White House Debate Rises on Iraq Pullback (NYT)

Source: New York Times

White House Debate Rises on Iraq Pullback

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: July 9, 2007

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political
support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq
strategy are collapsing around them, according to several
administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They
say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over
whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections
by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of
American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of
Baghdad and other cities.

Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin
those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field
commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are
scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase
that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some
of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are
combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week
to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the
war’s future and financing.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that
they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including
senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts
only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr.
Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would
be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined
mission for American troops that would allow for a staged
pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a
prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the
bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

“When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes
we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty
grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in
the discussions, would not speak on the record about
internal White House deliberations.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/washington/09prexy.html