Bush Denounces Iraq War Timetable

In a statement following Bush's comments, Reid said, "Although the president rightly stated that the American people voted against failure in Iraq last November, they also clearly voted against a policy that is leading us to failure -- and that's what the president's stay the course strategy does."

Citing the deaths of 10 more service members yesterday "in one of the deadliest days of this war," he said Bush "continues to offer more of the same: a failed policy that has our troops mired in an open-ended civil war that risks our security at home."

He later called the supplemental spending bill "a good piece of legislation, telling reporters, "I would hope the president would stop being so brusque and waving it off. . . . The president should look at this piece of legislation and sign it."

In a statement he read to reporters after a lunch with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill, Cheney disputed several of Reid's statements Monday in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington.

"What's most troubling about Senator Reid's comments yesterday is his defeatism," Cheney said. "Indeed, last week he said the war is already lost. And the timetable legislation that he is now pursuing would guarantee defeat."

The vice president added, "It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage. Leaders should make decisions based on the security interests of our country, not on the interests of their political party."

In response to Cheney's attack, Kerry said in a statement, "No one has been more wrong about Iraq from day one than Vice President Cheney. The Cheney Doctrine has been a recipe for disaster in Iraq that has put American troops in unforgivable danger and made America less secure."

Saying he could not believe Cheney's audacity in calling Reid uninformed, Kerry declared, "This is the same man who claimed that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes, when in fact the civil war was growing. It is time for the vice president to return to his secure, undisclosed location to rejoin his neocon friends rather than attack the majority leader who is fighting to keep faith with American troops."

Pelosi said in a news briefing, "Our bill is grounded in the realities in the war in Iraq" and deals with "the strain that this war is placing on our military." She said Bush's response to it reflects an administration "in disarray."

The House speaker also criticized Bush for repeatedly demanding funds for the war through emergency supplementals rather than the regular budget. "Seven supplementals, seven times unprepared?" she asked. "I don't think so. I think it's seven times that the president wanted to hide the truth of the cost of this war from the American people."

Among the retired generals who commended the war-funding bill was Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who formerly commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq.

"This important legislation sets a new direction for Iraq," Batiste said in a statement. "It acknowledges that America went to war without mobilizing the nation, that our strategy in Iraq has been tragically flawed since the invasion in March 2003, that our Army and Marine Corps are at the breaking point with little to show for it, and that our military alone will never establish representative government in Iraq. The administration got it terribly wrong, and I applaud our Congress for stepping up to their constitutional responsibilities."

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004, said, "The argument that this bill aides the enemy is simply not mature." He said it gives the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, "great leverage for moving the Iraqi government" toward political compromises aimed at undercutting the insurgency.

"We must commence a coordinated phased withdrawal of U.S. combat troops and condition our continuing support of the Iraqi government on its fulfilling the political commitments it has made to facilitate reconciliation of the contending secular factions," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard Jr., a former senior Pentagon official. "Otherwise, we will continue to be entwined in a hopeless quagmire, with continuing American casualties, which will render our ground forces ineffective."

Retired Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Mel Montano, a former adjutant general of New Mexico, said the bill "not only reflects the thinking of the Iraq Study Group but puts teeth to the phrase 'Supporting the Troops.' " He said establishing timelines "returns the responsibility of self-preservation and regional sovereignty to the people of Iraq and their government."