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Bremer, Rumsfeld face senators on Iraq funds
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration's $87 billion request for military and reconstruction spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is urgently needed to head off rising discontent with the American occupation, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad said Wednesday. "Most Iraqis welcomed us as liberators, and we glowed with pleasure at that welcome," the administrator, L. Paul Bremer, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "But now the reality of foreign troops on the streets is starting to chafe. Some Iraqis are starting to see us more as occupiers than liberators. Let's not hide the fact. Some of this is inevitable, but faster progress on reconstruction will help." Bremer rejected a suggestion from the Senate's top Democrat that the $20 billion request for reconstruction funds be separated from the portion of the measure funding military operations, calling the supplemental appropriation "a carefully considered, integrated request." "The link to the safety of our troops is indirect, but no less real," Bremer said. "The people who ambush our troops are small in number, and they're not doing it because they don't have dependable electric supplies, but the population's view of America is directly linked to their cooperation in hunting down those people who do attack us." Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, said Tuesday that the Iraq reconstruction request is a tough sell -- even among Republicans -- when lawmakers face cuts in domestic spending. Daschle said President Bush's request for reconstruction funds may have to be split from the rest of the bill to allow it to pass. "We just turned down $292 million for Indian health care in this country. We're told that we can't afford it, and we don't have the resources," Daschle said. "And yet he is now asking for health care for the Iraqi people. He's asking for education for the Iraqi children. He's asking for money for an Iraqi highway bill -- highway construction." But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Wednesday that "the price of sending terrorists a message that we are not willing to spend what it takes ... would be far greater." In a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Rumsfeld said that restoring order in Iraq will lay the foundation for restoring self-rule. U.S. troops face ongoing guerrilla attacks in the country nearly six months after ousting Saddam Hussein. "The way that we can leave that country better than we found it, a lot better -- no more mass graves, no more prisons filled with people -- we can leave it by investing in the kinds of security that we're talking about here," Rumsfeld said. "That is what this request is overwhelmingly about." But Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, an outspoken critic of the war, said the spending bill "is the beginning of an enormous commitment to Iraq." "We have the duty to understand the enormity for the potential consequences and to insist on an explanation of the consequences for the American people before we act," said Byrd, the appropriations panel's ranking Democrat. Some Democrats criticized the Bush administration's comparison of the Iraq bill to the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe after World War II. Appropriations Committee Chairman Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, noted that the Marshall Plan wasn't proposed until three years after the German surrender in 1945. "I'm supporting this because I believe we'll get our people home sooner if we move now to create something that will create democracy in Iraq," Stevens said. The administration has asked Congress for $51 billion to pay for military operations in Iraq and $20 billion for reconstruction. The request includes $2 billion to speed up training of Iraqi police and another $2 billion for a new Iraqi army, Bremer said. Other funds will help establish security forces to guard Iraq's oil and power industries from sabotage, a chronic problem for the U.S.-led occupation but one Bremer said was on the wane. "I'm not being Pollyanna," he said. "We will have bad days. We will have sabotage. But the trend is in our favor." An additional $11 billion will pay for military operations in Afghanistan, where U.S. and allied troops are fighting the remnants of the Taliban regime and al Qaeda, the terrorist network behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, and $800 million will go toward rebuilding that country. The remainder of the money, about $4 billion, is earmarked for operations in other parts of the world.
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