US Senate panel debates rejection of troop increase

WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Reuters) Brushing aside President George W Bush's plea to give his new war strategy a chance, Republicans and Democrats in the US Senate moved ahead today with a resolution opposing his plan to send more troops to Iraq.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee took up a bipartisan resolution drafted by its chairman, Sen Joseph Biden, and several of his colleagues that rejects Bush's decision to add 21,500 troops in Baghdad and Anbar province.

Many members of the panel are known critics of Bush's plan, and the committee was expected to pass the nonbinding resolution in some form as soon as Wednesday, sending it to the Senate floor for a vote next week.

''Our resolution of disapproval is not, I emphasise not, an attempt to embarrass the president, (or) to demonstrate isolation,'' Biden, a Delaware Democrat and presidential hopeful, said at the start of the hearing.

''What it is, is an attempt to save the president from making a significant mistake, with regard to our policy in Iraq.'' The resolution was designed to let Bush know that senators in both parties believed sending more US troops into a civil war was ''the wrong way to go,'' Biden said.

In his State of the Union address to a defiant Congress on Tuesday, Bush insisted it was not too late to shape the outcome in Iraq.

''Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq -- and I ask you to give it a chance to work,'' Bush told the joint session of Congress, the first time he faced a House of Representatives and Senate both controlled by Democrats since he took office.

The senior Republican on the committee, Sen Richard Lugar of Indiana, opposed the resolution because it was ''the wrong tool for this stage in the Iraq debate''. Bush was deeply invested in his plan and had said he would ignore the resolution, Lugar told the committee.

'DIVIDED AND IN DISARRAY' ''This vote will force nothing on the president, but it will confirm to our friends and allies that we are divided and in disarray,'' Lugar said.

A Republican co-sponsor of the resolution and opponent of the troop increase, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, called on senators to say where they stood on the ''most divisive issue in the country since Vietnam.

''Sure it's tough,'' he said. ''If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes.'' ''There is no strategy,'' Hagel, a former Marine who served in Vietnam, said of Bush's plan. ''This is a ping pong game with American lives.'' ''These young men and women we put in Anbar province, in Baghdad, are not beans. They are real lives, and we better be damn sure we know what we are doing,'' Hagel said.

Biden said that once the committee acted, he was willing to negotiate a consensus version with a leading Republican senator on national security issues, Sen. John Warner of Virginia.

Warner is not on the committee but has also proposed a bipartisan resolution opposing the troop increase.

Biden said the troop increase would take five months to complete and warned that if Bush did not change his mind, the resolution would just be the committee's first step.

''I will support other means by which we can effectively constitutionally limit the president,'' he said. There were other ways -- such as rewriting the authorization of force in Iraq passed by Congress in 2002 -- but none could be done quickly, Biden said.

REUTERS SI RK2150