New Senate leader vows push for change in Iraq: report

[Ron Burgundy]

Reuters - Newly-elected U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid vowed in an interview to press for troop withdrawals from Iraq and said President George W. Bush has not grasped the urgent need to change course there.

"Three Americans killed yesterday, four British; 150 Iraqis taken out of that building and kidnapped; 1,800-plus went through that one Baghdad morgue but that doesn't count all the dead," the Nevada Democrat said in the interview in Wednesday editions of The Washington Post.

"My displeasure with the president, he doesn't understand the urgency of this. It's all victory for him, but I don't know what that means anymore in Iraq. I do know what we are doing now doesn't work," Reid said.

Reid, who was elected to his leadership post on Tuesday, vowed to press quickly for phased troop withdrawals from Iraq and a more international approach to resolving the problems there, the newspaper said.

Reid acknowledged voter anger over the war swept his party to power in last week's congressional elections. He said Democrats must respond to that anger with hearings to pressure the Bush administration and with calls for a regional Middle Eastern conference and a revitalized Iraqi reconstruction effort.

He also pledged to work on rebuilding the thinly-stretched U.S. military.

One of the first acts of the new Democratic-led Congress will be a $75 billion boost to the military budget to try to get the Army's diminished units back into combat shape, Reid told the newspaper.