"It is hard to imagine that the Democrats would pass anti-war resolutions, one after another, which [they know] the President would veto, just for the sake of [the already ongoing presidential] election campaign," Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the International Affairs Committee at the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian legislature, said.
"They are doing this largely because there is real frustration with the war among the U.S. public - the longer the war, the deeper the frustration," he said.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Thursday 223 to 201 for the withdrawal of most American troops from Iraq by April 1, 2008, hours after President Bush delivered an impassioned televised plea to give his "surge" strategy, which saw the deployment of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops in and around the Iraqi capital Baghdad, a chance to work.
The bill has yet to go through the Senate, where the resolution will not pass along party lines, as in the House of Representatives, but George W. Bush has pledged to veto any bill sent to him requiring a pullout before a full assessment of his new strategy can be made in September.
The Russian lawmaker said President Bush was losing popularity among his closest international allies as well as at home, where a USA Today/Gallup Poll coincidentally released this week found his approval rating dropping to 29%.
Margelov cited a recent Washington speech by U.K. International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander, one of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown's closest allies, who said that a country's might is "too often measured in what it could destroy."
"Just as we need the rule of law at home to have civilization, so we need rules abroad to ensure global civilization," Alexander told a high-profile Washington audience.
Margelov interpreted the speech as a restraining signal to the U.S., warning it against abusing its "hard power."
"The speech is fairly general as such, but it is all too easy to see the intended destination of the message," he said.
Alexander's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, also featured such issues as climate change, United Nations and World Bank reforms, migration, and world poverty.
Earlier this week, Brown acknowledged in a U.K. radio interview that there had been "failures at the beginning of the war," which led some British MPs to speculate that as Bush's rift with Congress will be getting wider, Britain will be increasingly inclined to order early withdrawal of its own troops from Iraq.
