Bush's Iraq troop surge blasted by Nebraska lawmaker

No one would ever confuse Senator Chuck Hagel for an ally of President George W. Bush on the war in Iraq.

The Nebraska lawmaker has been the Republican party's chief critic of White House policy for the better part of three years, expressing his opposition with ever more clarity as the violence in Iraq escalated and the U.S. military death toll increased.

But as a Senate committee voted Wednesday to reject Bush's plan to send 21,500 more American troops to Iraq, Hagel finally dispensed with the last remnants of polite talk on the matter.

''There is no strategy. This is a ping-pong game with American lives,'' Hagel told fellow members of the Senate foreign relations committee. ''These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans. They're real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we're doing - all of us - before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder.''.....