Democratic leaders in the US Congress offered major concessions on Friday over a war spending bill that would provide money for the Iraq war, but the offers were rejected by the White House.
After a close-door meeting with top White House aides on Capital Hill, Democratic leaders said the White House said "no" to everything they proposed.
"To say I was disappointed in the meeting is an understatement," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada..
Democratic leaders offered to strip from a war spending bill billions of US dollars in domestic spending that was opposed by President George W. Bush, if the White House agreed to a withdrawal timetable in the bill. They also offered to give the president authority to waiver compliance with a timetable to pull out US troops out of Iraq.
But the offers were declined by the White House, and no agreement emerged.
White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten, who rejected the deal at the meeting, said any timetable would send the wrong signal to the enemies of the United States. "Whether waivable or not, timelines send exactly the wrong signal to our adversaries, to our allies and, most importantly, to the troops in the field," he said.
Even without agreement with the White House, Democrats said they would try to pass a bill next week to provide funding to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not rule out the bill would contain a withdrawal timetable. "Nothing is off the table. The one thing that has to be on the table is accountability and this administration has never been willing to be accountable for this war in Iraq," she said.
The Congress was trying to approve nearly 100 billion dollars to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through September, but the Democratic-led legislature and the White House differed over whether any conditions should be attached to that money.
A war spending bill passed the Congress last month, which would have required the Bush administration to start withdrawing US troops from Iraq by Oct. 1, with a goal of ending US combat operations there by next March, but the bill was vetoed by Bush.
(Xinhua News Agency May 19, 2007)
