Reid says Bush must learn to compromise

RENO -- President Bush would be to blame, not the Democrat-controlled Congress, if he vetoes a supplemental spending bill for U.S. troops because he has rejected repeated invitations to discuss a compromise, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday.

"I'm a legislator. I know how to compromise. He doesn't. That's what he's got to learn," Reid, D-Nev., said.

"Compromise is not a bad word. I think it's been real hard for him to understand he can't do what he did before we had a new Congress in town.

"He's going to have to learn to deal with it."

Reid made the remarks after he met with a mixed reception at a veterans hospital where he took his plea for troop withdrawals by the fall and called the war in Iraq the "worst foreign policy blunder" in U.S. history.

"The training wheels have to come off and Iraq has got to police it's own civil war. We should not be policing a civil war," Reid told about 80 veterans, doctors and others at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Reno.

"People say if we leave Iraq it's going to be chaos," he said. "It's chaos right now. So whenever we leave, whether it is six days from now or six months from now -- we know we'll be out of there in 20 months because that is when Bush is out of office -- it is going to be chaos."

Two of the half-dozen or more skeptics in the audience offered pointed criticism of Reid, including one who said the senator's "irresponsible statements" are undermining U.S. troops.

"You are using this as a political football. It's not acceptable," said John Edwards, a veteran and member of a local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, whose national organization has called for Congress to approve funding for the Iraq war without what it called "an arbitrary withdrawal timeline."

Reid said he agrees the nation must make sure U.S. troops have "not died in vain in Iraq."

"Conversely, we have to tell it how it is. We can't paint a picture that doesn't exist," he said.

"Before we invaded, there was not a single terrorist in Iraq. I recognize Saddam Hussein was an evil man and I'm glad he's gone. But invading Iraq did not help the situation. It made it worse."

Reid said earlier he will propose legislation to cut off funds for combat operations and provide money for only three missions: targeted counterterrorism operations; training and equipping the Iraqi security forces; and providing security for U.S. personnel and infrastructure.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates criticized the strategy Wednesday, saying such limits could pull troops from Baghdad neighborhoods, which have been the focus of the latest military buildup in Iraq.

"One real possibility is, if we abandon some of these areas and withdraw into the countryside or whatever to do these targeted missions, that you could have a fairly significant ethnic cleansing inside Baghdad or in Iraq more broadly," Gates said.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., is among those who argue Congress has no business "micromanaging this war."

"Our troops are in Iraq fighting an enemy that wants to destroy our way of life, and setting a date for withdrawal would undermine our commanders," he said last week.