US Democrats will not seek to cut funding for US troops in Iraq but will insist on political progress in the war-torn country as a condition, a senator said Sunday.
"We're not going to cut off funding for the troops," the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, told ABC news, commenting on the Democrats' bid to timetable the forces' withdrawal.
President George W. Bush has vowed to veto the two versions of the Democrats' bill to withdraw the troops next year -- one from the Senate and one from the House of Representatives -- raising the question of how they would proceed with their drive to wind up the bloody war.
"What we should do, and we're going to do, is continue to press this president to put some pressure on the Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement," Levin said.
Lawmakers passed a Democrat-sponsored proposal that would make crucial funding for the Iraq war conditional on pulling out the troops. Bush dismissed the Democrats' efforts to set a date as "a political statement."
On Saturday Bush urged the Democrats to pass their bill to him as soon as possible so he could veto it and Congress could get to work on drafting an alternative to fund the troops.
Levin responded on Sunday by calling on Bush to fulfill his promise to make the Iraqis meet political "benchmarks." These conditions will still be included in the funding bill even if the withdrawal timetable were scrapped, he said.
"The Iraqis have not kept any of the benchmarks that they set for themselves so far: dividing resources, dividing the oil resources, sharing power," Levin said.
The chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, Jon Kyl, denied Iraqis were failing to meet these conditions, however.
"The Iraqis are beginning to do the things that we've asked them to do," he told CNN, citing a US military report. "They are cooperating with us ... That's one of the reasons this new (troop) surge strategy is working."
Congress has gone on Easter recess and is expected to resume its work only on the week of April 16.
