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President Bush meets with the Baker-Hamilton Commission. (White House/Eric Draper)
Freshly shorn of power in Congress, Republicans face a crowded agenda for their final few weeks in the majority and a challenge to work cooperatively with Democrats on a number of important foreign policy issues. The Republican priorities include completing the confirmation of Robert M. Gates as defense secretary; getting Senate approval of the civilian nuclear agreement with India; and obtaining House and Senate endorsement of permanent normal trade relations with Vietnam. The House dealt an initial defeat to the Vietnam deal (FT) Monday but positive votes on all three issues are still viewed as possible.
Immediate action on two other issues important to the White House—the extension of John Bolton’s term as UN ambassador and legislation allowing domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency (NSA)—may be doomed. Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), expected to be the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told ABC’s This Week program Sunday that President Bush needs to ready a new candidate for the UN post, saying “[Bolton’s] going to lose” (USNews.com). On domestic surveillance, competing House and Senate bills offer different levels of court oversight of the NSA program and the divisions are seen as unbridgeable in the lame-duck period of Congress. This Backgrounder explores the privacy versus national security issues involved in the NSA debate.
The most closely watched issue in the next few weeks is, of course, policy on the war in Iraq. Voters last week identified the Republicans’ handling of the war as a major reason for turning toward Democratic candidates. No new legislation on Iraq is expected in the lame-duck period but the bipartisan Iraq Study Group is expected to issue its recommendations on new policies before the end of the year. President Bush met the group on Monday and said he was looking forward to its report but added that the goal in Iraq is still "a government that can sustain and defend itself" (AP). The study group is not expected to bring any new plans to the table but should provide a chance for both parties to coalesce around a single approach (WashPost). Leading Democrats like Biden and Richard C. Holbrooke favor an international conference on Iraq, bearing some resemblance to the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian civil war. The incoming chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-MI), has already called for a phased reduction of U.S. troops from Iraq in four to six months (PBS). CFR President Richard N. Haass tells Der Spiegel that both force reductions as well as intensified diplomacy with Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, are likely.
The tone of bipartisanship declared by party leaders gets its first real test on November 15 when the armed services committees in both legislative chambers question top U.S. officials on options in Iraq and Afghanistan. The debate will continue in December when the Senate Armed Services Committee is due to begin Gates’ confirmation hearings. CFR.org’s Michael Moran writes this could mark the start of a protracted “Who Lost Iraq?” argument in Congress (Star-Ledger).
Midterm elections exit polls provided a mixed picture of what the public wants (CSMonitor). The Bush administration faced renewed calls from conservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan for a beefed-up deployment to pacify Iraq (FT). But Lawrence J. Korb and Peter Ogden write in Foreign Affairs that this will be difficult given the Bush administration’s failure to provide funding for expanding the number of U.S. troops.
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