Levin focuses ahead on Iraq: 12/30/06
By Gordon Trowbridge
Detroit News Washington Bureau
Hearings will be his first chance to use Dems’ control of Congress to help shape Iraq policy.
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Carl Levin’s first hearings as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee will question administration officials and outside experts about possible new strategies in Iraq — and not about possible mistakes in conduct of the war.
Levin said this week in an interview with The Detroit News that in a series of hearings scheduled for January, he does not plan to call past administration officials such as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The aim, Levin said, is not to look back.
“This is a going-forward effort on Iraq,” said Levin, D-Mich. “That will be our main focus.”
The hearings, scheduled to begin Jan. 11, will be Levin’s first opportunity as one of the Democratic Party’s leading voices on military issues to use the party’s control of Congress to shape Iraq policy.
Levin and Sen. John McCain, the committee’s top Republican, sent a letter this week to new Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, asking them to appear Jan. 11. Ideally, Levin said, that hearing would come after President Bush unveils his much-awaited new strategy on Iraq; if that unveiling is delayed, the first committee hearing would be as well.
In their letter, Levin and McCain asked the Pentagon officials to prepare testimony on the justifications for the president’s policy and on other options that were considered and discarded.
Two more hearings, tentatively scheduled for Jan. 18 and Jan. 25, would quiz outside defense experts on their analysis of the war.