World & Nation

WASHINGTON [HTML_REMOVED][HTML_REMOVED] The co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group urged Congress on Thursday to build a bipartisan consensus around their recommendations and use it to press President Bush to change course in Iraq.

They didn't get their wish.

"I hope we don't treat this like a fruit salad, and say 'I like this but I don't like that,'" former Secretary of State James A. Baker III pleaded before the Senate Armed Services Committee as it considered the findings of the report.

The senators promptly ignored his request, picking and choosing among the panel's findings, praising some and condemning others.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., disagreed strongly with the panel's call for a withdrawal of most U.S. troops by 2008, calling it "a recipe that will lead to our defeat."

Sens. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., all questioned the commission's proposal that the administration approach Iran in search of help in stabilizing Iraq.

 Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., sounded skeptical of Baker's view that Israel could help by returning the occupied Golan Heights to Syria.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, took issue with the panel's suggestion that the United States should consider warning Iraq's government that U.S. troops could be withdrawn unless political reforms accelerate.

All critiques came on top of earlier negative reactions. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., complained that the panel didn't call for a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops. The conservative New York Post derided Baker and his co-chairman, former Democratic Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, on its front page as "Surrender Monkeys," complete with a striking photo montage of two simians wearing the elder statesmen's faces.

It wasn't exactly the reception Baker and Hamilton had in mind.

When Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., asked the former secretary of State what he wanted Congress to do with his report, Baker replied: "If the Congress would come together behind supporting, let's say utopianly, all of the recommendations of this report, that would do a lot toward moving things downtown [at the White House]."

"Utopianly" was right: Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the committee chairman, broke in at that point to say that Congress should not explicitly endorse any recommendations until it has a chance to consider the findings of similar policy reviews under way at the Pentagon and the State Department.

"Yes, the Congress is very impressed with your report," Warner said. "But ... before the Congress rushes in, I'm just hopeful we can have all points."

WASHINGTON [HTML_REMOVED] The Pentagon, which has resisted appeals from federal drug agents to play a bigger role in the campaign to curb Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade, has pledged more support for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's counter-narcotics efforts.

While the $2.3 billion profit from opium trafficking has helped to arm the Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has long maintained that drug interdiction is primarily a law enforcement responsibility, one that belongs to Afghan authorities and the British troops in the NATO operation.

But Rep. Henry J. Hyde, R.-Ill., chairman of the House Committee on International Relations, and other critics have urged the Pentagon to do more, including transporting and protecting the DEA agents who are working in the dangerous country.

In a letter Hyde received Wednesday, Undersecretary of Defense Eric S. Edelman wrote, " ... we have taken your concerns seriously and will work more closely with DEA to make use of this important capability."

Edelman's letter arrived a day after the Los Angeles Times reported that U.S. military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some requests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized crime syndicates.

Hyde, U.S. and U.N. counter-narcotics experts and Afghan officials told the Times that the Department of Defense needs to target major drug traffickers in Afghanistan.