July 14, 2007	Saturday	Jamadi-us-Sani 28, 1428

WASHINGTON, July 13: A day after the US House of Representatives set a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the lawmakers to give the Bush administration’s policy more time to work. In a series of television interviews on the morning after the congressional snub, Ms Rice asked lawmakers to wait till September to “make a coherent judgment of where we are.” On Wednesday, President George W. Bush made a similar appeal, saying “I believe we can succeed in Iraq, and I know we must.” At a White House news conference Mr Bush also warned that negative public opinion polls would not force him to pull back US troops.

But hours after Mr Bush’s news conference, the Democratic-controlled House voted 223-201 for a resolution calling for the withdrawal of most US combat forces from Iraq by April1 of next year.

The redeployment would begin within 120 days and the president would be forced to report to Congress on why soldiers should stay in Iraq for limited purposes such as fighting terrorism or training Iraqi forces.

Four Republicans voted for the resolution while 10 Democrats voted against it.

The House resolution has to be adopted by the Senate before it can be sent to President Bush for signing.

But the Republicans are stronger in the Senate than in the House and they can prevent the resolution’s adoption in the upper chamber.

Even if the Senate approves the resolution, President Bush can still veto it, as he did with an earlier bill of similar nature.

The move in the House, however, reflects the mood of the Democratic lawmakers who won control of the legislature in the midterm elections in November and regard their victory as a referendum against Mr Bush’s Iraq policy.

Neither the fear of a veto nor a progress report the Bush administration issued on Thursday, however, prevented Democratic lawmakers from adopting the resolution.

The Bush administration’s interim Iraq report shows satisfactory progress on eight of 18 benchmarks outlined by Congress. The report shows unsatisfactory progress on eight others and mixed results in two. It says there has been little progress on key political issues such as oil revenue-sharing and political reconciliation.

Congress set up the benchmarks in May, when it authorized continued funding for the Iraq war with the provision that the administration certify by July 15, and again on September 15, that the Iraqis are making progress toward those benchmarks.