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Kerry Urges Iraq Pullout Deadline
Defeated 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., says the U.S. must set a pair of deadlines for Iraqis - get a new government up and running by May 15, and agree to a U.S. pullout by year's end. Moreover, Kerry writes that if the Iraqis fail to heed the first deadline, the U.S. should pull out immediately leaving the Iraqis to fend for themselves. Writing in an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, Kerry insisted that Iraqis have shown that they only respond to deadlines, citing past U.S. imposed deadlines to transfer authority to a provisional government, and the demand to hold three elections. "Now we must set another deadline to extricate our troops and get Iraq up on its own two feet," he wrote ... "Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military."
Story Continues Below The junior senator from Massachusetts warned that if Iraqis "aren't willing to build a unity government in the five months since the election, they're probably not willing to build one at all." The alleged civil war, he predicted, will only worsen, leaving the U.S. no choice but to pull out of Iraq. Once that government is formed, Kerry wrote, "we must agree on another deadline: a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year's end." Kerry argued that by so doing the new Iraqi leadership will be empowered and put into the position of running their own country. It would, he predicted, also "undermine support for the insurgency, which is fueled in large measure by the majority of Iraqis who want us to leave their country." He conceded that those U.S. "troops essential to finishing the job of training Iraqi forces should remain." "We are now in the third war in Iraq in as many years," Kerry claimed, saying the first was against Saddam Hussein and "his supposed weapons of mass destruction." The second, according to Kerry, was fought against terrorists "whom, the administration said, it was better to fight over there than here." Now, it seems, the U.S. is in the midst of what he called "an escalating civil war."
The man who helped bring about America's defeat in the Vietnam war by his virulent and often untruthful anti-war actions and rhetoric said: "Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America's leaders knew our strategy would not work." That war, claims Kerry, was "immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion," adding that although we want democracy in Iraq, Iraqis must want it as much as we do. "Our valiant soldiers can't bring democracy to Iraq if Iraq's leaders are unwilling themselves to make the compromises that democracy requires." Claiming that "our generals" - who he failed to identify - insist that the war cannot be won militarily and must be be won politically, Kerry wrote, "No American soldier should be sacrificed because Iraqi politicians refuse to resolve their ethnic and political differences." Kerry failed to address the valid Bush administration claim that by setting a deadline or a timetable for troop withdrawal the United States would provide the strongest motive for al-Qaida to hang in there until our troops leave.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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