McConnell sees ‘good chance’ for new Iraq direction

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Sunday he thinks there is a good chance that President Bush will take a new direction on Iraq following the status report next month from General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker.

Though McConnell said he would not like to prejudge the highly anticipated report on Iraq, but he added that “there’s a good chance that in September we’ll go in a different direction.”

{mosads}The senator stressed that this would not mean “an arbitrary surrender date,” which is what he is accusing Democrats of trying to do.

“But I think it’s entirely possible that the president will lay out a strategy that takes us into a different place, which hopefully, at the end of the day, ends up with some American troops forward deployed in the Middle East at the end of this draw down that many of us are anticipating over a period of time,” he said on Fox News Sunday.

McConnell criticized Democrats for prejudging the outcome of the troop surge, which Bush set in motion at the beginning of the year, but he reserved his harshest words for the Iraqi government.

The senator said Iraq might be better off without Prime Minister Nouril al-Maliki at the helm though noted that it is not up to the U.S. to select the Iraqi leader and that Maliki was democratically elected.

“But by any objective standard, any objective standard, the one thing that there is broad bipartisan agreement on in the United States Senate is that the Iraqi government has been a huge disappointment,” McConnell said. “All of the kind of political compromises that we were looking to them to make, they have not yet made. Maybe it's not too late, but it's time they get about it.”