Senate panel rejects troop boost

WASHINGTON — One day after President Bush implored Congress to give his Iraq strategy a chance to succeed, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution on Wednesday denouncing the plan to send more troops to Baghdad, setting up the most direct confrontation over the war since it began nearly four years ago.

The full Senate is poised to consider the nonbinding, yet strongly symbolic, repudiation of Bush as early as next Wednesday. Democratic leaders agreed to tone down the language in the resolution, hoping to make it more acceptable to Republicans in an effort to send a strong bipartisan rebuke to the White House.

"This is not designed to say, 'Mr. President, ah-ha, you're wrong,"' said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., chairman of the committee. "This is designed to say, 'Mr. President, please don't go do this."'

Even as the White House delicately worked to persuade some Republicans to consider the president's approach, the administration also said congressional action would not interrupt the plan to send more than 20,000 U.S. troops to Iraq.

In a television interview on CNN, Vice President Dick Cheney declared: "It won't stop us."

The Foreign Relations Committee approved the resolution on a vote of 12-9, with Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., joining 11 Democrats in supporting the measure. But even Republicans who opposed the resolution, including Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, expressed deep doubt about whether the troop increase could succeed and suggested it was time for a new direction.

The committee rejected amendments that would have strengthened or softened the resolution, which described Bush's plan to increase troops as contrary to the national interest. Some Republicans expressed reluctance to support the legislation because they feared it could be seen as a political attack on Bush but left themselves open to backing a similar plan offered by Sen. John W. Warner, R-W.Va.

The Foreign Relations Committee tends to carry a more-centrist outlook than the Senate as a whole, but Democrats say they believe that at least 8 of the 49 Republicans might join with nearly all Democrats in embracing a resolution — Biden's or Warner's — critical of Bush's troop increase plan.

Sen. George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio, said he was disappointed that the administration had failed to extend an olive branch to Congress. He said he told a White House official at the State of the Union address on Tuesday that the stalemate in Iraq was threatening to consume the Bush presidency.