The Iraqi government must be told that U.S. presence was "not open-ended and that, as a matter of fact, we need to begin a phased redeployment of forces from Iraq in four to six months," Levin said on ABC's "This Week."

President George W. Bush has insisted that U.S. troops would not leave until Iraqis could take over security for their country, and has repeatedly rejected setting a timetable for withdrawal, saying that would only embolden the insurgents.

The White House, however, said that Bush is open to new ideas and the president will meet on Monday with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that is expected to recommend alternative policies in its final report.

More than 2,800 American troops have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and the unpopular war was a key factor in last week's elections that swept Bush's Republican Party from power in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Violence showed no signs of letting up. A suicide bomber killed 35 people at a police recruiting center in Baghdad on Sunday in the bloodiest attack in months against recruits. Four British troops were killed in an attack in Basra.

"We need to redeploy," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said on CBS' "Face The Nation," adding that the decision should be made by military officers in Iraq.

"And I think it should start within the next few months."

Reid said he would not insist on a specific date for pulling troops out.

White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said any change in policy must ensure that Iraq can succeed and have a democratic government that can sustain and defend itself.

'FRESH LOOK'

"The president obviously wants to take a whole fresh look at what we're doing in Iraq," Bolten said. "Nobody is happy with what our situation in Iraq is now.

"But what we cannot do is pull out of there prematurely and leave a failed state behind," he said on CBS.

Bolten said he could not envision supporting a plan with a set date for troop withdrawal, calling that "a very bad idea."

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, is conducting a review of Iraq strategy at the
Pentagon, and other national security agencies will do similar reviews.

The Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker, a former secretary of state with close ties to the Bush family, was not expected to have its final report at the meeting with Bush.

One approach reportedly considered by that panel was for Washington to open a dialogue with Iran and Syria, accused by the Bush administration of supporting terrorism and fanning instability in neighboring Iraq.

Democrats are calling for an international conference on Iraq that would include Iran, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

"Well, nothing is off the table. All of the options will be considered," Bolten said on CNN's "Late Edition" about the conference proposal.

Bush chose a member of the Iraq Study Group, former
CIA Director Robert Gates, to replace Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The nomination requires Senate approval.

Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), a Delaware Democrat expected to head the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was inclined to support Gates.

"I know some of his views on Iraq. I know he wasn't of the Rumsfeld school. And to put it very, very bluntly, as long as he's not there, Rumsfeld is there," Biden said on ABC.

(Additional reporting by Missy Ryan and Bill Trott)

With the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- who became the face of the Iraq war that was a major cause of Republican election losses -- senators from both parties also said they will work quickly to consider Bush's choice of a replacement, former CIA director Robert Gates.

Lawmakers also will choose leaders for the next Congress, when Democrats take control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in 12 years.

All of this is in addition to unfinished budget work for the 2007 fiscal year that began on October 1 and other items already on Congress' agenda including a civil nuclear agreement with India and normalizing trade relations with Vietnam.

Democrats say Bush is asking too much.

"For a Republican Congress that has gone forward for two years and produced so little, and then the president to come up with a huge agenda for the next weeks -- you have to ask 'why didn't you use some time you spent arguing on some other less important issues before,"' said Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the renewed push on Bolton, whose hawkish views made him a conservative favorite, and the domestic surveillance program that critics call unconstitutional, should not be viewed as "necessarily provocative."

DIFFERENT PRIORITIES

Congress has completed just two annual spending bills for the military and domestic security initiatives, and must deal with measures to finance farm programs, law enforcement, the environment, foreign aid and a range of other programs. Those have been operating through a stop-gap measure set to expire on November 17.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who will become majority leader, issued his own priorities list for the lame duck session -- and it did not include Bush's domestic surveillance program or Bolton.

Instead, Reid highlighted bioterrorism legislation, offshore drilling legislation that passed the Senate earlier this year but not the House, the India nuclear agreement and a bill extending popular business and individual tax breaks, in addition to the spending bills on everyone's list.

Bolton's nomination appears doomed given continued opposition by Democrats and a key Republican, Sen. Lincoln Chafee (news, bio, voting record) of Rhode Island, who lost his reelection bid.

The plan is for lawmakers to break after next week for the Thanksgiving holiday and return starting on December 4 to finish the leftovers. A Senate Republican aide said a bill giving nuclear-armed India access to U.S. nuclear fuel and reactors for the first time in three decades may be ready by then.

The aide also said he hoped the House would accept a Senate-passed bill that would open a small new area in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and natural gas drilling. The House backed a broader bill that would open exploration in most U.S. Atlantic and Pacific waters more than 100 miles from shore.

But they also expressed concerns that Democrats might seek to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq too quickly or hamper the administration's efforts to combat terrorism, it said.

The poll surveyed 1,006 adults on Thursday and Friday, following the Democrats' midterm election victory on Tuesday. It had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

The strongest support, 92 percent, was for lowering drug prices for retirees on Medicare by allowing the government to negotiate directly with drug companies. Some three-quarters of respondents said it should be a top priority, according to Newsweek.

Americans also supported raising the federal minimum wage (89 percent), investigating government contracts in Iraq (89 percent) and cutting the interest rate of federal student loans (88 percent).

Bush's 31-percent job approval rating, down from 35 percent a week earlier, was a new low in Newsweek's polling. Some 63 percent disapproved of the Republican president's job performance, and a full two-thirds agreed that "he won't be able to get much done" in the last two years of his term.

The drop in Bush's approval rating came after Wednesday's resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had been a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's handling of the war in Iraq.

While a bare majority of 51 percent called the Democrats' victory "a good thing," even more said they were concerned about some of the actions a Democratic Congress might take, including 78 percent who were somewhat or very concerned that it would seek too hasty a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Another 69 percent said they were concerned that the new Congress would keep the administration "from doing what is necessary to combat terrorism," and two-thirds said they were concerned it would spend too much time investigating the administration and Republican scandals.

As the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and were on the verge of taking over the Senate, George W. Bush announced that Donald Rumsfeld was out and Robert Gates was in as Secretary of Defense. When Bush is being run out of town, he knows how to get out in the front of the crowd and make it look like he's leading the parade. The Rumsfeld-Gates swap is a classic example.

The election was a referendum on the war. The dramatic results prove that the overwhelming majority of people in this country don't like the disaster Bush has created in Iraq. So rather than let the airwaves fill up with beaming Democrats and talk of the horrors of Iraq, Bush changed the subject and fired Rumsfeld. Now, when the Democrats begin to investigate what went wrong, Rumsfeld will no longer be the controversial public face of the war.

Rumsfeld had come under fire from many quarters, not the least of which was a gaggle of military officers who had been clamoring for his resignation. Bush said he decided to oust Rumsfeld before Tuesday's voting but lied to reporters so it wouldn't affect the election. Putting aside the incredulity of that claim, Bush likely waited to see if there would be a changing of the legislative guard before giving Rumsfeld his walking papers. If the GOP had retained control of Congress, Bush would probably have retained Rumsfeld. But in hindsight, Bush has to wish he had ejected Rumsfeld before the election to demonstrate a new direction in the Iraq war to angry voters.

Rumsfeld's sin was not in failing to develop a winning strategy for Iraq. There is no winning in Iraq, because we never belonged there in the first place. The war in Iraq is a war of aggression. It violates the United Nations Charter which only permits one country to invade another in self-defense or with the blessing of the Security Council.

Donald Rumsfeld was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war. On September 15, 2001, in a meeting at Camp David, Rumsfeld suggested an attack on Iraq because he was deeply worried about the availability of "good targets in Afghanistan." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported that Rumsfeld articulated his hope to "dissuade" other nations from "asymmetrical challenges" to U.S. power. Rumsfeld's support for a preemptive attack on Iraq "matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination," Ron Suskind wrote after interviewing O'Neill.

Rumsfeld defensively sought to decouple oil access from regime change in Iraq when he appeared on CBS News on November 15, 2002. In a Macbeth moment, Rumsfeld proclaimed the United States' beef with Iraq has "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." The Secretary doth protest too much.

Prosecuting a war of aggression isn't Rumsfeld's only crime. He also participated in the highest levels of decision-making that allowed the extrajudicial execution of several people. Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, which constitutes a war crime. In his book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh described the "unacknowledged" special-access program (SAP) established by a top-secret order Bush signed in late 2001 or early 2002. It authorized the Defense Department to set up a clandestine team of Special Forces operatives to defy international law and snatch, or assassinate, anyone considered a "high-value" Al Qaeda operative, anywhere in the world. Rumsfeld expanded SAP into Iraq in August 2003.

But Rumsfeld's crimes don't end there. He sanctioned the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and thus constitute war crimes. Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques that included the use of dogs, removal of clothing, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour interrogations, and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli. According to Seymour Hersh, Rumsfeld sanctioned the use of physical coercion and sexual humiliation to extract information from prisoners. Rumsfeld also authorized waterboarding, where the interrogator induces the sensation of imminent death by drowning. Waterboarding is widely considered a form of torture.

Rumsfeld was intimately involved with the interrogation of a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Qahtani, at Guantánamo in late 2002. General Geoffrey Miller, who later transferred many of his harsh interrogation techniques to Abu Ghaib, supervised the interrogation and gave Rumsfeld weekly updates on his progress. During a six-week period, al-Qahtani was stripped naked, forced to wear women's underwear on his head, denied bathroom access, threatened with dogs, forced to perform tricks while tethered to a dog leash, and subjected to sleep deprivation. Al-Qahtani was kept in solitary confinement for 160 days. For 48 days out of 54, he was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours a day.

Even though Rumsfeld didn't personally carry out the torture and mistreatment of prisoners, he authorized it. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be liable for war crimes committed by his inferiors if he knew or should have known they would be committed and did nothing to stop of prevent them. The U.S. War Crimes Act provides for prosecution of a person who commits war crimes and prescribes life imprisonment, or even the death penalty if the victim dies.

Although intending to signal a new direction in Iraq with his nomination of Gates to replace Rumsfeld, Bush has no intention of leaving Iraq. He is building huge permanent U.S. military bases there. Gates at the helm of the Defense Department, Bush said, "can help make the necessary adjustments in our approach." Bush hopes he can bring congressional Democrats on board by convincing them he will simply fight a smarter war.

But this war can never get smarter. Nearly 3,000 American soldiers and more than 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died and tens of thousands have been wounded. Our national debt has skyrocketed with the billions Bush has pumped into the war. Now that there is a new day in Congress, there must be a new push to end the war. That means a demand that Congress cut off its funds.

And the war criminals must be brought to justice -- beginning with Donald Rumsfeld. On November 14, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, and other organizations will ask the German federal prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation into the war crimes of Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials. Although Bush has immunized his team from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, they could be tried in any country under the well-established principle of universal jurisdiction.

Donald Rumsfeld may be out of sight, but he will not be out of mind. The chickens have come home to roost.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published this spring by PoliPointPress.

Republicans for months have known that no bill accomplishing Bush's goal could get filibuster-proof support from 60 senators. Sealing off any hope was what Democratic leader Harry Reid put on his lame-duck to-do list. The warrantless domestic surveillance bill was conspicuous in its absence.

As for next year, Bush should not expect Democrats to allow such legislation to pass without language establishing considerable congressional oversight of any expansion of warrantless wiretaps.

"We have been asked to make sweeping and fundamental changes in law for reasons that we do not know and in order to legalize secret, unlawful actions that the administration has refused to fully divulge," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record) of Vermont, the next Judiciary Committee chairman. "If legislation is needed for judicial review, then we should write that legislation together, in a bipartisan and thoughtful way."

The Bush administration has a backup plan. In speeches over the next few weeks, the Justice Department will launch a new campaign for the legislation by casting the choice as one between supporting the program or dropping it altogether - and appearing soft on al-Qaida.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will make the eavesdropping program the focus of a Nov. 18 speech at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for the national security, will make a similar pitch Wednesday to the American Bar Association.

Leahy said that monitoring communications of suspected terrorists is essential but that "it needs to be done lawfully and with adequate checks and balances to prevent abuses of Americans' rights and Americans' privacy."

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush ordered the National Security Agency to monitor communications potentially related to al-Qaida between people in the U.S. and those overseas. He bypassed normal requirements for court approval of such eavesdropping, and the program came under harsh criticism after it was disclosed last December by The New York Times.

Democrats and Republicans on the intelligence and judiciary committees spent much of the year trying to find out details from the administration, to little avail. Much of the information is classified, and the White House has insisted that revealing it would mean compromising the war on terrorism.

The House passed a bill in September to allow warrantless wiretaps under certain restrictions. House and Senate intelligence committees and congressional leaders would have to be notified, the president would have to believe that a terrorist attack is imminent, and certification would have to be renewed every 90 days.

A Republican measure in the Senate favored by the administration would require the Justice Department to report twice a year to the House and Senate intelligence committees the number and kind of any such operations. It would permit the surveillance to continue for up to one year without a warrant.

The House bill is H.R. 5825; the Senate bill is S. 3931.

It was the worst outcome imaginable.

They lost the House and the Senate in one night with one savage blow. Even the Confederate flag at Senator "Macakaw's" house was flying at half-mast. Suddenly the Reich that was "built to last a thousand years" had been reduced to small blocks of dusty-rubble extending from sea to shining sea. At the very epicenter of the twisted-iron and smoldering wreckage; was George W. Bush, President Hologram, the celluloid executive whose smirking puss had appeared daily on every American TV and in every American newspaper spreading the "good news" of domestic repression and nonstop war. Now, here he was, once again, convening a news conference, dazed and ashen, propped up amid the scattered debris of a midterm massacre; his party left in utter ruins.

Ouch!

In a moment worthy of Shakespeare, the Fraudster-in-chief had been scuttled by his own party; knifed in the back by his own friends and family who knew that it was finally time to extract the drunken driver from behind the wheel of a Mack Truck.

The Democrats didn't win anything; that's all hogwash. Bush was buried beneath an avalanche of bad news which was timed to begin with the release of Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial", followed by the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Lancet's Iraqi casualty report, the Mark Foley page fiasco, and a barrage of ethics-scandals, corruption investigations, and intensified coverage of the war. It was a carefully-coordinated coup intended to install "adults" (like Robert Gates) in positions of power, change the policy in Iraq, and remove Rumsfeld and Cheney from office.

One down; one to go.

The "vanilla" Democrats had nothing to do with Tuesday's results. It was a "planned demolition" from the get-go.

Robert Dreyfuss said it best in a recent article when he opined that Bush was handled in the same way "a family confronts an alcoholic. You bring everyone in, and you say, 'Look, my friend, it's time to change.'" (And then you remove the bad influences)

Elite powerbrokers and Republican Party kingpins extended their hoary grip all the way into the Oval Office and took the country back from the teenagers. But the boulder is still only half way up the hill. After all, what are their plans for Cheney?

Cheney wisely decided to go hunting when he discovered that friend Rumsfeld was being led to the gallows. Cheney's no fool. He knew that if he hung around, he'd be blamed as the co-conspirator of the Iraqi debacle and the subsequent destruction of the Republican Party.

So he did what Cheney always does; he skedaddled. He suddenly discovered that he "had more important things to do"; just like Vietnam.

He said he was going hunting, but that's rubbish. He wanted to be as far from the political fallout as humanly possible, so he vamoosed. There's nothing more to it than that. Besides, there've been no reports of "downed lawyers full of birdshot" this week in Wyoming so we know that Cheney's firearms are still safely tucked-away in the family vault.

Right now, Cheney is probably huddled somewhere with his national security team, rubbing his sweaty-hands together, figuring out how he can get back in the game and keep his fetid plan moving forward.

Cheney is smart; real smart. Smart like a cobra. He's not going down without a fight and he doesn't give a damn if he takes the whole country with him.

This is all about Cheney now; Dick Cheney, political survivor and skilled bureaucratic infighter. If anyone thinks that he's going to sit around waiting for the Democrats to start sniffing around the Republican corruption-cesspool; they're crazy.

He knows what's going on. He knows that Bush Senior, and Brzezinski, and Baker, and the rest of the "old order" Republicans have muscled in and are taking over. He knows he won't be able to bomb Iran, kill another 650,000 Iraqis, or declare martial law at home. And, he also knows that Conyers and the rest of them will be nosing-around the Halliburton "no bid" contracts; going through every sordid detail with a fine-tooth comb, and dredging up new scandals on a daily basis.

He grasps all of that. He understands the political climate and he knows that he only has two choices left; offense or defense?

Either he steps down or he collects his wits, gets his team together; Addington, Abrams, Chertoff, Gonzales etc; all the guys who are "one step ahead of the hangman"; and slaps together one "last-ditch" effort to establish absolute-dictatorial power that will put him forever beyond the reach of the law or of any future accountability for his war crimes.

It's a tough task. Bush is teetering and he's probably left the Cheney-Rumsfeld orbit already. Robert Gates' job is to influence Bush, to win him over with reason and, thus, move the country away from the brink of disaster. Cheney has been removed from the policy-making apparatus and he knows it.

So, what'll he do next?

What will Cheney do now that he's been backed into a corner and his power is oozing away like the blood from a sucking chest-wound?

Will he quietly retire and disappear into the political vapor or "lock-n-load" and go down with both guns blazing?

Here's a clue: Cheney is a "dead-ender". He won't go peacefully.

This was a stinging rebuke to Cheney, who had brought his mentor, Don Rumsfeld, into the Bush 43 tent over the strenuous objections of the Bush 41 crowd. Cheney and Rumsfeld shared the same world view of the NeoCon crowd, which included a fierce distrust and anger toward the CIA. During the last five years Cheney assisted Rumsfeld's quest to set up a completely independent intelligence operation in the Department of Defense. At least with the DOD intel capability, the Pentagon and the White House could ignore the CIA view.

The appointment of Bob Gates, to replace Don Rumsfeld, is a mixed blessing.

Gates is not an ideologue. He is a conservative politically but he is also willing to entertain outside views. Even though he demonstrated a willingness to "cook" the intel books and play politics with analysts at the CIA in the 1980s, his subsequent tenure at the National Security Council and as head of the CIA in the 1990s won praise from both ends of the political spectrum. One former senior CIA manager recently told me that the management of the interagency Deputies Committee during Gates' stint at the National Security Council was superb.

The Gates era at DOD will bring an end to Rummy's reign of terror. Rummy and his coterie of neocons bullied and bashed the military, particularly in the summer of 2002, for its reluctance to accept Rummy's demand to invade Iraq with a light force. Rummy came to the job with preconceived ideas and was unwilling to entertain dissent or alternative views. There is no doubt that the military officers on the Joint Staff are heaving a great sigh of relief these days. Gates, by contrast, will welcome strong briefers and will defer to military recommendations that are fully supported by evidence.

The appointment of Gates also marks the end of Cheney's dominance within the Bush Administration. Cheney has been conspicuously absent since the Republicans were routed at the polls. His efforts to save Rummy were rebuffed. And with the Senate in the hands of the Democrats, Cheney's influence on the Hill is over. Don't be surprised if Dick Cheney develops a heart condition in the next couple of months that will force him to resign as the Vice President. Whether he stays or goes, the era of Cheney's supremacy at the White House is done. The neocons are discredited, as is Cheney, and their pet projects--from warrantless wiretapping to torture to trashing habeus corpus--are dead as well.