“I am not confident that President Bush’s plan will succeed,” said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, senior Republican on the committee.
“There is no strategy,” he said of the Bush administration’s war management. “This is a pingpong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans; they’re real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder.”
A Vietnam veteran, he fairly lectured fellow senators not to duck a painful debate about a war that has grown increasingly unpopular as it has gone on. “No president of the United States can sustain a foreign policy or a war policy without the sustained support of the American people,” Hagel said.
At least eight other Republican senators say they now back legislative proposals registering objections to Bush’s decision to boost U.S. military strength in Iraq by 21,500 troops.
The growing list — which includes Sens. Gordon Smith, George Voinovich and Sam Brownback — has emboldened Democrats, who are pushing for a vote in the full Senate by next week to rebuke the president’s Iraq policy.
“I wonder whether the clock has already run out,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. She said she was worried that U.S. troops in Iraq are already perceived “not as liberators but as occupiers.”
