Straw in the wind: Republican base dividing on Iraq

[Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Rep. Jones, Resolving To Follow His Heart
Rising Iraq Toll Moves Republican To Call for Pullout
By Marcia Davis
Washington Post
Friday, June 17, 2005

It started at a military funeral about two years ago, this heartache that
Republican Walter B. Jones says has gripped him and won't let go.

It's the kind of pain that gnaws and prods. So much so that it pushed the
North Carolina congressman to begin writing to other families of dead
servicemen and women. (He's up to at least 1,300.)

And to collect pictures of the fallen. (There are rows of posters bearing
them outside his Capitol Hill office.)

And just yesterday, that heartache pushed him to stand in the House press
gallery with three colleagues, including two Democrats, and call for
President Bush to set up a plan to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq
by October 2006.

"What we all agree on is that it is time for a public discussion of our
goals and the future of our military involvement in Iraq," Jones, 62, told
the reporters packed shoulder to shoulder to witness this bipartisan effort.
There he was, a proudly conservative Republican co-sponsoring a resolution
with Reps. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and Dennis
Kucinich (D-Ohio). You know Kucinich, that hard-core antiwar Democrat who
ran for president.

You know Jones, too. If not his name, then certainly his Freedom Fries. He's
the guy largely responsible for the rechristening of the House cafeteria
fries, so angry was he a few years back that the French wouldn't get with
the war program.

But heartache has a way of changing a man's mind. And Jones, a man of deep
Catholic faith, talks openly about listening to his heart.

It's time now, Jones says, "to take a fresh look at where we are and where
we are going," not to focus on the past, on those silly fries or even those
serious and now unfounded stories about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Too many lives have been lost, too many people have been wounded. He spent
much of yesterday quoting the numbers over and over -- 1,700 dead, 12,000
wounded.

"I just believe that we have done as much as we can do in Iraq," he says, an
intensity in his voice as he repeatedly outlined his argument about why he's
broken ranks with his party. We've toppled Saddam Hussein, he says. We've
put Iraq on the road to democracy. And we've trained its military. "What
else should our goals be?"

Calls from his constituents have been running about 50-50, says the
congressman, who has three military bases in his district, including Camp
Lejeune.

Jones's stance, though, is not popular among members of his party. Robin
Hayes, a fellow North Carolina Republican and a member of the House Armed
Services Committee, told him this week he was just flat wrong, Hayes said
yesterday.

"It's ill-timed, poorly thought out," says Hayes, who took a trip to Iraq in
May.

And House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who's certainly got a lot of other
things on his mind these days, issued a statement: "I think setting a time
schedule for withdrawal from Iraq undermines our efforts to fight the war on
terror. Why would you give your enemies a timetable? It never has worked; it
won't work. We are fighting this war on terror to win."

Early yesterday afternoon, Jones said he hadn't directly heard from the
White House and didn't expect to. He's used to being ignored by the
administration.

But White House spokesman Scott McClellan did respond, saying setting a
withdrawal would send the wrong message to Iraqi insurgents.

"This message would say to the terrorists: All you have to do is wait until
that day when our troops leave and then you can start carrying out those
attacks and just hold out," McClellan says.

Jones believes other Republicans will swing his way down the line, others,
he says, who have privately told him as much.

"If doing what's right means I don't return to Congress, then it's God's
will," he says. "And God knows my heart."

Full:
/www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061601639.html?referrer=email