My Solution to Iraq

The debate in Iraq has really bogged down in back and forth accusations and calling each other "treasonous" so in trying to move things forward I've been thinking about a solution to Iraq. Here's the speech I would like to hear from the President:

My fellow Americans and people around the World, I come here tonight to say that we screwed up. We screwed up going into Iraq and we’ve screwed up the occupation of Iraq. We went to Iraq with good intentions and an honest belief that the regime of Saddam Hussein represented a far greater threat than they turned out to be and to enact a change in the political dynamic of the region. We screwed up believing that order would be quickly restored in Iraq and that the Iraqis could rapidly stand on their own. We overestimated the threat and underestimated the difficulties of bringing peace and stability to post Saddam Iraq. We now fully realize the enormity of the challenge. We also realize that our continued presence in Iraq is hindering bringing peace to the Iraqis as our troops are a magnet for both domestic insurgents and foreign fighters.

We fully recognize the problems with the invasion and our ongoing occupation but we also believe that it is not in the interest of us as Americans, other countries in the World and Iraqis to immediately or haphazardly withdraw from Iraq.

The Iraqis are on the whole good people who deserve the chance to build a successful stable country and it is our responsibility as a country and a world to seek out the best path to do that. We’ve already been undertaking a plan by working with them to write a constitution, elect a government and train a new Iraqi police force and army. This process has turned out to be much slower and more difficult than we anticipated. It is being hampered by ethnic and religious tensions that were held in check by Saddam’s regime but are now playing out. These tensions are also being inflamed by our presence and the belief by a large segment of the Sunni population that we are favoring the Shiite and Kurdish population. Our presence as occupiers is also tainting in the minds of many Iraqis that the new Iraqi police and army are collaborators and making their jobs much more difficult and targets of the insurgency.

Our continued presence is very likely one of the largest hurdles towards peace and stability in Iraq.

If we stay in Iraq indefinately things may never improve but at the same time we cannot leave the Iraqis to fend for themselves with ethnic tensions threatening to break out in full civil war and a continued lack of infrastructure. Therefore it is time to seek out a new strategy for bringing very much deserved peace to the Iraqi people and to allow us to leave.

To undertake this new strategy I have asked our UN ambassador to introduce a resolution in the UN Security council for bringing in a multinational peace keeping force to Iraq. This force will be one composed of countries that were not initially involved in the invasion of Iraq and we will ask for troops from Arab and predominately Muslim countries. We believe that there will be less antagonism towards these troops as they will understand the culture and religion of Iraq better than we can and will be free of association with the initial invasion. As the new peacekeeping force deploys in Iraq our troops will pull back to rearward bases in the region and eventually the majority of them will return home. We will not wholly withdraw fromm the region and will still maintain rapid reaction forces in the region to deal with possible contingencies. We will also not wholly abandon the UN peacekeeping force but will maintain support and transport services along with providing medical and humanitarian aid but our troops will not be responsible for policing Iraq.

The second part of this strategy is to continue the training of the new Iraqi army and police forces. As part of the resolution for a new UN peacekeeping force we will ask the UN Security Council to take over the training to remove the association of our occupation with those new forces. Where and how that training will be conducted we will leave it to the UN to decide and while we will not directly train these new forces we will stand ready to help provide transportation for personnel being trained outside of their country along with material aid.

The next part of this strategy is to address a sore point among many countries regarding the rebuilding of Iraq. Even before the invasion this Administration had worked closely with American contractors to handle much of the reconstruction of the Iraqi basic and petroleum infrastructure. We believed this would be the best strategy to rapidly bring that infrastructure back on line and getting much needed petroleum revenue back online. We understand that this shut out contractors from other countries and this has led to the mistaken belief that we are primarily interested in the oil wealth of Iraq. In the interest of fostering good will my Administration will cancel those contracts and ask the new Iraqi government to begin a new round of bidding for reconstruction contracts to companies from all countries.

Under Saddam’s regime Iraq built up a large foreign debt. Many countries have been hesitant to assist with the rebuilding of Iraq while these debts are outstanding but we have felt that it was unfair for a post Saddam Iraq to be burdened with those debts. We understand the hesitancy of these other countries and while we encourage them to forgive these debts for the sake of the Iraqis we will not demand forgiveness of the debts. We will further help the new Iraqi government fulfill their debt obligation by asking for a summit between the debtor nations, Iraq and ourselves to work out financing and restructuring of the debt so that once Iraq’s oil industry returns they can start fulfilling that obligation without crippling their economy.

While we will work towards disassociating ourselves military from Iraq we cannot remove ourselves from responsibility for seeing that Iraq is restored to peace and stability. Therefore we will agree to take on much of the burden for funding the peacekeeping mission and reconstruction. We need to be clear that this will not be cheap but we cannot ignore our responsibility in this matter and if we do not do so there will be very little likelihood of a multinational peacekeeping force or reconstruction.

For those countries who have been skeptical of us previously it is understandable they are skeptical of us now and are very hesitant of committing their troops to a new multinational peacekeeping force. I would ask them to consider carefully what is at stake if Iraq cannot be stabilized. Iraq occupies a key strategic location in addition to sitting on the World’s second largest proven oil reserves. A destabilized or even fractured Iraq will have severe negative implications to regional stability with potentially worldwide implications. As I have often said terrorism is a problem that affects all nations and a destabilized Iraq or a weakened broken Iraq will very likely turn into a new breeding ground for terrorism much like Afghanistan under the Taliban was. It is not only in the interest of us as Americans but also the rest of the World to see a stable peaceful Iraq.

In closing I would like to reiterate that we went into Iraq with the best intentions. We saw what we believed to be a legitimate threat and acted on it. We overestimated that threat and were wrong. We also saw the opportunity to remove a repressive dictator and bring democracy to a region that has seen very little democracy. It is our continued and profound belief that all peoples aspire for freedom from tyranny and democracy. The path to bringing those to Iraq has proved much more difficult than we predicted and we now realize that our own presence maybe hindering that. Still we believe that the Iraqi people are capable of that and if given stability will be able to exercise their democratic aspirations to the fullest. While we might not be the ones to shepherd that in we’ve started the process and now look to the rest of the World to help fulfill that for the good of the Iraqis and the whole World.

May God continue to bless America and the people of Iraq.

 

Probably so but I thought it might move the discussion further along than arguing about whether Howard Dean and John Kerry are traitors.