Weapons of mass disagreement
COMBINED DISPATCHES
WASHINGTON -- Just hours after the Senate rejected U.S. troop withdrawals, a Democratic challenger to Sen. Mike DeWine charged that the Republican "failed Ohio's military families today by voting for more of the same in Iraq."
Acting equally swiftly, the GOP's Senate campaign committee criticized Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey as an "ultra-liberal" who cast a "vote to surrender in Iraq."
Neither DeWine nor Menendez would agree with the opposition's characterizations of their positions.
But that's the political reality of Senate votes on the war in a midterm election year. Both Republicans and Democrats end up with ammunition to use against one another during campaigns.
Prelude to November
The Senate debate over Iraq this week changed no policy, but with congressional elections less than five months away, the debate defined as never before where the political parties stand on the divisive three-year-old war.
Democrats, prodded by their liberal wing to initiate the debate, pressed a single message: that the Bush administration has no plan to end the war and bring the troops home.
Republicans embraced the challenge, eager to portray the conflict in Iraq as part of the war on terrorism and Democratic calls for withdrawing troops as a sign of weakness.
The debate exposed divisions among Democrats. In the end, 38 Democrats and one Republican voted Thursday in favor of a nonbinding Senate measure that called for troop withdrawals to begin this year but set no firm end date. It failed 60-39.
Only 13 Democrats and no Republicans voted for a proposal by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., to withdraw entirely from Iraq by July 2007. It failed 86-13.
Last week, the House of Representatives voted 256-153 in favor of a resolution opposing any timetable for withdrawal, with Republicans voting 214 for it and only three against, while Democrats split, 42 for and 149 against. One independent also voted against it.
WMD back-and-forth
Meanwhile, Democrats on Thursday ridiculed comments by two leading congressional Republicans that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq.
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who is engaged in a tough re-election battle, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said at a news conference Wednesday that unconventional weapons had been found in Iraq.
"Congressman Hoekstra and I are here today to say that we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Santorum said. "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent."
Santorum added, "Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf war chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf war chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."
The White House and the intelligence community have conceded that despite prewar assertions to the contrary, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. This miscalculation is considered a major intelligence failure.
Santorum, in making his announcement Wednesday, was apparently referring to shells from before the Persian Gulf war whose chemical agents, sarin and mustard gas, were badly degraded.
Democrats seized on Santorum's statement Thursday to say that the Republicans were "losing touch with reality."
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Santorum was repeating old claims that no one considered evidence of an ongoing unconventional weapons program by Saddam Hussein.
"There is nothing new here," Harman said. "Nothing in this report, classified or otherwise, contradicts the Duelfer Report, which assessed that we would find degraded pre-1991 weaponry in Iraq."
Harman also complained that intelligence was being selectively declassified to support Republican positions.
But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a news briefing Thursday, said Santorum's comments were correct.
"They are weapons of mass destruction. They're harmful to human beings. And they have been found," Rumsfeld said. "And they had not been reported by Saddam Hussein as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his weapons. And they are still being found and discovered."
In other developments:
At least 25 people have been executed gangland-style in Iraq's third-largest city this week, with residents gunned down in ones and twos and bodies found scattered throughout Mosul.
Five U.S. troops were killed in operations south and west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Thursday, and police stormed a farm and freed 17 victims of a factory kidnapping.