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Independent (UK)Iraq withdrawal pressure on President BushLast Updated: 2:18am BST 16/07/2007
The White House remained under intense pressure at the weekend to issue a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq but rejected the latest call from two senior Republican senators to restrict the mission of US troops.
Senators John Warner and Richard Lugar attempted to force President George W Bush to change course and curtail his "surge" of nearly 30,000 extra troops into Iraq. They proposed that Congress should reauthorise a sharply narrowed American mission in Iraq, to pull troops out of the sectarian cross-fire, and reasign them to battle terrorists, train Iraqi soldiers and secure Iraq's borders.
Stephen Hadley, the National Security Adviser, said yesterday that the administration had a "very orderly process" set out for reviewing whether its Iraq strategy was working and that this should be allowed to continue.
Asked whether Mr Bush could live with the plan proposed by the senators, Hadley said: "No." He added that the president was staying with his plan to evaluate progress in Iraq in September and decide on a course of action from there.
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