Warns "Fur Is Going Fly" In Republican Ranks Over The War
It's not just President Bush who exhibits a disturbing focus on the legacy he will leave behind once his reign in the White House is over, even while hundreds of American soldiers are being killed and wounded in Iraq every month.
Republican senator George Voinovich has told White House svengali Karl Rove that Bush must pull together a workable plan to get American troops out of Iraq, or his legacy will be left in ruins.
He told CNN that he had given a clear warning to Rove that :
Not surprisingly, there is plenty of fury from commenters at the CNN blog, here, who vent their disgust that a Republican senator appears to be more concerned with how history will view President Bush, and his legacy, than he is about the constant death and mutilation of American soldiers in Iraq.“The president is a young man and should think about his legacy.”
He should know history will not be kind unless he can come up with a plan that protects the troops and stabilizes the region,” Voinovich said he told Karl Rove, whom Bush dubbed “the architect” of his 2004 re-election.
Voinovich added that other Republicans are close to speaking out against the President’s current strategy.
“I won’t mention anyone’s name. But I have every reason to believe that the fur is going to start to fly, perhaps sooner than what they may have wanted.”
In private, Voinovich is more blunt, using a profanity to describe the White House’s handling of Iraq by charging the administration “f—ed up” the war.
“I got into this to get them to move, and they’re moving,” said Voinovich, who is pushing for the president to put together a workable plan for withdrawing U.S. troops that will be ready in time for a September progress report on the military surge from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.
And while Voinovich is giving the White House some breathing space until September to receive the progress report from Gen. Petraeus, the senator is privately warning if there’s not a dramatic new strategy ready to be unveiled in the fall, he will endorse a Democratic plan mandating a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 120 days.
His break with the White House came one day after another senior Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, delivered a dramatic Senate floor speech declaring the president’s current strategy was not working.
A war, by the way, that this Republican senator heartily endorsed in 2002, and continued to support until only very recently, when it became clear that going into the 2008 elections, with no end to the war in sight, would all but destroy the Republican Party.
