Veterans for Common Sense

Has a loser ever looked so cocky? When Paul Hackett mounted a Cincinnati stage on Tuesday night, he had a DJ cue up Wild West music and then twirled and holstered an imaginary pistol for his delighted supporters, who cheered wildly. A clueless interloper would surely guess that this Iraq veteran-turned-Democratic hero had just triumphed in what was the most-hyped congressional special election in years. In fact, Hackett had just lost his race to Republican Jean Schmidt by a 48-52 margin. Flashing his self-assured smile at the back of the room, Hackett spotted a young female staffer in tears. “Knock off the cryin’!” he called out to her. “There’s nothing to cry about here. This was a success. So let’s rock on!” 

A few months earlier, the lanky, handsome, 43-year-old Hackett had been a Marine serving in Falluja, Iraq. Then the local Republican representative, Rob Portman, left his seat to become U.S. trade representative. The race seemed hopeless for Democrats: The rural and exurban Cincinnati-area district gave Bush 64 percent of its vote in 2004 and hadn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in over 30 years. But, as Hackett made an unexpectedly strong run for the seat, he became his party’s hottest commodity since Barack Obama shot into orbit. The combination of his Iraq service and his defiant talk–Hackett openly called George W. Bush a “chicken hawk” and a “son of a bitch,” and called the war in which he served “a misuse of the military”–made liberals swoon. The New York Times profiled him on page one, and the blogosphere raised some $500,000 for him in just a few weeks. Though he came up short, his showing on Tuesday night was, as The Cincinnati Enquirer put it, “nothing short of astounding.” 

Within hours, national Democrats were already spinning Hackett’s close defeat as a sign that they are poised to win back Congress in 2006. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (dccc), argues that “these are the early vibrations on the track.” Hackett, he says, was just the sort of “change agent” that malcontented voters fed up with Bush, Iraq, and Washington corruption are looking for. 

That may be true. But Democrats shouldn’t assume a Hackett victory ordains a massive comeback for their party. His opponent was an uncharismatic, washed-up ex-state representative. And his candidacy combined two elements–his stirring Iraq service and the full firepower of the liberal blogosphere–in a way that few other Democrats will be able to replicate come fall of 2006. 

It’s hard to underestimate how central Hackett’s identity as an Iraq veteran was to his candidacy. Every piece of campaign literature I saw prominently featured a photograph of him in combat fatigues. In the days before the election, his campaign had a grizzled World War II vet named Butch cruise local roads in an old military Jeep, complete with a .30-caliber mounted machine gun and a veterans for hackett sign. The same went for Hackett’s campaign appearances. During a grip-and-grin appearance outside a local GE aerospace plant, Hackett wore a proud to have served pin as he shook workers’ hands. 

As his aides handed out flyers nearby, they cut straight to the chase: “Please vote for Paul Hackett. He just got back from Iraq.” The impact of this one-liner was plain to see. The worn-out workers would emerge from their shifts with a disinterested look, until the I-word stopped them in their tracks. “Did he? Huh,” replied one burly African American in a Bengals cap, studying Hackett’s flyer. Others thanked him profusely for his service. Some were turned off by Hackett’s Bush-bashing. But part of his appeal, one suspects, was that he never backed away from it. During a lull in his handshaking, Hackett stood under the blazing sun with his hands on his hips, looking gallant in gold-rimmed Ray-Bans. “That one guy, he came up to me and told me, ‘I didn’t like the way you called the president a chicken hawk. You can’t say that.’ I said, ‘The hell I can’t!’ I asked him, ‘Did you serve?’ He says, ‘No.’ Figures. That’s who I get that the most from, the guys who didn’t serve.” 

This sort of thing made Hackett a rock star in the world of liberal blogs–a figure who combined the defiant rhetoric of Howard Dean with the military credentials of Max Cleland. Schmidt’s campaign sniffed at Hackett’s Web following. (“The second congressional district doesn’t fully involve themselves in the blogosphere,” a spokeswoman told me at Schmidt headquarters, as Rush Limbaugh trashed Hackett on a radio playing in the background.) But one need only look at the astounding numbers. Whereas the dccc spent $200,000 on ads for Hackett, the campaign raised more than twice that much from online contributions. Most of that was thanks to the intense advocacy of a handful of liberal bloggers, several of whom traveled to southern Ohio from around the country and became a sort of informal arm of the campaign. 

On Election Day, the bloggers’ “war room” consisted of a dark corner of the Goldminers Inn, a dank dive bar in Batavia, Ohio, where four twentysomethings quaffed cans of Miller Lite and ruminated about their growing role in Democratic politics. The leader of the group was Bob Brigham, who blogs for a site called Swing State Project. After raising a six-figure sum for Hackett, Brigham had flown in from San Fancisco and “embedded” himself in the campaign, riding in Hackett’s small convoy from event to event in baggy blue jeans and faded red canvas sneakers. “We’re three times as relevant as the dccc. And you can quote that!” he told me between sips of beer. “It’s a sea change in Democratic politics. I see Al From and I see a hearse. This is the future. We’re way ahead of the curve.” Brigham proceeded to tell a strange tale, wherein Donnie Fowler, a onetime candidate for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, allegedly threw a punch at him. Did it land? “Hell, no! I’m virtual!” The spirit of the Dean campaign was alive and well. 

Whether this spirit means a 2006 Democratic sweep is another matter. While the bloggers who sustained Hackett are certainly around for the long haul, the midsummer timing of the race allowed liberals to focus on Hackett’s campaign with an intensity that won’t be possible when dozens of other races are competing for attention in the November 2006 midterms. And, while Democrats are trying to scare up more Iraq veterans to run next year, the list is likely to be a short one. 

Which may not be all bad. It’s not easy running political neophytes for office, as the Hackett experience suggests. For all his seemingly ideal qualities, Hackett chafed at essential parts of the campaign process. The marriage between Hackett and his broader fan base, for instance, sometimes seemed an uneasy one. On the Monday before the election, Brigham convinced Hackett to make a guest appearance on the militantly liberal website Daily Kos. The candidate sat with him in a darkened restaurant, squinting quizzically at Brigham’s laptop. At one point, after Brigham relayed some slangy reader commentary, Hackett turned to him and deadpanned, military style: “Translate.” It seemed that some of Daily Kos’s more paranoid readers wanted proof that it was really Hackett posting. Hackett rolled his eyes. “What do they want, my Social Security number?” Then he dictated to Brigham at the keyboard: “It’s me. Quit being a typical Democrat and get off my ass.” Inevitably, someone took offense: “If exercizing [sic] critical thinking skills and healthy skepticism makes me a ‘typical Democrat,’ I’m proud to be one,” harrumphed one reader. 

Nor did Hackett seem to enjoy the onrush of national press as much as some career politicians might. At one point, when he turned from a conversation to find two reporters taking notes a couple of feet away, he said, only half-jokingly, “Don’t you guys ever go away?” By Election Day, the half-joking part was gone. On Tuesday afternoon, he sat in a stairwell, his shirt soaked from 95-degree heat, talking to a CNN Radio reporter on his cell phone. “What, specifically, would you like to know? That covers a lot of topics,” Hackett snapped in response to some unknown question. When the connection grew garbled, Hackett shouted into the phone–“Hello? Hello? Hello!”–then hung up in disgust before stalking past a mortified press aide to his car and driving away. 

In the end, some people around Hackett wondered if all the attention–stories on ABC, NBC, Fox, CNN, the Times, The Washington Post, not to mention all the blog mania–wasn’t spooking him. In the last two days of the election, Hackett skipped several opportunities to battle for a few last votes. Instead of nonstop stumping on Election Day, he took an unscheduled rest at home. And, the night before the election, as Schmidt raced around to diners and ihops, Hackett took in a Bruce Springsteen concert. What gave? “I expected that everyone would get excited and charged up about an Iraqi war vet,” he told me just after delivering his concession speech. “I was a little surprised by the volume [of attention], particularly in the last week or so.” 

At his after-party on Tuesday night, Hackett’s supporters were already looking ahead to next year, when Schmidt’s new seat will be up again, and chanting, “’06! ’06!” Hackett sounded open to it. And, if he runs, he may prevail. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats will.

Iraq’s new democracy will be crippled from the outset if the drafts of the country’s permanent constitution being circulated are any indication of where things are headed. In a significant rollback from language in the interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), current drafts would threaten regional stability and thwart stated U.S. goals of promoting freedom and democracy. They would establish a constitution under which dissent and debate would not be protected. As the deadline for a constitution approaches, the United States and the international community must redouble their efforts to ensure that an Iran-like theocratic state is not established in Iraq.

Current drafts would limit Iraq’s international human rights obligations to those that do not contradict Islam or Islamic law. They assert that an undefined version of Islamic law, or sharia , is the main source of law. They make no reference to freedom of religion or belief for every Iraqi, and they provide no guarantee of individual freedom of thought and conscience. One clause in the constitution would forbid any law contrary to sharia, leaving the door open for interpretations by unelected Islamic “experts” to be considered sacrosanct. In fact, the drafts authorize many of the constitutional court’s justices to be sharia jurists who may have no education or experience in civil law — placing Iraq’s judiciary in the company of those in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, which allow judges without traditional legal training to decide matters pertaining to constitutional law. Basic individual rights, perhaps even the constitution itself, would be protected only if they were not viewed as contrary to judicial interpretations of Islam.

This is a radical departure from the TAL, which set out Iraq’s human rights obligations according to international instruments and guaranteed, among other things, the right to “freedom of thought, conscience, and religious belief and practice” for every Iraqi — man, woman, Arab, Kurd, Muslim, non-Muslim, believer, nonbeliever.

The guarantees in the TAL were a positive break from past Iraqi constitutions, which typically guaranteed aspects of freedom of religion only to minority groups, as opposed to individual Iraqis. Guaranteeing freedom of thought and conscience as an individual right for Muslims as well as for minority religious groups is essential if debate within Islam and dissent from imposed orthodoxies is to be allowed, and if the political breathing space necessary for plural and alternative voices within the Islamic tradition is to be created.

Now is not the time for the international community to take a hands-off approach, which it may be tempted to do by a false sense of cultural relativism and a misguided respect for a flawed “democratic” process that could, ultimately, lead to undemocratic results. The protection of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief is not un-Islamic. Like all individuals, Muslims deserve and need the freedom to think and believe. An April poll by the International Republican Institute found that 70 percent of the Iraqi people want equal rights for women and 60 percent want freedom of religion. According to a recent study by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, surveying the constitutions of the world’s 44 predominantly Muslim countries:

· More than half of the world’s Muslim population (estimated at over 1.3 billion) lives in countries that are neither Islamic republics nor have declared Islam the state religion.

· Several countries in which Islam is the declared state religion provide constitutional guarantees of the right to freedom of religion or belief that compare favorably with international legal standards.

· Similarly, countries with Islam as the declared state religion may maintain constitutional provisions protecting rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly that compare favorably with international standards.

· A number of constitutions of predominantly Muslim countries incorporate or otherwise refer to international human rights instruments and legal norms.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, have asserted in the past week the importance of women’s rights in Iraq. But the problems with the draft constitution go beyond this. Women’s equality will be in peril unless individual freedom of religion or belief is ensured. Otherwise, a woman will not be able to opt out of the religious laws of her sect.

Moreover, the absence of guaranteed religious freedom would severely damage the democratic framework, because individuals engaged in political debate or dissent would have no protection against possible criminal trials for apostasy and blasphemy.

The U.S. government and the international community should invoke universal human rights standards as a basis for dialogue and diplomatic engagement with Iraqis. This is crucial for regional security and stability, as well as for humanity. These standards should be a fundamental aspect of any constitution-related assistance programs and a yardstick for measuring the success of Iraq’s constitutional process.

In the short time remaining, the administration should direct its efforts to backing individual human rights guarantees in the permanent constitution that are consistent with obligations set forth in international instruments to which Iraq is a party. It should also call on the United Nations, other allies and international experts providing technical advice on the drafting process to support incorporation of these guarantees. And it should urge Iraq’s transitional government to include underrepresented ethnic and religious minorities, such as Sunni Muslims, Christians and others, in the constitutional process.

The United States has fought a war of liberation for Iraq, at great cost in blood and treasure. It must not settle now for anything less than the vision articulated by Rice: “a strong and vibrant and vital democracy here in the heart of the Middle East.”

Preeta D. Bansal, former solicitor general of the state of New York, is a member and former chairman of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Nina Shea, vice chairman of the commission, directs Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom. She is an adviser to the Bush administration on Iraq

In June, The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson offered a mischievous explanation for why a spate of opinion polls showed Americans growing increasingly disillusioned with the Iraq war. The American people hate futile wars fueled by dishonesty, Meyerson wrote, but they really hate the culturally alien, soi disant radicals who oppose those wars. And so, he hypothesized, it took the disappearance of the antiwar movement for Americans’ true opposition to the war to rise to the surface.

As Meyerson noted, in late 1969, 49 percent of the public told Gallup the United States needed to abandon Vietnam, but a staggering 77 percent disapproved of the antiwar protests. What he termed the antiwar movement’s “large, raucous and sometimes senseless fringe,” with its gleeful indictments of America as terminally bloodthirsty and its values as decadently bourgeois, had driven conflicted Americans into the arms of Richard Nixon, who really was terminally bloodthirsty. (“Now, by all-out bombing attack, I am thinking about things that go far beyond. … I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?”)

By contrast, once the Iraq invasion began in 2003, the massive protests–several of which were organized by apologists for assorted anti-American despots and human-rights abusers–largely dissipated. With nobody for the right to demonize, and no one to alienate average Americans from their suspicion that the war was a bad idea, Meyerson wrote, “the occupation is being judged on its own merits.”

In the weeks since Meyerson’s op-ed appeared, the war has only gotten worse and the administration more craven. Within a month of Bush’s stay-the-course speech at Fort Bragg rejecting “artificial timetables” for withdrawal, General George Casey, America’s Iraq commander, publicly floated a “fairly substantial” troop cut by spring 2006–Newsweek described the cut, to be completed by the end of 2006, as totalling up to 98,000 out of a current 138,000 troops–and Zalmay Khalilzad, the new U.S. ambassador, devoted his first press conference to discussing immediate U.S. pullbacks. Given that the right spent 2004 arguing that a Kerry administration would pull off precisely such a surrender, National Review editor Rich Lowry turned to a “well-informed source” to find out what was happening. The source replied that down was, in fact, up: “It’s exactly what we have been saying within the administration for the last year and half … Gens. [John] Abizaid and Casey are more and more confident that the necessary conditions for a drawn down [sic] will be met.” That’s a lie, but whatever. As someone who’s argued that the only hope of salvaging any decent outcome of the war depends on a speedy U.S. departure, I’ll take what I can get. We went into Iraq deceitfully. Does anyone expect us to exit honestly?

But, suddenly, as what remains of the antiwar movement stands on the verge of getting at least the beginning of what it wants–an exit–it seemingly intends to put Meyerson’s thesis to the test. In what one conservative blogger aptly termed “a gift from the gods,” Jane Fonda decided last week that patriotic duty compels her to speak out against the Iraq war around the country. Not long ago, Fonda told Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” that she “will go to my grave regretting” the infamous 1972 photograph of her seated in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. The source of her regret is somewhat cloudy, though. She writes in My Life So Far that she carries “heavy in my heart” the appearance she gave to U.S. combat personnel that she had “become their enemy.” But she also laments the fact that “I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price” for sitting in the gun. And how she’s paid! She told the Associated Press last week, “I have not taken a stand on any war since Vietnam,” from which she carries “a lot of baggage.” Evidently, Fonda’s baggage–the fact that her name evokes images many Americans consider treasonous–has denied her the joy of protesting for too long. Of her antiwar road trip, she says, “It’s going to be pretty exciting.” Only for Karl Rove–whom another right-wing blogger gleefully speculated was behind Fonda’s newfound outspokenness. Please, ma’am, if you really care about ending the occupation, do everyone a favor and shut up.

But Fonda is merely a sybaritic narcissist. George Galloway is an evil man. In his recent book, I’m Not The Only One, Galloway, a member of Britain’s parliament, refers to the thousands of Iraqi Shia murdered by Saddam Hussein as a “fifth column” that “undermined the Iraqi war effort in the interests of their country’s enemy.” He approves of how “Saddam plotted Iraq’s own Great Leap Forward.” All this and more was too much for a reviewer in The Independent, the left-wing British daily, who wrote, “All those who denied that Galloway has mutated into a Saddamist will have to recant.” (Oh, and he may have personally profited from Saddam’s manipulation of the Oil-For-Food program, but that’s unproven.) Yet when Galloway trekked to Capitol Hill in May to deliver a rococo indictment of the Iraq war by way of personal exculpation before the Senate Oil-For-Food panel, many liberals heard all they needed to hear out of his apologist’s mouth. A column in The Nation heralded, “Mr. Galloway Goes To Washington,” as if a man who called Saddam’s 1991 slaughter of the Shia a “civil war” was Jimmy Stewart. Never mind that Galloway also attacked Senator Carl Levin, one of the most prominent antiwar Democrats.

Galloway is a disgrace in the U.K., but the leftist euphoria that greeted his testimony has afforded him a new opportunity for prestige. Next month, he’s planning a speaking tour of the United States, at which, according to The New York Times, a man who shrugs at war crimes plans on “challenging Americans to challenge their leaders more forcefully.” Fonda presents the antiwar movement with a political test, but Galloway presents it with a moral one. The moral onus is still on the supporters of the Iraq disaster. But those who oppose the war should be able to say that no solidarity is possible with someone who would defend a man who filled mass graves. I don’t believe for a minute that there are more than a handful out of the millions of war opponents who truly think kind thoughts about Saddam Hussein, and so ignoring Galloway’s vanity trip–or, better yet, telling him to get on the next plane out of the country–is an excellent opportunity to reverse the dynamic Meyerson noted. Of course, even if Fonda and Galloway are greeted by cheering hordes, it probably won’t cause a groundswell of support for the war. But why tempt fate?

Seven U.S. Marines killed in Iraq

Death toll passes 1,800; Pentagon fears Iraqi army infiltrated by insurgents

NBC News and news services Updated: 8:32 p.m. ET Aug. 2, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The U.S. military said Tuesday that six Marines were killed in action in western Iraq.

The Marines, assigned to Regimental Combat Team-2 of the 2nd Marine Division, died Monday in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad.

A seventh Marine was killed by a car bomb in Hit, 50 miles southeast of Haditha in the volatile Euphrates River valley.

The seven fatalities pushed the death toll for Americans since the start of the war past 1,800.

Insurgents posted handbills in Haditha, claiming to have killed 10 U.S. troops and seizing some of their weapons.

At least 1,801 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,382 died as a result of hostile action. The figures include five military civilians.

Were killings an inside job?

For U.S. military officials, the deaths of the six Marines killed in action Monday raises an unsettling prospect: that they may have been victims of someone with inside information.

The six were members of two sniper teams, trained to pick off the enemy at a distance, one-by-one, with a single precision shot.

Officials report the sniper teams were working together and in position when they were ambushed by an unknown number of insurgents.

Marines nearby heard the short, heavy burst of enemy gunfire that apparently killed five of the Marine snipers instantly. Evidence indicates the attack came so quickly the Marines were unable to return fire.

The sixth Marine either escaped or was taken prisoner but was later found dead a mile or so from the scene of the attack.

The attack is eerily similar to one in nearby Ramadi more than a year ago, when four Marine snipers were ambushed and killed.

In both cases, it’s feared the Marines were betrayed by insurgents who had infiltrated the Iraqi military. In fact, a recent Pentagon report warns that some Iraqi military and police recruits may be insurgent or terrorist infiltrators.

“We need their skills and abilities, so we have to accept some level of risk in having them in the new security forces,” said Jeffrey White, a Pentagon official.

More injuries in Baghdad

In other violence, a roadside bomb targeting a U.S. military convoy exploded Tuesday at the entrance to a tunnel in central Baghdad, and at least 29 civilians were wounded, officials said.

The blast hit as the convoy was about to enter the tunnel in Bab Shargi, near Tahrir Square, said police Capt. Abdul-Hussein Munsif. Two Humvees appeared to have been damaged, he said.

U.S. and Iraqi forces placed a security cordon around the area. The U.S. military had no immediate information on casualties.

An emergency services official said on customary condition of anonymity that 29 wounded civilians were taken to two hospitals.

The bomb left a three-foot-wide crater in the ground. Charred parts from the armored Humvee littered the site and seven civilian cars were also badly damaged.

Blast in Samarra

U.S. troops took away some items from the damaged armored vehicle, including a helmet and two flak jackets.

In Samarra, 60 miles north of the capital, an explosion about 5 a.m. Tuesday damaged a pipeline used for shipping fuel from the Beiji refinery to a power station in the Baghdad area, police said. Insurgents have frequently targeted the line to interrupt electricity in the Baghdad area — already critically low as demand rises in the summer.

The U.S. military said a reporter for the Army Times newspaper embedded with American troops was injured in a suicide car bombing Monday evening in western Iraq near the Syrian border.

U.S. military spokesman Capt. Duane Limpert had no details on the extent of injuries to the reporter, and he added that troops reported only minor injuries.

Amid violence, Iraqi constitution deadline nears

As the Aug. 15 deadline neared for finishing Iraq’s new constitution, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad called for it to protect women’s rights, saying it was an important element for the country’s success.

After meeting with representatives from some Iraqi women’s groups, Khalilzad said they agreed that the equality of women “is a fundamental requirement for Iraq’s progress.”

The ambassador said that the U.S. government is expecting a constitution that would ensure full rights to all Iraqis, regardless of their sex, ethnicity or gender.

“My focus is to help get a constitution that does this. Of course, the Iraqis will decide but we will help in any way that we can,” he said.

Khalilzad said his government would encourage Iraqi politicians to exclude any constitutional articles that discriminate or limit opportunities for any Iraqi citizens.

Women urge parliament to limit Islamic role

On Monday, women activists urged parliament to limit the role of Islam in the new constitution and follow international treaties on the rights of women and children.

Khalilzad also called for more involvement by Arab Sunnis in the political process, stressing the necessity of national agreement on the future of Iraq as a way to divide and defeat the insurgency.

“In order to defeat the insurgency, one needs to reach a national compact, because if all Iraqis, including those who in western and central parts of the country see themselves as part of this new Iraq … they will be separated from the insurgency,” he said.

He accused insurgents of attempting to ignite a sectarian civil war in Iraq, adding that the solution to the insurgency problem should not be limited to military means.

“The military solution has to be integrated into a broad strategy that has a political element leading it, and of course, there are other elements.”

NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Iraq War Veteran Loses Close Election in Ohio

CINCINNATI – A Republican former state lawmaker has claimed a seat in Congress by narrowly defeating an Iraq war veteran who drew national attention to the race with his military service and a series of harsh attacks on President Bush.

But Democrats said they, too, had reason to celebrate – pointing to the close race as a sign of promise heading into next year’s midterm elections.

With all precincts reporting, Jean Schmidt had 52 percent, or 57,974 votes, compared with Democrat Paul Hackett’s 48 percent, or 54,401 votes. Schmidt’s margin of victory amounted to about 3,500 votes out of more than 112,000 cast.

Democrats had viewed the race as a bellwether for 2006, saying even a strong showing by Hackett in such a heavily GOP district would give them a lift.

“There’s no safe Republican district. You can run, but you cannot hide,” said U.S. Rep. Rahm Emmanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Schmidt, 53, will replace Republican Rob Portman, who stepped down this year after being named U.S. trade representative by Bush. Portman held the seat for 12 years, consistently winning with more than 70 percent of the vote in the Cincinnati-area district.

In Ohio, Schmidt billed herself as an experienced leader more in tune with the district than Hackett. She also consistently supported Bush on the war.

“We began this race way back in late March, and no one had thought we’d be the focus of the national media or be the so-called first test of the Republican Party and the Bush mandate. Well, ladies and gentleman, we passed that test,” Schmidt said.

Hackett, 43, a lawyer and Marine reservist who recently completed a seven-month tour, was vying to become the first combat veteran of the Iraq war to serve in Congress.

“This was a success. We should all be proud,” Hackett told cheering supporters. “The voters of the 2nd District won because we gave them a choice.”

He drew attention to the race with his flame-throwing assaults on Bush, namely for the president’s July 2003 “bring ’em on” comment about Iraqi insurgents. Hackett called it the “most incredibly stupid comment” he ever heard a president make, saying it “cheered on the enemy.”

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 2 – As Iraqi leaders on Monday reaffirmed their decision to finish writing the country’s constitution by the middle of the month, the American ambassador here publicly outlined the process for a gradual American troop withdrawal. And today, the American military said seven more American troops were killed in Iraq.

Speaking in his first news conference here, the new ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said on Monday that the American military would hand over control of specific areas to Iraqi forces and “withdraw its own units from these areas.” He declined to say which Iraqi cities American soldiers would leave first but said he had formed a committee with Iraqi leaders to draw up a detailed withdrawal plan.

“After this transfer occurs in more and more areas, there will be a smaller need for coalition forces, and elements of the multinational forces will leave Iraq,” the ambassador said. Iraqi forces have been given sole control over very few areas of the country. A recent report prepared by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld concluded that only a small percentage of Iraqi military units were capable of fighting on their own.

Mr. Khalilzad’s remarks were a public reminder to Iraqis that the Bush administration is moving ahead with plans to reduce the number of foreign troops here. And they were the latest demonstration of the highly visible role that he has played in the weeks since his arrival. Before then, Mr. Khalilzad was the ambassador to Afghanistan, where he was deeply engaged in the affairs of the country. He seems to be bringing that philosophy to Iraq as well, departing from American officials’ recent custom of staying in the background while Iraqis increasingly take the lead.

He played an active part in pushing Iraqi leaders toward their decision on Sunday to stick to an Aug. 15 deadline for drafting a new constitution, urging them to set aside any issues that could not be resolved by that date.

The Bush administration has been keen to keep the democratic process here on track, as a means to drain anger from the insurgency and also to help set the conditions for an American troop draw-down.

Sectarian violence continued to punctuate the country’s political tensions.

Today, an American military spokesman, Staff Sgt. Don Dees, said in a telephone interview that seven American marines were killed on Monday, six of them during operations in the restive Al Anbar province west of Baghdad and one in a suicide car bomb attack in the town of Hit. Also on Monday, eleven bodies were found in southwest Baghdad, most shot but two beheaded. Their identities were not immediately clear, though the men were of varying ages and many had the long beards worn by conservative Muslims. One weeping relative of a victim was photographed holding the decapitated head of a man as it lay on the back of a flatbed truck, according to Reuters.

An Interior Ministry official, Brig. Abdul Salam Abdul Latif, was killed and two of his guards wounded when gunmen attacked his car on a highway in eastern Baghdad, the ministry said. About 40 miles south of Kirkuk, an Iraqi soldier was killed and six others were wounded by a roadside bomb.

In another appearance on Monday, Mr. Khalilzad urged the members of the constitutional drafting committee to set aside their differences and strike a deal. “I encourage them to move forward in a spirit of compromise, flexibility and good will,” he said in a speech before Iraq’s National Assembly.

Under a framework agreed to by Iraqis last year, the constitution will be put to a vote of the National Assembly, followed by a nationwide referendum on Oct. 15. Nationwide elections to elect a new National Assembly to a full term are scheduled for Dec. 15.

The danger, expressed by some Iraqi leaders, is that there is not enough time until Aug. 15 for the constitutional committee to resolve several contentious issues that are central to Iraq’s identity. A flawed constitution, they say, could open the door to civil war.

Some of the trickiest issues involve the future of the Kurds, who predominate in the mountains of northern Iraq. The Kurds have enjoyed a wide degree of autonomy since the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and they are eager to preserve — and even expand — their prerogatives against what they view as a potentially predatory central government.

On Monday, Kurdish leaders said they were prepared to withdraw their support of an Iraqi charter if it does not satisfy their concerns on a range of difficult issues, including expanding the geographic breadth of their autonomy and reversing years of expulsions and ethnic killings in areas of Iraq that were formerly Kurdish.

“If the constitution does not respect the basic rights of the Kurdish people in Iraq, the Kurdish region will vote against the referendum,” said Barham Salih, a senior Kurdish leader and Iraq’s planning minister.

It is not an idle threat. Under the rules set up last year, the Iraqi constitution would fail if two-thirds of the voters in 3 of Iraq’s 18 provinces vote against it in October — and Kurds are a majority in exactly three provinces.

Among the other unresolved issues is the role of religion in public and political life. Some Shiite leaders want the country to be called the Iraqi Islamic Republic, and they want to designate Islam as the main source of the country’s legislation. Some Kurdish and other secular Iraqi leaders want to make sure that such language is not used to strip women and others of their basic rights.

It is such fundamental disagreements that prompted American diplomats to try to persuade the Iraqis to hold fast to the Aug. 15 deadline, even at the cost of leaving some of those big issues out of the constitution altogether.

But Mr. Salih, the Kurdish leader, suggested that some of those disagreements may be too large to paper over.

Without acceptance of the Kurds’ basic demands, “there will be no agreement,” he said. “You cannot camouflage it.”