Neo-Cons Intervene.

Neo-cons and other US hawks want to rally sceptical Republicans behind support for Bush's strategy. They say the surge has not been given time to work and abandoning it would amount to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The defection of hitherto loyal senior Republican senators has thrown the hawks into something of a panic, if only because anti-war Democrats are inching steadily towards the kind of majority which Bush can no longer ignore. The New York Times on July 9 said the Bush team was split over what to do, with some, notably Defence Secretary Gates, quietly pressing for beginning a gradual pull-out of combat troops consistent with the ISG recommendations. Gates was a member of the ISG until his nomination to the defence post last November.

While the White House, through the diplomacy of Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, is spending an extraordinary amount of time listening to sceptics in hopes of keeping them from crossing the aisle on key war-related measures, neo-cons outside the administration are taking a harsher tack. William Kristol, a key neo-con the editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote of Lugar, Voinovich, Dominici and Warner - the four most senior Republicans who want a change of course in Iraq - and said: "They are pre-9/11 Republicans. They have been followers of conventional opinion [during their 20-plus-year Senate careers], not leaders... Now they are following conventional wisdom again, in their stately way, in turning against the Iraq war".

The lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal on July 9 argued: "Republicans may think they can distance themselves from all this, but they'll get no credit from voters if they contribute to an ugly outcome in Iraq. A divided Republican caucus that undercuts America's military efforts while chasing the mirage of bipartisan comity will only make their own election defeat [in November 2008] more likely".

Both warnings came as the Senate began a debate which could stretch until Congress' August recess on the defence authorisation bill to which Democrats hope to attach a series of Iraq-related amendments opposed by the hawks. Two Democratic amendments backed by Senate majority leader Reid, will call for withdrawing all combat forces from Iraq by the spring or summer of 2008. They more narrowly define the mission of the remaining troops - still likely to number in the tens of thousands - as training Iraqi forces, helping to secure international borders, striking al-Qaeda and other terrorist targets, and protecting US facilities and personnel there.

Similar amendments were approved by the Senate this year but ultimately failed because of parliamentary obstacles or a Bush veto which could not be overcome by the small Democratic majority. (Two-thirds of each congressional chamber are needed to override a presidential veto). Another likely amendment, co-sponsored by Democratic Sens Hillary Clinton and Robert Byrd, would repeal Congress' 2002 authorisation for the use of force in Iraq and require Bush to seek a new authorisation defining the mission and strategy of US forces there before more money could be spent on the war.

Yet another, sponsored by Sen. Webb, would require that active-duty troops be given at least the same amount of time to rest at home as they are deployed to a war zone. This provision would make continuation of the current surge to a total of some 165,000 US Army troops and Marines in Iraq impossible to sustain.

While the White House believes it can keep enough Republicans in line on these amendments to defeat their adoption, it is worried one or two of them could attract as many as 60 votes and thus highlight the erosion in support for its strategy over the past month. A strong anti-war showing would raise pressure to reverse course before the mid-September report Petraeus is to submit to Congress.

The hawks, however, are very concerned that another amendment, the product of several weeks' work by a dozen centrist Democrats and Republicans, may be approved by a veto-proof margin. That amendment would declare the recommendations of the ISG, which was co-chaired by former state secretary James Baker for the Republicans and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, to be official US policy.

Those recommendations, which included US diplomatic engagement with Syria and Iran and intensified efforts to achieve a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are considered anathema by the hawks, especially pro-Likud neo-cons who launched a major propaganda campaign against the ISG even before it released its study last December.

Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently explicitly endorsed key ISG recommendations in a major policy address in which he warned that failure to initiate a drawdown of US combat forces in Iraq "very soon" could pose "extreme risks for US national security [because]...it would greatly increase the chances for a poorly planned withdrawal from Iraq or possibly the broader Middle East region that could damage US interests for decades".

Lugar's remarks were hailed at the time by Warner, who predicted that a number of other Republicans were likely to voice similar concerns in the debate over the defence bill. Warner, whose former chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee has made him particularly influential on defence issues with fellow Republicans, has since become the subject of intense White House lobbying.

After his speech, Lugar became a focus of neo-con wrath, with Kristol describing his address as a "case study in pseudo-thoughtfulness, full of cheek-puffing and chin-pulling". Thomas Donnelly of the AEI accused Lugar of sounding "more like an investor rebalancing his portfolio, selling Iraq and buying Israel-Palestine, than a man thinking about strategy in war".

In the neo-con view, the surge has resulted in major military gains in recent weeks, even if the Iraqis' political reconciliation which it was supposed to promote has been nowhere in sight, a point made emphatically by Lugar, Warner and other Republican critics.

Retired army Gen Jack Keane, one of the surge's architects who made much the same point at a special AEI forum on July 9, told the neo-con New York Sun: "The tragedy of these efforts is we are on the cusp of potentially being successful in the next year in a way that we have failed in the three-plus preceding years. But because of this political pressure, it looks like we intend to pull out the rug from underneath that potential success". In its own editorial on July 9, the Sun called the possible approval of legislation setting a withdrawal timetable "the most astounding act of perfidy in the history of Congress".