Democrats’ push to change Iraq war course falls flat in Senate

They said their strategy would now focus on portraying Republicans as opposing any change and on trying to chip away support for the White House as the war continued.

The proposal that failed Wednesday fell 4 votes short of the 60 needed to prevent a filibuster and would have required that troops be given as much time at home as they had spent overseas before being redeployed.

There were 56 votes in favor, including 6 Republicans – one fewer than the 7 Republicans who joined the Democrats in July, when the measure, by Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, also fell 4 votes short.

Supporters of Bush’s war strategy declared victory, saying they had firmly beaten back legislative efforts to change course.

“It means that Congress will not intervene in the foreseeable future,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Independent who has voted with the Republicans on war issues. “The fact that it didn’t get enough votes says that Congress doesn’t have the votes to stop this strategy of success from going forward.”

The Senate vote was a crucial test of the war plan that Bush put forward last week, calling for only gradual reductions in troop levels in Iraq from their current high, and leaving intact by next summer a main body of more than 130,000 troops, about the same number as last February.

The outcome showed that the strong opposition to the war plan by Democrats and a few Republicans remained insufficient to overcome a powerful Republican minority in the Senate that has succeeded all year in staving off challenges to the war policy.

For now, the failed Webb proposal is the closest Democrats have come to bipartisan legislation that would force. Bush to change his strategy. And with Republicans solidly behind the plan outlined by Bush and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, Democrats have retreated to a firm antiwar stance.

They are no longer entertaining the kind of compromise measures that some Democrats had proposed this month as an attempt to woo Republican defectors, and they said they would instead seek opportunities to hold votes that would more starkly contrast Republican support for the president with Democrats’ demands for withdrawal.

“The Republican leadership and the White House is getting them all to march in line,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who ranks third in the party leadership. “But it is marching further and further away from where America is. We just keep at it. It’s all we can do.”