Senate GOP rejects call for Iraq war pullout plan

WASHINGTON -- The GOP-controlled Senate rejected a Democratic call Tuesday for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq but urged President Bush to outline his plan for "the successful completion of the mission" in a bill reflecting a growing bipartisan unease with his Iraq policies.\nThe overall measure, adopted 98-0, shows a willingness to defy the president in several ways despite a threatened veto. It would restrict the techniques used to interrogate terror detainees, ban their inhumane treatment and call for the administration to provide lawmakers with quarterly reports on the status of operations in Iraq.\nThe bill was not without victories for the president, including support for the military tribunals Bush wants to use to try detainees at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Yet even that was tempered, with language letting the inmates appeal to a federal court their designation as enemy combatants and their sentences.\nThe Senate's votes on Iraq showed a willingness even by Republicans to question the White House on a war that's growing increasingly unpopular with Americans.\nPolls show Bush's popularity has tumbled in part because of public frustration over Iraq, a war that has claimed the lives of more than 2,000 American troops.\nSenate Democratic leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the outcome was "a vote of no confidence on the president's policies in Iraq." Republicans "acknowledged that there need to be changes made," he said.\nBut Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., trumpeted the chamber's rejection of the Democratic call for a withdrawal timetable.\n"It is an absolute repudiation of the cut-and-run strategy put forward by the Democrats," Frist said.\nThe fate of the legislation is uncertain. The House version of the bill, which sets Pentagon policy and authorizes spending, doesn't include the Iraq language or any of the provisions on the detention, interrogation or prosecution of terrorism suspects.\nThe measure faces a veto threat from the administration over a provision that imposes a blanket prohibition on the use of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of terrorism suspects in U.S. custody.\nEven so, the Senate's political statement was clear -- and made even more stinging when the vote was held with Bush abroad, in Asia, an embarrassing step Congress often tries to avoid. With Democrats pressing their amendment calling for a calendar for withdrawal, Republicans worked to fend off a frontal attack by Democrats by calling on the White House to do more.\nIn a 58-40 vote, Senate Republicans killed the measure Democratic leaders had offered to force GOP lawmakers to take a stand on the war.\nThe Senate then voted 79-19 in favor of a Republican alternative stating that 2006 "should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty," with Iraqi forces taking the lead in providing security to create the conditions for the phased redeployment of U.S. forces.\nLike the Democratic proposal, the GOP measure is purely advisory, a statement of the Senate's thinking. It does not require the administration to do anything.\nRather, it simply calls for the Bush administration to "explain to Congress and the American people its strategy for the successful completion of the mission in Iraq" and to provide reports on U.S. foreign policy and military operations in Iraq every three months until all U.S. combat brigades have been withdrawn.