Democrats' Struggle to Change Course in Iraq Has Produced Much Debate, Little Action

Reid, who has emerged in recent months as an impassioned opponent of the war, anchored the strategy of Democrats in the Senate. In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) presided over a far more aggressive caucus, split between passionate out-of-Iraq liberals and more pragmatic opponents of the war looking for language that could break the Senate barrier and reach the president's desk.

Both leaders took office committed to trying to force Bush to change policy, but with no clear sense of their chances of succeeding. Their hope was that through a combination of legislative maneuvering, public opinion and the continuing violence in Iraq, enough Republicans would break to overcome a White House veto.

The Democratic presidential candidates have functioned as a separate block and have used their Senate roles to court likely caucus and primary voters, the overwhelming majority of whom strongly oppose the war. Their intramural battles became a running sideshow -- both the competition between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) and the efforts by the rest of the field, except Biden, to push the front-runners further left.

Pressing on all three arenas were the antiwar groups, led by MoveOn.org, that acted as a kind of Greek chorus, demanding confrontation and urging Reid to surrender no ground.

Because of a Senate rule requiring 60 votes to shut off debate and 67 votes to overturn a veto, Reid faced an almost impossible challenge. Even if all his troops stood together, he started with just 49 votes: One member of the caucus, Sen. Tim Johnson (S.D.), was absent because of a massive brain hemorrhage, while another, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), was a strong supporter of the president and newly independent after his 2006 reelection.

Five days before the president's speech on Jan. 10 announcing the troop increase, Reid and Pelosi fired their opening shot in the battle with Bush. "After nearly four years of combat, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties and over 300 billion dollars, it is time to bring the war to a close," they said in a joint statement. A procession of Democrats flowed into Reid's small conference room next to his office to share their ideas. The visitors included Sens. Clinton, Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and John F. Kerry (Mass.), who had not yet announced he would not run for president in 2008.

Biden had made his opposition clear on Dec. 26 -- an effort that he said later was designed to make it difficult for other Democrats to equivocate as the fight opened. More quietly, he was reaching out to Republicans whom he knew were skeptics of the president's policies, hoping to woo them to the Democrats' side. The list included Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.), Richard G. Lugar (Ind.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), and two Republicans facing reelection in blue states in 2008, Sens. Norm Coleman (Minn.) and John E. Sununu (N.H.).

The presidential campaign quickly intruded. On Jan. 14, former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) went to Riverside Church in New York for a Martin Luther King Day service, and he prodded Democrats in Washington by evoking the slain civil rights leader's decision to speak out against Vietnam.

"You have the power, members of Congress, to prohibit the president from spending any money to escalate the war," said Edwards, a convert to the antiwar crusade who had voted to authorize the Iraq invasion as a senator in 2002. "Use that power. Use it now."

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson called for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of this year, symbolic of the strategy employed by long-shot candidates to win support among party activists.

The same weekend as Edwards's speech, Clinton visited Iraq and Afghanistan, a trip that her aides said they had concluded was her last, best opportunity to see the war zone firsthand before plunging into her presidential campaign. On Jan. 17, the day Biden and Hagel introduced a nonbinding resolution opposing Bush's troop buildup, Clinton delivered her conclusions after returning from Iraq. She restated her opposition to the "surge" and stepped up pressure on the administration and the Iraqi government.

But as the legislative battle began to unfold, many Democratic lawmakers were reluctant to embrace withdrawal deadlines. Some weren't willing because they knew they would scare off potential Republican support. Others simply weren't ready to go that far. Asked on Jan. 17 whether she supported a recommendation by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to remove all combat forces by the spring of 2008, Clinton replied, "I'm not going to support a specific deadline."