Harry Reid: "Someone has to get the message to this man that there has to be significant change." [View All]

NYT: With 3 Iraq Reports to Come, Bush Plans Week of Scrutiny
By JIM RUTENBERG and CARL HULSE
Published: December 9, 2006

....After a meeting with Mr. Bush on Friday, several Democratic leaders said they remained skeptical that he was ready to embrace a substantially different approach (in Iraq).

“Someone has to get the message to this man that there has to be significant changes,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Democratic majority leader. He said Mr. Bush, through his comments and demeanor at the session, indicated that he was not receptive to the report, which Mr. Reid said was not the work of “do-gooders” but was written by “Democrats and Republicans with wide-ranging experience.”

Mr. Reid’s top deputy in the Senate starting next year, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said Mr. Bush had compared himself in the meeting to President Truman at the start of the cold war. But Mr. Durbin noted that Truman was working with a broad range of NATO allies at the time while keeping negotiations open with the Soviet Union and others — a jab at the administration’s decision so far against including Syria and Iran in talks on Iraq....

***

Flexing their own muscles, Democratic leaders promised heightened scrutiny of a forthcoming request from the administration for as much as $150 billion in new emergency spending for the war. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate have generally approved the administration’s previous requests, though they enforced some changes.

Given the increasing number of employees working for private contractors in Iraq and the federal money flowing to Halliburton, a company Mr. Reid described as the “poster child for what is bad about this war,” Mr. Reid said the new Congress would not simply sign off on the request.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/world/middleeast/09prexy.html