Out of Iraq, but ‘in the neighborhood'?

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Senate GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky signaled Tuesday that he is looking for “a bipartisan agreement that we need a long-term deployment somewhere in the Middle East in the future” — but he pointedly did not say that accord had to entail maintaining the U.S. deployment in Iraq itself.

He said he hoped the politically charged debate in Congress over Iraq would not lead to an outcome in which “we just bring all the troops back home and thereby expose us once again to the kind of attacks we’ve had here” in the United States or attacks such as the one on the Navy ship USS Cole in 2000.

McConnell said if he and Democrats were able to reach an accord, the American troops would be “in that area of the world… It would be up to the generals to recommend where the troops ought to be. I think we need to be in the neighborhood of where the biggest problem is.”

The twin purposes of this deployment would be, he said, to pursue al-Qaida terrorists and to deter potential aggression by Iran.

Staying in the neighborhood
“It’s an important reminder to Iran that we’re in the neighborhood,” he told reporters in a Capitol Hill briefing.

MSNBC video Iraq War debate Sept. 4:  Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D- Calif., talks to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about Iraq as the top issue as Congress returns from its recess. MSNBC

McConnell’s remarks set the stage for what will likely be several weeks of contentious Senate debate over Iraq policy, with the congressionally mandated report next week by Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker.

McConnell’s comments Tuesday were an expansion of a position he took in a Fox News TV interview on Aug. 26.

“There's a good chance that in September we'll go in a different direction. I don't think that means an arbitrary surrender date, but I think it's entirely possible that the president will lay out a strategy that takes us into a different place, which hopefully, at the end of the day, ends up with some American troops forward deployed in the Middle East at the end of this draw down that many of us are anticipating.”

Combined with the statement by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., two weeks ago urging a small withdrawal of perhaps 5,000 soldiers from Iraq, it now appears that senior Republican leaders in Congress are signaling their intention to support reduction of the U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Unanswered questions
But those signals themselves raise some questions: Are the Republican elder statesmen preparing the ground for something President Bush will say after Crocker and Petraeus report to Congress next week?

And what of the prospects of more chaos and ethnic cleansing in Iraq if there is a significant drawdown of U.S. forces? Can U.S. soldiers sit by in Kuwait or Turkey and watch Iraq descend into genocide?

McConnell also told reporters Tuesday that most of the other 44 senators in his GOP caucus had not yet decided in which direction they want Bush administration policy to go; they are waiting to hear what Petraeus and Crocker say next week.

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