General Decries Call For Timetable in Iraq

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17 Nov. Washington Post - General Decries Call For Timetable in Iraq.

A top American commander in Iraq on Wednesday denounced calls by some U.S. senators and others to set a deadline for a troop withdrawal, calling it "a recipe for disaster" for the 2 1/2 -year-old war.

"Setting a date would mean that the 221 soldiers I've lost this year, that their lives will have been lost in vain," said Army Maj. Gen. William Webster, whose 3rd Infantry Division is responsible for security in three-fourths of Iraq's capital. Making up the bulk of Task Force Baghdad, the 3rd Infantry patrols some of the most dangerous turf in Iraq, encountering massive bombs and suicide assaults in attacks that Webster said average 35 a day in the city.

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday defeated by a 58 to 40 vote a Democratic proposal that would have required U.S. leaders to fix a rough date for pulling out the more than 140,000 American service members in Iraq.

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17 Nov. Washington Times - Bush Hails Senate Defeat of Bill on Iraq Timetable.

President Bush said yesterday that it was "a positive step" for the Senate to defeat a Democrat-led effort to establish a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq...

...Another military analyst at Brookings, Ivo H. Daalder, said that despite the Democratic amendment's defeat, the Republican Senate adopted significant parts of it and did so to send signals to the White House that it wants clearer answers to the questions of "what are we doing there, how are we doing, and when are we done.

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17 Nov. Washington Times - Intervention by Hill in Iraq War not a First.

It's uncommon for Congress to intervene in a war that's under way - as the Senate did Tuesday regarding Iraq - but there is a precedent for such interference, dating back to the Civil War.

It was in December 1861, eight months after the first bloodshed in the War Between the States, that the House and Senate approved the formation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate the conflict. The panel consisted of three senators and four representatives...

On Aug. 7, 1964, Congress passed a measure known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution giving President Johnson power to take "all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States" by the North Vietnamese...

In 1973 and 1974, Congress began to curtail operations in Vietnam, and in 1973, it passed the War Powers Act, whose intent was to put more control over war in the hands of Congress..