Blog - Bringing Back Iraq

With violence in Iraq trending down and pressing domestic issues on the table, plans from Congress to wind down the war have been relegated to the back burner. But in her weekly press conference this afternoon, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she plans to bring a troop withdrawal plan to the floor of the House and it could be voted on as soon as tomorrow.

The AP reports:

>Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House will vote as early as Friday on legislation that would spend $50 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but require that President Bush start bringing troops home.
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>The money is about a quarter of the $196 billion requested by Bush. It would finance about four months of combat in Iraq, Pelosi told reporters on Thursday.
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>"This is not a blank check for the president," she said at a Capitol Hill news conference. “This is providing funding for the troops limited to a particular purpose, for a short time frame.”
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>The bill would set the requirement that troop withdrawals begin immediately and that soldiers and Marines spend as much time at home as they do in combat.
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>The measure also sets a goal that combat end by December 2008. After that, troops left behind should be restricted to a narrow sets of missions, namely counterterrorism, training Iraqi security forces and protecting U.S. assets.

“We are restating the differentiation between us and the president of the United States,” The Hill quotes Pelosi as saying at the news conference. Indeed, there’s no reason to expect the troop withdrawal language in this bill to be any more than a statement. Similar plans have been approved by the House repeatedly in the past several months, but in the end, after the filibusters and vetoes, Congress has invariably dropped the withdrawal language and given the President his war money.

Anyone expect this to go down any differently?

Related from CNN: Poll: War opposition reaches high despite reports of less violence

And some interesting findings from Charles Franklin at Political Arithmetik: Ten Months of Opinion Change on War and More