administration’s critics, by Michael Brown, then the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who sometimes seemed bewildered by the catastrophe.

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans ran a front-page editorial accusing the Bush administration of steering more money to Mississippi than to Louisiana, where the damage was greater, and questioned whether Louisiana was being short-changed because Democrats are more powerful there than in Mississippi. (Mr. Bush did carry Louisiana in 2004, as he had done in 2000.)

The Ninth Ward charter school visited by Mr. Bush is itself a symbol of recovery. A fourth-grade teacher, Joseph Recasner, recalled that the school was inundated by up to 18 feet of water two years ago, and that people who had taken refuge there were rescued from the second-story windows. Today, the school seems mint-new, with bright hallways with names like Dream Avenue.

But to get to the school, the president’s motorcade crossed a canal with new white cement wall that had “Hindsight” painted in large red letters. Along the route, considerable damage was still visible, with boarded-up houses and lots strewn with debris.

Ahead of Mr. Bush’s trip to the Gulf Coast, the White House issued a “fact sheet” detailing $114 billion in relief to the region, not counting $13 billion in tax relief. The president’s Gulf Coast rebuilding chief, Don Powell, told reporters that $96 billion of that aid has already been made available to local governments, The A.P. reported.

Alluding to complaints that not enough money has reached the people who need it quickly enough, Mr. Powell implied that local officials were at least partly to blame, The A.P. said.

On Tuesday night, President Bush and his wife, Laura, dined with community leaders at Dooky Chase, a famed restaurant that has been closed since the hurricane struck but is scheduled to reopen soon.

The reopening of Dooky Chase will doubtless be heralded as another sign of the Crescent City’s rebirth. But long before the flood, New Orleans was at least two cities — the jazz-filled, pleasure-celebrating, European-style community cherished by tourists, and the everyday New Orleans, marked by deep pockets of poverty, a rundown public school system and a police force with a checkered history. Those problems were not washed away by the floods.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from New Orleans.

    2 Years After Katrina, Bush Sees Hope in New Orleans, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/us/29cnd-bush.html?hp

Bush to Tour New Orleans

August 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:26 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- President Bush is marking Hurricane Katrina's devastating blow by celebrating those he says have ''dedicated their lives to the renewal of New Orleans.'' With the region far from its former self after two years, some here think it's the president's dedication that should be in the spotlight.

Bush and his wife, Laura, are to spend Wednesday's anniversary remembering the storm in New Orleans and Bay St. Louis, Miss.

It is the president's 15th visit to the Gulf Coast since the massive hurricane obliterated coastal Mississippi, inundated most of the Big Easy with floodwaters and killed 1,600 people in Louisiana and Mississippi when it roared onto land the morning of Aug. 29, 2005 -- but only his second stop in these parts since last year's anniversary.

The performance by the president and the federal government in the immediate aftermath of the storm -- and some residents' lingering sense of abandonment since -- severely dented Bush's image as a take-charge leader.

As on other visits, the president and his team arrived here armed with facts and figures to show how much the Bush administration has done to fulfill the promises the president made two-and-a-half weeks after the hurricane.

''We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives,'' Bush said then from historic Jackson Square in New Orleans' French Quarter. ''This great city will rise again.''

In fact, there is some good news here. The city's population is rebounding, and a few neighborhoods thrive. New Orleans has recovered much of its economic base and sales tax revenues are approaching normal. The French Quarter survived Katrina, and the music and restaurant scenes are recovering.

But much of New Orleans still looks like a wasteland, with businesses shuttered and houses abandoned. Basic services like schools, libraries, public transportation and childcare are at half their original levels and only two-thirds of the region's licensed hospitals are open. Rental properties are in severely short supply, driving rents for those that are available way up. Crime is rampant and police operate out of trailers.

Along Mississippi's 70-mile shoreline, harsh economic realities also are hampering rebuilding.

Many projects are hamstrung by the soaring costs of construction and insurance, while federal funding has been slow to flow to cities. Other economic indicators are down -- such as population, employment and housing supplies.

Bush's Gulf Coast rebuilding chief, Don Powell, noted the federal government has committed a total of $114 billion to the region, $96 billion of which is already disbursed or available to local governments. Most of it has been for disaster relief, not long-term recovery. He implied it is local officials' fault, particularly in Louisiana where the pace has been slower, if money has not reached citizens.

Powell also said the president intends to ask for the approximately $5 billion federal share of the $7.6 billion more needed to strengthen New Orleans' levee system to withstand a 100-year storm and improve the area's drainage system. Though the levees are not yet ready for the next massive storm, they are slated to be strengthened by 2015.

But Powell said other areas -- such as infrastructure repair and home rebuilding -- are shared responsibilities with local officials or entirely the purview of state and local governments, suggesting that the federal government is absolved when those things don't happen.

Locals don't appreciate the insinuations.

''The federal government still seems to place a higher priority on troop surges in Iraq than on storm surges in our part of the world,'' New Orleans resident Walter L. Bonam wrote in an op-ed in Wednesday's The Times-Picayune.

Mark Smith, a spokesman for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco's homeland security department, said dealing with the federal bureaucracy has been difficult.

''To say that anybody is not getting the money out to the parishes, after we've already gotten out more money than anyone else in history, under more constraints, is ludicrous,'' said Mark Smith, a homeland security spokesman for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

    Bush to Tour New Orleans, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Katrina.html

Bush Cites Nuclear Risk of Leaving Iraq

August 29, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

RENO, Nev., Aug. 28 — President Bush told a receptive audience of veterans on Tuesday that an American withdrawal from Iraq would unsettle the entire Middle East, create a haven for Al Qaeda and embolden a belligerent Iran. He said Tehran’s nuclear programs threatened to put “a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”

Speaking here before the American Legion’s annual convention, Mr. Bush said competing brands of Islamic extremism — the Sunni model exemplified by Al Qaeda and a Shiite version that he said was abetted by Iran — were vying for dominance in Iraq.

That, he said, made it imperative for the United States not to fail in establishing a pro-American government there.

“I want our citizens to consider what would happen if these forces of radicalism are allowed to drive us out of the Middle East,” he said in a speech interrupted several times by applause. “The region would be dramatically transformed in a way that would imperil the civilized world.”

Mr. Bush has previously warned Iran about its involvement in Iraq and its nuclear programs, but his remarks on Tuesday were especially forceful, and suggested that he was blending the justification for staying in Iraq with fears held by members of both parties in Congress that Iran could emerge as a threat.

He reiterated accusations by officials and American military commanders that Iran was providing training and weaponry, including 240-millimeter rockets, to forces not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He said he had authorized the military to “confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

“For all those who ask whether the fight is worth it, imagine an Iraq where militia groups backed by Iran control larger parts of the country,” he said.

One problem for Mr. Bush is that the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, an assessment released last week, suggested that that is already happening with the tacit consent of the Iraqi leaders Mr. Bush supports.

The future of Iraq has dominated Mr. Bush’s recent public events, even as his administration dealt with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. It has been a concerted effort to make his case before a new legislative fight once Congress receives a much-anticipated progress report from the administration and the military next month.

Although Democrats and even a few Republicans have urged the White House to rethink its approach, Mr. Bush, in his remarks, showed little sign of bending. Administration and military officials have already indicated that any reduction of troops from today’s level, which exceeds 160,000, would be gradual and incremental, not the substantial reductions that opponents have sought.

Congressional Democrats reacted with scorn to the speech. “The president continues to suffer from the Katrina complex,” Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware told reporters during a conference call. “That’s when you ignore all the warnings, bad things happen, you continue to follow the same bad policy, and things get worse.”

Senator Harry Reid, majority leader, said Democrats would press their Republican counterparts again in the coming weeks for a change in American strategy in Iraq. “The president continues to stubbornly pursue a flawed strategy that has mired our troops in a civil war in Iraq and diverted our attention as Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda grow stronger,” Mr. Reid said in a statement. “Most Americans, and a bipartisan majority in Congress, believe this strategy is not in our national interest and the time for a major change is now.”

Last week Mr. Bush appeared before another veterans group, the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Mo., and recalled the anger, humiliation and turmoil that followed the American withdrawal from Vietnam. On Tuesday, he sought to raise the specter of a new haven for terrorists and an Iran that dominated the region, threatening allies and energy supplies.

“This scenario would be a disaster for the people of the Middle East, a danger to our friends and allies, and a direct threat to American peace and security,” he said.

Mr. Bush did not directly rebut critics of the war, especially Democrats in Congress, but he sought to preempt the coming debate over the success of the troop buildup. He said that the greater military effort this year had increased security even though it only reached full strength less than three months ago.

He also noted rare progress on political issues, welcoming an agreement by Iraq’s political leaders to make modest steps toward the benchmarks outlined by Congress to evaluate Mr. Bush’s military increase this year. And he urged patience. “It makes no sense to respond to military progress by claiming that we have failed because Iraq’s Parliament has yet to pass every law it said it would,” he said.

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.

    Bush Cites Nuclear Risk of Leaving Iraq, NYT, 29.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/washington/29prexy.html

Bush: Fight Against Extremism Is Crucial

August 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

RENO, Nev. (AP) -- President Bush aims to inspire patience with the war Tuesday by arguing that the fight against extremists in Iraq is crucial to U.S. security and the future of a strategic, struggling region.

Bush is speaking before thousands of veterans Tuesday at the American Legion convention. It his second major speech in a week devoted to an attempt to buttress support for the war.

Last week before the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, he likened today's fight against extremism in Iraq to past conflicts in Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

On Tuesday, he plans to discuss the implications of the fight in Iraq for the broader Middle East, a global crossroads that has largely missed the democratic and economic advances seen in other parts of the world and is thus vulnerable to the rise of terrorism, said a senior administration official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting the president.

The pair of speeches is intended to set the stage for a crucial Sept. 15 assessment of the fighting, particularly whether the additional U.S. forces that Bush ordered to Iraq in January are improving security enough to create an environment for lasting political progress. The report, required by law to be presented to Congress, also is to measure Iraq's performance on U.S. benchmarks for military and political development.

Democrats, as well as some Republicans, are pressing to start the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The president is expected to announce shortly after the report's release whether he intends to do so.

Bush added 30,000 troops to help calm Baghdad and a western province, making the total now more than 160,000. At least 3,728 military members have died in the war.

In the next week, Bush and his senior advisers are likely to hear the initial thinking from Ryan Crocker, Bush's envoy in Baghdad, and the top U.S. general in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, another senior administration official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a schedule still in flux.

Bush leaves Monday to spend nearly a week in Australia, but Crocker and Petraeus are expected to testify to Congress as soon as Sept. 10 on the military and political landscape in Iraq more than four years after the start of the war, officials said. The two will give two days of testimony before their report is sent to lawmakers.

The two have already telegraphed many of their conclusions, and Bush has made it increasingly clear that he is likely to say that he wants more time for the additional forces to have an impact.

In fact, the first official said the president in his Tuesday speech would note the security gains from the surge, as well as early signs of political progress, while asking lawmakers to hold off on any judgments until hearing from Crocker and Petraeus.

But he was also to make a broader argument about the importance of the fighting in Iraq. He was to argue that Iraq is at the heart of rising extremist movements in both the Sunni and Shiite Muslim communities, the former dominated by al-Qaida and the latter by Iran, the official said.

''Failure in Iraq would cause the enemy not to retreat but to follow us to America,'' Bush said Monday night in Bellevue, Wash., in remarks at a fundraiser for GOP Rep. Dave Reichert.

Earlier Monday, he sought to highlight nascent moves toward political reconciliation in Iraq, heralding an agreement over the weekend among leading Iraqi politicians. He called Sunday's pact on some issues that have blocked national reconciliation a good step, but not enough.

''I reminded them, and they understand, much more needs to be done,'' Bush said on an airport tarmac in New Mexico, where he was raising campaign cash for Republican Sen. Pete Domenici. He added that it will be up to the Iraqi parliament to codify the new agreements when it reconvenes in early September.

Both Bush and Iraq's leaders are under increasing pressure to show progress amid slow deliberations and political squabbling in Baghdad and sinking support for the war among Americans and in Congress.

The Iraqi leaders said on Sunday that they agreed on some issues that the U.S. has set as targets, among them holding provincial elections, releasing prisoners held without charge and changing the law preventing many former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from holding government jobs and elected office.

No details were released and committees must hash out final versions of legislation to be presented to the Iraqi parliament. Iraqi officials have announced similar deals in the past, only to have them fall apart.

The deal also was not enough to convince the main Sunni Arab political bloc to take back posts in government that they abandoned this month over differences with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

AP Diplomatic Writer Anne Gearan in Washington contributed to this report.

    Bush: Fight Against Extremism Is Crucial, NYT, 28.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Text

Bush’s Statement on Gonzales

August 27, 2007
The New York Times

Following is the text of a statement delivered by President Bush on Monday, Aug. 27, on the resignation of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, as provided by the White House:

THE PRESIDENT: This morning, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that he will leave the Department of Justice, after two and a half years of service to the department. Al Gonzales is a man of integrity, decency and principle. And I have reluctantly accepted his resignation, with great appreciation for the service that he has provided for our country.

As Attorney General and before that, as White House counsel, Al Gonzales has played a role in shaping our policies in the war on terror, and has worked tirelessly to make this country safer. The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act and other important laws bear his imprint. Under his leadership, the Justice Department has made a priority of protecting children from Internet predators, and made enforcement of civil rights laws a top priority. He aggressively and successfully pursued public corruption and effectively combated gang violence.

As Attorney General he played an important role in helping to confirm two fine jurists in Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. He did an outstanding job as White House Counsel, identifying and recommending the best nominees to fill critically important federal court vacancies.

Alberto Gonzales's tenure as Attorney General and White House Counsel is only part of a long history of distinguished public service that began as a young man when, after high school, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. When I became governor of Texas in 1995, I recruited him from one of Texas's most prestigious law firms to be my general counsel. He went on to become Texas's 100th secretary of state and to serve on our state's supreme court. In the long course of our work together this trusted advisor became a close friend.

These various positions have required sacrifice from Al, his wife Becky, their sons Jared, Graham and Gabriel, and I thank them for their service to the country.

After months of unfair treatment that has created a harmful distraction at the Justice Department, Judge Gonzales decided to resign his position, and I accept his decision. It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.

I've asked Solicitor General Paul Clement to serve as Acting Attorney General upon Alberto Gonzales's departure and until a nominee has been confirmed by the Senate. He's agreed to do so. Paul is one of the finest lawyers in America. As Solicitor General, Paul has developed a reputation for excellence and fairness, and earned the respect and confidence of the entire Justice Department.

Thank you.

    Bush’s Statement on Gonzales, NYT, 27.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/washington/27bush-text.html

Bush Signs Homeland Security Bill

August 3, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:30 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush signed legislation Friday that intensifies the anti-terrorism effort at home, shifting money to high-risk states and cities and expanding scrutiny of air and sea cargo.

''This legislation builds upon the considerable progress we have made in strengthening our defenses and protecting Americans since the attacks of Sept. 11,'' Bush said in a statement.

The bill requires screening of all cargo on passenger planes within three years and sets a five-year goal of scanning all container ships for nuclear devices before they leave foreign ports. It also elevates the importance of risk factors in determining which states and cities get federal security funds. That would mean more money for such cities as New York and Washington. It also puts money into a new program to ensure that security officials at every level can communicate with each other.

While lauding Congress for passing the bill, Bush said he will continue to work with lawmakers to ensure the cargo screening provisions are workable and don't impede commerce. And he said Congress should strive to better target grant dollars to cities and states based on their vulnerability to a terrorist attack.

''This legislation makes some progress, but it also authorizes billions of dollars for grants and other programs that are unnecessary or should not be funded at such excessive levels,'' Bush said in a statement. ''I will not request this excessive funding in my 2009 budget request.''

Bush signed the bill into law in the Oval Office before heading to the FBI to have lunch with counterterrorism advisers and then talk with members of his homeland security team. ''We've done a lot of work since September the 11th to make this country safe, and it is safer but it's not completely safe,'' he said at the FBI.

Bush meets this weekend at Camp David, Md., with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, where South Korean hostages are being held by the Taliban and where the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is considered a haven for the al-Qaida terrorist network.

The measure carries out unfulfilled recommendations that the Sept. 11 Commission made three years ago in the wake of the terror attacks on the U.S. homeland in 2001. It was passed in the House on a 371-40 vote and 85-8 in the Senate. Republicans generally backed the bill while stressing their own administration's success in preventing another major terrorist attack.

''There is still other work to be done. I continue to believe that Congress should act on the outstanding 9/11 Commission recommendations to reform the legislative branch's oversight of intelligence and counterterrorism activities, which the commission described as dysfunctional,'' Bush said. ''While this legislation does not heed the commission's advice, I hope Congress revisits the issue soon.''

The independent 9/11 Commission in 2004 issued 41 recommendations covering domestic security, intelligence gathering and foreign policy. Congress and the White House followed through on some, including creating a director of national intelligence, tightening land border screening and cracking down on terrorist financing. Democrats, after taking over control of Congress, promised to make completing the list a top priority.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, said with enactment of the bill some 80 percent of the panel's recommendations will have been met. According to Hamilton, one shortcoming of the bill is that it fails to carry out the commission's recommendation that Congress streamline its own overlapping setup for monitoring intelligence and homeland security matters.

The legislation also:

--Authorizes more than $4 billion for four years for rail, transit and bus security.

--Requires the screening of all container ships in foreign ports within five years, but give the Homeland Security secretary authority to delay implementation.

--Establishes a new electronic travel authorization system to improve security for visitors from countries participating in the visa waiver program. Bush said he would continue to work with Congress to provide more flexibility to bring some of the closest U.S. allies into the program.

--Strengthens a board that oversees privacy and civil liberties issues.

--Establishes a voluntary certification program to assess whether private entities comply with voluntary preparedness standards.

--Requires the president and Congress to disclose total spending requested and approved for the intelligence community.

--Provides civil immunity to those who, in good faith, report suspicious activities that threaten the safety and security of passengers on a transportation system or that could be an act of terrorism.

--Requires the president to confirm that Pakistan is making progress combatting al-Qaida and Taliban elements within its boarders before the United States provides aid to the country.

------

The bill is H.R. 1

On the Net:

Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/

    Bush Signs Homeland Security Bill, NYT, 3.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush.html

Bush Pushes for Surveillance Law

August 3, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:24 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Friday that Congress must stay in session until it approves legislation modernizing a U.S. law governing eavesdropping on foreigners.

''So far the Democrats in Congress have not drafted a bill I can sign,'' Bush said at FBI headquarters, where he was meeting with counterterror and homeland security officials. ''We've worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution, but we are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short.''

The president, who has the power under the Constitution to keep Congress in session, said lawmakers cannot leave for their August recess this weekend as planned unless they ''pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States.''

Earlier Friday, the White House offered an eleventh-hour accord to Democrats in the negotiations over the matter, saying it would agree to a court review of its foreign intelligence activities instead of leaving certification up to the attorney general and director of national intelligence.

But it attached several conditions that could be unacceptable to Democrats: that the review would only be after-the-fact and would only involve the administration's general process of collecting the intelligence, not individual cases, said a senior administration official speaking on condition of anonymity to more freely discuss internal deliberations.

Bush said the administration offer is a ''a narrow and targeted piece of legislation that will close the gaps in intelligence.''

''This is what we need to do our job to protect the American people,'' the president said. ''It's the bare minimum.''

The two sides, however, still are far from striking a deal on what all agree needs to happen, and soon: an update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

At issue is how the government would spy on foreign terror suspects overseas without invading Americans' privacy rights. Democrats want the special FISA Court to review the eavesdropping process to make sure the surveillance does not focus on communications that might be sent to and from Americans.

The law now generally requires court review of government surveillance of suspected terrorists in the United States. It does not specifically address the government's ability to intercept messages believed to come from suspects who are overseas, opening what the White House considers a significant gap in protecting against attacks by foreigners targeting the U.S.

Negotiations broke off shortly before midnight Thursday and resumed Friday morning.

In a statement late Thursday, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell said he would agree to a review by the FISA court, but only after the surveillance had begun, not before as some Democrats are demanding.

''To acknowledge the interests of all, I could agree to a procedure that provides for court review -- after needed collection has begun -- of our procedures for gathering foreign intelligence through classified methods directed at foreigners located overseas,'' McConnell wrote.

''While I would strongly prefer not to engage in such a process, I am prepared to take these additional steps to keep the confidence of members of Congress and the American people that our processes have been subject to court review and approval,'' he wrote.

The FISA court review would happen 120 days after the surveillance began, another senior administration official said Friday. Until then, McConnell and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would oversee and approve the process of targeting foreign terrorists, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing negotiations.

The administration is demanding that this apply to monitoring of all foreign targets, no matter whether they end up communicating with another foreigner or someone in the U.S, and no matter whether they are a suspected terrorist or a target for some other reason, said the first official.

Democrats leery of Gonzales' involvement said that seemed far too long a period of time before the FISA court could step in.

Bush said that he would judge any bill sent to him by one measure alone: McConnell's judgment as to whether it provides ''what you need to prevent an attack on the country.''

''If the answer's `no,' I'm going to veto the bill,'' he said.

The urgent push to update FISA may stem from a recent ruling by the court that oversees it, according to remarks earlier this week by House Republican Leader John Boehner during an interview with Fox News.

''There's been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States,'' said Boehner, going further that most officials have in explaining the pressing need for change.

Talk of keeping Congress in session is premature for now, said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, who noted a bipartisan consensus that something needs to be done and the availability of less-drastic legislative manuevers.

''We cannot imagine that Congress would leave without fixing the problem,'' she said.

Bush Pushes for Surveillance Law, NYT, 3.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Terrorism-Surveillance.html