Levin to Use Top Armed Services Post to Push U.S. Iraq Pullout: 11/10/06
By Tony Capaccio and Kelly Riddell
Bloomberg
Democrats’ takeover of the Senate puts Carl Levin, a man who’s said the U.S. must begin to pull troops out of Iraq, in charge of the Armed Services Committee.
Levin has pressed the Bush administration to force Iraqis to take more responsibility for their security and to set a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. He’ll have the power to convene hearings, subpoena documents and bring national media attention to Democrats’ differences with the administration over this issue and any other he chooses.
Expect Levin to “unleash a spate of oversight hearings,” said Gordon Adams, a professor of defense policy for George Washington University. “He’s going to be a bulldog.”
The armed services panel writes defense policy and authorizes billions of dollars in military spending.
Levin, of Michigan, probably won’t press for major cuts in the defense budget. Democrats realize they need to convince the public they will be as aggressive as Republicans on defense issues, analysts said. Levin has signaled that he would sharpen oversight of the Pentagon’s growing use of private contractors.
Levin, the ranking Democrat on armed services, will succeed Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia as chairman when the 110th Congress convenes in January.
Serve Notice
Levin, talking to reporters Nov. 8, said the U.S. should serve notice to the Iraqis that in a reasonable period of time the U.S. will begin a phased withdrawal.
“I think the American people basically support this kind of urgent statement to the Iraqis, that they are going to have to get their political house in order,” Levin said.
“We cannot do more for them than we’ve already done, which is to give them an opportunity to work out their political differences and to build a nation,” he said. The U.S. cannot withdraw “precipitously,” he said. “I don’t think most Democrats want to do it precipitously.”
Bush has rejected any notion of a timetable. Still, his decision to oust Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary signals a readiness to change strategy. Rumsfeld’s replacement, former CIA chief Robert Gates, is one of 10 members of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel trying to shape a new policy.
Bush plans to submit the Gates nomination to the Armed Services Committee for confirmation before the end of the year. Levin voted against Gates when he was nominated for CIA director in 1991 over questions he may have misled Congress in testimony about the late-1980s Iran-Contra scandal.
`Fresh Look’
Levin said it would be “premature” to discuss how he might vote on Gates this time. “I want to give him a fair and fresh look,” he said. “A lot of time has passed.”
Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, who spent seven years investigating the arms-for-hostages scandal, said in his final report that, while Gates’s congressional testimony often seemed “scripted and less than candid,” there was “insufficient evidence to charge Gates with a crime.”
Loren Thompson, a defense analyst for the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Virginia research group, said Levin will be under pressure to show bipartisanship in the Gates hearing, yet may “raise concerns about Mr. Gates’s candor” during Iran- Contra.
May Look Back
Levin has had a running fight with the Bush administration over its candor on Iraq and may use his chairmanship to investigate the flawed assumptions used to justify the March 2003 invasion, the number of troops that have been deployed there and other strategies, analysts said.
Levin “has substantive differences and frustrations about the administration not providing information” on its Iraq policy, said Brookings Institution senior fellow Thomas Mann.
Levin has pressed, for example, to know more about the evolution of U.S. policy on handling detainees — a policy he believes led to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as well as in U.S. prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in Afghanistan.
Levin, 72, may also probe the rationale behind U.S. troop levels in Iraq. It was his February 2003 questioning of then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki about how many troops it would take to keep order in postwar Iraq that led the general to say “on the order of several hundred thousand,” far more than planned.
Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, attacked that response. As the insurgency mounted, administration critics cited Shinseki’s advice as the type the White House ignored.
Skelton Leads House Panel
Levin’s counterpart in the House, Democrat Ike Skelton of Missouri, said he’ll use his chairmanship of that chamber’s armed services panel to press for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Americans “want to pass that baton off as quickly and as efficiently as we can and put the burden on the Iraqi shoulders,” Skelton told reporters Nov. 8. The first task “is to speed up the training of the Iraqi forces, both military and police forces,” he said.
Skelton has recommended that for every three Iraqi brigades brought to readiness, one American brigade could be redeployed from Iraq, a formula Bush rejected as “too rigid.”
Skelton said he’ll also use his committee to investigate fraud, waste and abuse within the military and possibly the defense industry as well.
Adams predicted Levin will sharpen the Senate panel’s scrutiny of Pentagon contracting practices. “Levin is likely to take a harder stance on ill-qualified or corrupt contractors used by the U.S. government to help rebuild Iraq,” Adams said.
Targeting Halliburton
Levin might focus on Halliburton Co. and whether the Army has provided adequate oversight for the No. 1 contactor in Iraq.
The senator revealed in June 2004 that Houston-based Halliburton’s January 2004 receipt of a $1.2 billion U.S. Army contract for work on Iraq’s southern oilfields came three days after Pentagon auditors warned of billing flaws at the company. Levin said the Army never justified the award. As a committee chairman, he’d be in the position to compel justification.
Levin has criticized the Pentagon’s growing use of private contractors for everything from laundry to security — contracts that grew to $17 billion in fiscal 2003 from $7 billion in 1994, according to the Center for Public Integrity in Washington.
“This is an area that cries out for oversight,” Levin during a Sept. 27 hearing on acquisition practices.
The Pentagon assigns “its most capable managers to major acquisition programs and tracks them closely at the highest levels,” he said. Service contracts “get far less management attention and suffer from problems that are even worse.”
Program Cuts Unlikely
While the defense industry might initially be worried by Levin’s ascendancy, Democrats aren’t likely to make major cuts in weapons programs, said Dave Baker, a defense analyst for Stanford Group Company, a nonpartisan policy research organization based in Washington. “The `knee-jerk’ will be `Oh my God, the Democrats are in charge — here goes the defense piece of the economy,”‘ Baker said. “But I think not.”
“Some of these big acquisition programs have moved well through the acquisition process and it’s going to be much harder for the Congress to make any deep cuts,” he said.
Democrats “have come to see that opposing weapons systems gets no electoral mileage,” Thompson said.