(05-01) 16:00 PDT -- President Bush carried through on his often-repeated threat today and vetoed a war spending bill that called for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, but on Capitol Hill key Republicans started moving away from the administration's hard line against compromising with Democrats.

"Setting a deadline for withdrawal will be setting a date for failure and that's unacceptable,'' Bush said in a televised statement this afternoon from the White House.
Moments before Bush had vetoed the $124.2 billion bill, which would have provided about $100 billion to pay for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through September, but would also have set a Democratic-backed goal of withdrawing almost all U.S. combat forces from Iraq by March 2008.

Bush said the legislation, only the second bill he has vetoed, was dangerous because it "substitutes the opinion of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders.''
Democratic leaders, who had appealed to Bush to sign the bill up until the moment he vetoed it, said the president was denying the will of American voters who last November elected an anti-war Democratic majority in Congress.

"The president wants a blank check and Congress is not going to give it to him,'' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said to reporters just minutes after Bush's veto.
"We had hoped the president would have treated with the respect that a bipartisan majority of both houses supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people deserved,'' she added.

A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll released late last week showed voters back the congressional withdrawal plan 56 to 37 percent. The poll also found that 55 percent said victory in Iraq -- a war that has lasted more than four years and claimed more than 3,350 American lives -- is no longer possible.

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., vowed to press on. "If the president thinks that by vetoing this bill he will stop us from working to change the direction of the war in Iraq he is mistaken,'' Reid said.