No sign of compromise on Iraq by Bush, Democrats

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President George W. Bush and Democrats who control the U.S. Congress are on a collision course over Iraq war funding with neither side yet showing a willingness to back down.

The festering feud is the most dramatic example of political brinkmanship since a 1995 budget dispute between then-Democratic President Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans led to a government shutdown.

Back then, Americans perceived Clinton as the voice of reason and saw Republicans as over-reaching in their drive to cut the federal budget.

But in this case, the outcome is not so clear. Democrats were elected to control of Congress last November on a platform to scale back U.S. involvement in Iraq, and are trying to do that by attaching a withdrawal timetable to Bush's request for $100 billion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although polls shows strong support for the Democrats' position, White House officials believe Americans will ultimately agree with Bush that even though the Iraq war is unpopular and people are weary of it, in the end the troops must be funded.

For all the talk last January of bipartisan cooperation between the Bush White House and the new Democratic majority in Congress, partisan battles are again the norm in Washington.

The White House is singling out Democrats every day for criticism on the Iraq funding bill, warning troop tours of duty in Iraq will be extended if the money is not there to rotate them out. On Thursday, it was Vice President Dick Cheney's turn to lead the attack.

"I do believe that a significant portion of the Democrats, including, I think, (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi, are adamantly opposed to the war and prepared to pack it in and come home in defeat, rather than put in place or support a policy that will lead to victory," Cheney told conservative talk show radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Democrats have yet to submit their timetable legislation to Bush for his expected veto. They have to first work out differences between the House bill, which has a mandatory September 1, 2008 deadline for pulling out combat troops, and the Senate version that mandates the withdrawal to begin sooner, but sets next March 31 as a goal for them to be out.

Democrats are confident they will be able to resolve their differences and get a bill to Bush when they return from Easter recess, and they want Bush to be willing to talk to Congress about it as a co-equal branch of government.

"He should sit down and talk to us, we're reasonable," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Fox News affiliate KVVU in Las Vegas on Wednesday. "We've compromised on issues before. He hasn't, because he's had Congress give him everything he wants. We're not going to do that anymore. We don't have to do that anymore."

Former Secretary of State James Baker, a Bush family friend who chaired a bipartisan commission known as the Iraq Study Group that late last year came up with 79 recommendations for Iraq policy changes, offered a possible compromise.

Bush was seen as largely ignoring many of the key recommendations of the report, such as direct engagement with Iran and Syria.

Baker wrote in an opinion article on Thursday for The Washington Post that Bush should embrace all the report's recommendations and call on Democrats to join him and that if they did not, "the burden of rejecting a unified bipartisan approach would fall on them."

"Moving forward this way, which would require compromise by both sides, would be far better than continuing a political dogfight that can only undermine U.S. foreign policy goals in Iraq and the Middle East," Baker wrote.