From NY Times
By Brian Knowlton

As the Senate prepared to open a high-profile debate on Iraq against a backdrop of stunning new violence in Baghdad, senators engaged in unusually bitter exchanges today about the best way forward in the war.

A suicide truck bomb killed at least 130 people on Saturday in Baghdad, a day after a major new intelligence report painted a bleak picture of prospects for bringing the violence in Iraq under control. But the assessment, reflecting the views of the 16 United States intelligence agencies, also found that a hasty American withdrawal could accelerate an Iraqi collapse.

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, said today that the report, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, made clear that it essentially isn’t going to make any difference how many more troops are sent to Iraq.

But Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that while chances of success were unsure, an American failure in Iraq would be disastrous, perhaps leading to a bloodletting in Baghdad that makes Srebrenica look like a Sunday-school picnic. His reference was to the 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces.

The Senate’s debate on rival nonbinding resolutions — notably, one spearheaded by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, that opposes any troop buildup, and another, led by Mr. McCain, that supports the administration’s planned increase — is to begin on Monday. Mr. Hagel supports Mr. Warner’s resolution.

In a year with extraordinarily large fields of presidential hopefuls in both parties, the verbal fights on Iraq were, to an unusual degree, Republican-on-Republican or Democrat-on-Democrat.

Read More Sparring