Senate halts Iraq pullout, cash cutoff

The Senate yesterday overwhelmingly rejected a bid to pull out troops from Iraq and cut off funds for combat, a bruising defeat for Majority Leader Harry Reid that highlights the Democratic split over how far to go in opposing the war.

The amendment, which was co-sponsored by Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, died in a 67-29 procedural vote, with 47 Republicans, 19 Democrats and one independent blocking the plan to start a troop withdrawal in 120 days and cut off funds March 31 to most military operations in Iraq.

“We don’t want to send the message to the troops” that they lost the backing of Congress, said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee and one of several key Democrats to defect. “We’re going to support those troops.”

Twenty-eight Democrats and one independent supported the measure, far shy of the significant showing that Mr. Reid had predicted would propel Congress into a “position of strength” in war-funding negotiations with the White House. The vote comes as the approval rating of the Democrat-led Congress consumed by war measures dropped to 29 percent in a Gallup poll this week, four points below Mr. Bush’s 33 percent rating.

Sen. James H. Webb Jr., a Virginia Democrat who voted against the amendment, said a majority of lawmakers oppose the war, but cutting off funds and pulling out troops undercuts the Bush administration’s diplomatic efforts.

“Recent initiatives from Secretary of State Rice, Ambassador Crocker and Admiral Fallon, the new commander of the Central Command, hold out the hope, if not the promise, that we might actually start to turn this thing around,” Mr. Webb said on the Senate floor.

“An arbitrary cutoff date would, at this point, take away an important negotiating tool.”

The same political forces that have pushed Mr. Reid to the left also helped keep the four Senate Democrats running for president in lockstep with the leadership on the troop pullout vote.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Christopher J. Dodd, who voted for the war in 2002, and Sen. Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate but spoke out in opposition to the war at the time, all voted for the amendment.

Mr. Dodd was the first of the candidates to publicly sign on to the plan to choke off war funding, and he made it a campaign issue, running TV ads this week to drive the point home to primary voters.

That prompted a major turnaround for Mrs. Clinton, who previously angered Democratic activists by refusing to disavow her war vote and who, until this week, rejected troop-withdrawal timetables.

The pullout plan that Mr. Reid co-sponsored with Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, was one of three procedural votes yesterday on war-related amendments attached to a $14 billion water-projects bill.

An amendment by Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican, would require President Bush to report to Congress in July and September and would cut foreign aid to Iraq if sufficient progress is not made. It also allowed Mr. Bush to waive the aid cuts.

That amendment failed in a 52-44 vote, winning support from 44 Republicans, seven Democrats and one independent. Voting against the legislation, which Mr. Reid described as “weak,” were 40 Democrats, three Republicans and one independent.

The amendments needed 60 votes to survive, known as a cloture vote, before lawmakers can vote on whether to add it to the underlying bill.

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