Pelosi Responds to Bush Veto Threat on Iraq Bill

[babylonsister]

http://www.politico.com/blogs/thecrypt/

March 10, 2007

Pelosi Responds to Bush Veto Threat on Iraq Bill

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) responded today to the threat by President Bush to veto the Iraq funding bill. House Democrats want to set a timetable for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq, which Bush and GOP congressional leaders vehemently oppose. Pelosi said that Bush only offers an "open-ended commitment to war without end" and rejects benchmarks for political reform by the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that Bush himself proposed. The $115 billion is scheduled to be taken up by the full House Appropriations Committee next week, and will be on the House floor the following week.

Here is Pelosi's statement in full:

"President Bush's Iraq policies weaken our military's readiness, dishonor our nation's promises to our veterans and fail to hold the Iraqi government accountable for overdue reforms.

"By threatening to veto the House's military funding bill, the president is walking away from his promise to the American people. The president has vowed to veto a bill that contains his own reform benchmarks for performance by the Iraqi government, our Defense Department's own standards for troop readiness and America's promise to our veterans.

"With his veto threat, the president offers only an open-ended commitment to a war without end that dangerously ignores the repeated warnings of military leaders, including the commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, who declared in Baghdad this week that the conflict cannot be resolved militarily.

"The House of Representatives will soon have a chance to choose a new direction for the American people. The bill the president dismisses out of hand will measure the Iraqi government's actions by the standards Mr. Bush himself set, conforms deployment of our troops to existing military standards for readiness and provides badly needed help to an overburdened military and veterans' medical system wracked by scandal."