Democrats: Panel's Findings Consistent With Their Proposals

Congressional leaders of both parties today welcomed the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group as a chance to build a national consensus over how to proceed in a conflict that has claimed almost 2,900 American lives, cost $400 billion and shows no signs of abating.

While some Democrats treated the group's findings as an indictment of President Bush, key Republicans agreed it should trigger a national debate about the nearly four-year-old conflict.

"The American people can now be very clear that no alternative, no option for success in Iraq, has been taken off the table for ideological or partisan reasons," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a member of the Senate Armed Services committee.

Launched with the aim of spreading democracy in the Middle East and uncovering weapons of mass destruction, the 2003 invasion of Iraq has devolved into a combination of bloody sectarian warfare and an all-out insurgency against U.S. and Iraqi military forces. Among the group's most prominent recommendations was for the United States to scale back its ambitions to helping the Iraq government build a police and military that can handle internal security.

Democratic leaders portrayed the report as the latest indictment of the Bush administration's policies.

"It is clear, now, that there is no one in America, save perhaps the president, who believes that staying the course is a viable policy," said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat who will become House majority leader next month.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who will become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the report "represents another blow at the policy of stay the course that this administration has followed. Hopefully, this will be the end of that stay-the-course policy."

Rep. Marty Meehan (D-Mass.), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the study group's findings come far too late for policy changes to have a meaningful effect in Iraq. He said he hopes the report highlights how difficult the struggle to salvage the situation will be.

"I hope that expectations are adjusted," Meehan said in an interview this afternoon. "Part of the problem with Iraq all along has been the failure of the administration to come clean with the American people about the failures. The Iraq Study Group lays out many of the things that a lot of us have been talking about for quite some time."

White House spokesman Tony Snow insisted at a news briefing that the report echoes, in many ways, the administration's existing policies.

"Stay the course is not the policy and the president has been saying that for months," he said. "We have discussed the importance of trying to come up with a transition where the Iraqis stand up and take greater responsibility. We have talked about the importance of having Iraqis assume primary combat control."

Snow said the administration continues to oppose direct dialogue with Iran, which the study group proposes, to end the violence in Iraq. But he declined to discuss many of the other specific recommendations in the report. "Give us a couple of days to try to parse it," he said.