Congress selective on funding for Iraq

WASHINGTON — Senate appropriators on Tuesday joined their House counterparts in warning the Bush administration against using taxpayer money to build permanent military bases in Iraq, stripping $177 million from the president's request for emergency defense-construction projects in the country to underscore their point.

The move, which cuts the $348 million the administration had sought for bases and roads inside Iraq, came despite approval by the Senate Appropriations Committee of an emergency spending bill that added $15 billion to the overall amount requested by President Bush in February.

The $107 billion Senate bill, which passed the committee overwhelmingly, provides $67.6 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other spending.

Like the House version of the spending bill, Senate appropriators included a strongly worded warning to the Pentagon that they will not approve emergency funding for "requests which propose a longer-term presence" in Iraq.

Pentagon and State Department officials have insisted that the U.S. military is not building permanent American bases in Iraq and that all facilities currently under construction will eventually be handed over to Iraq.

Most of the funding stripped from the president's construction request came from a proposed $167 million project to build a series of roads in Iraq to bypass major urban areas, a project military commanders insist is needed to avoid roadside bombs common in cities. The Senate committee reduced the project to just $38.7 million, saying it did not believe the roads would reduce the threat from insurgent attacks.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday brushed aside suggestions that the United States wants an indefinite troop presence and permanent military bases in Iraq.

"I don't think that anybody believes that we really want to be there longer than we have to," Rice told the House Appropriations Committee's foreign-operations panel.