Hot Story: Iraq Warm-Up Act

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": Coming up on THE BELTWAY BOYS, President Bush gets rebuked from Congress over Iraq. But the real fight is yet to come. We'll explain.

FRED BARNES, "WEEKLY STANDARD": Rudy Giuliani has the big mo in the 2008 race. We'll tell you what's behind the Rudy boomlet.

KONDRACKE: Week one as an official candidate, and Barack Obama is already getting huffy with the press.

BARNES: And speaking of huffy, what's the deal with Vladimir Putin? We'll tell you what's behind his latest outburst.

KONDRACKE: That's all straight ahead on THE BELTWAY BOYS, but first, the headlines.

(NEWSBREAK)

KONDRACKE: I'm Mort Kondracke.

BARNES: I'm Fred Barnes. And we're THE BELTWAY BOYS. And the "Hot Story" tonight, warm-up act, Mort.

After all the theatrics over the House antiwar resolution which passed on Friday and the non-debate over the war in the Senate, we're finally getting down to what really matters. And that is the Democratic effort to block Bush's surge of troops going into Iraq, and indeed to shut down America's combat role in Iraq altogether.

House Democrats, heaven forbid, don't want to do it frontally by cutting funding directly. What they want to do is they have come up with a plan authored by John Murtha, the congressman from Pennsylvania, very much against the war, a plan that would have them do it indirectly by setting limits on troops being newly deployed to Iraq, which would have the same effect. It would draw down America's funds and troops and so on in Iraq. Listen to Martha - rather, Murtha, he explains it as well as anyone, I guess.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JOHN MURTHA, (D) PA: The troops have to be equipped, they have to be trained. They can't be sent back without a year at home. They can't be extended. And we have to eliminate the stop loss.

So what we're trying to do is make sure people understand we're supporting the troops, we're protecting your troops, but on the other hand, we're going to stop this surge.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BARNES: Not only the serge, they would block the combat role entirely by American forces. Now the White House really didn't make that much of an effort because they knew it was a loser, against that resolution in the House on Friday, but they're ready to fight now. Listen to President Bush.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, U.S. PRESIDENT: Soon the Congress is going to vote on a piece of legislation that is binding. A bill to provide emergency funding for our troops. Our men and women in uniform are counting on their elected leaders to provide them with the support they need to accomplish their mission.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BARNES: See what the president is saying. He's saying, look, if you're going to support the troops as Democrats say they are, you've got to vote to fund the troops. And this is an argument he's going to use. I think Democrats have put themselves potentially in a bad situation, the same situation that Republicans put themselves in in the 1990s, remember when they impeached President Clinton and it backfired.

In other words, back then they had an exaggerated view of what their mandate was. I think Democrats have overinterpreted the results of the 2006 election and are now trying to do a lot more to get out of Iraq than the voters actually wanted and it may backfire on them.

KONDRACKE: Our latest Fox poll shows an astounding 54 percent would vote against more funding for the war. Frankly, I find that difficult to believe, but numbers like that may encourage the Democrats to think they do have the public on their side. And this Murtha resolution is clever in that it pretends to be pro-troops and anti-war, in reality would deny troops that are already in the field fighting for their lives the reinforcements they need in order to survive and possibly win.

Look, I think this is a major test of just how far left the Democratic Party is on all this. What does Hillary Clinton do about this? What does the great uniter, not a divider, Barack Obama do? Or the foreign policy expert Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and so on. They probably will ultimately have to vote on all this stuff or at least they will have to say how they are going to -- how they stand on it.

And the question basically boils down to this: is this the party of John F. Kennedy or is it the party of moveon.org.

BARNES: Right now, it's the party of moveon.org and it has certainly moved heavily in that direction.

Now, OK, that was Iraq that's an issue between Bush and Democrats. Also, Iran turned out this week, this past week, to be an issue just in the same way.

Look, in a perfectly straightforward and clear and I thought credible fashion, the president at his press conference pointed out that an Iraqi government agency, the Quds force, is sending weapons to Iraqis who are using -- Iraqi militias, Shiite militias, presumably, and are using them to kill American forces.

You would have thought, Mort, that he had declared war on Iran and was about to unleash the bombers to go bomb Tehran.

Hillary Clinton, the senator from New York responded by knocking down a straw man. First, however, listen to Bush. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: Whether Ahmadinejad ordered the Quds Force to do this, I don't think we know. But we do know that they're there. And I intend to do something about it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BARNES: Hillary has her doubts. Watch Hillary Clinton.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON, (D) NY: It would be a mistake of historical proportion if the administration thought that the 2002 resolution authorizing force against Iraq was a blank check for the use of force against Iran without further congressional authorization.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BARNES: Boy, there was a leap there, didn't you think, from what the president announced.

But look, based on no evidence, other Democrats have raised doubts about the credibility of the intelligence behind the president's claim that Iran was selling these weapons there.

And they've also suggested that the president, as Hillary is suggesting, that the president is creating a pretext for an invasion of Iran. There is just no evidence of this.

Look, it is clear. The Iranians are doing what they have historically done, and that is to send weapons to their allies and clients around the Middle East. They armed Hezbollah, they have sent weapons to the Palestinians, and now they are doing the same thing with Iraqi militias that are Shiites like they are.

KONDRACKE: You know, these explosively formed penetrators that can kill a main battle tank were used by Hezbollah against the Israeli tanks in Lebanon, from Iran. That's where they got them, from Iran. And also there's evidence that the Iranians have supplied to Shiite militias, Austrian-made sniper rifles that can kill -- and have killed, as a matter of fact, some Americans at a distance of 1,000 meters. So there's lots of precedent for this, and most senators ought to know that and recognize it.

But I have a question. I don't know what Bush is going to do about this. Do you think that President Bush is going to launch either an invasion of Iran or bomb its nuclear installation before he leaves office?

BARNES: No, I don't. I don't think he has plans for that.

KONDRACKE: OK. Well, there are people around town who want him to and expect him to. I don't either. I think what he's doing is finding every opportunity to ratchet up military pressure and economic pressure, political pressure, in order to get a coalition together of the Europeans to negotiate reductions in his -- or elimination of his nuclear program as happened in North Korea.

Now I hope that's what he's doing and I think that's what he is doing but the Democrats don't trust him, they don't trust the intelligence so what they're doing is expressing fear. And I don't think it does them any good politically, actually.

BARNES: I don't either.