The primary wars have started for me

Blow to Clinton campaign as effort to win over Iraq critics falls short


· Fight for Democratic party presidential ticket hots up
· Failure to denounce war could cost her party vote

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Thursday January 18, 2007
The Guardian


Hillary Clinton faces serious competition for funds. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

Hillary Clinton risked being outflanked in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday when she revised her stance on the Iraq war but failed to go far enough to satisfy anti-war critics.

Mrs Clinton, who voted for the war in 2002 and has so far refused to repudiate that, took to television and radio studios for a media blitz yesterday morning to set out a new position after a visit to Iraq and Afghanistan last week.

But she still remains well out of step with the other main potential Democratic candidates - Senator Barack Obama, Senator Joe Biden, and John Edwards - who all have clear anti-war credentials.

Her shift came as opposition gathered momentum in Congress against President George Bush's planned 21,500 troop increase. Democratic and Republican congress members published a draft joint resolution, to be voted on in the next few weeks, saying "it is not in the national interest of the United States to deepen its military involvement in Iraq, particularly by escalating US troop presence".

More at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1993010,00.html#article_continue

MODERATOR: Okay. Let’s wrestle with Iraq a little bit. I think you mentioned that U.S. troops are an incentive to the insurgents, and you said 2006 is the year we should get the troops out. On what timetable?

KERRY: On a timetable that is set by a series of benchmarks of accomplishments. And you do what’s necessary to achieve those benchmarks. Let me give you an example. I said in a speech I gave at Georgetown a few weeks ago that we ought to pull 20,000 troops out after the elections on December 15th. Why? That wasn’t arbitrarily chosen, and it’s not arbitrarily set. We put an additional 20,000 troops in — approximately — for the purposes of providing extra safety for the referendum and for the elections. I support that, and I support — and the election, I think, is going to be a momentous event, a very important event. It’ll be another momentum event. We’ve had several momentum events in Iraq. When the statue fell, it was a momentum event. When Kofi Annan offered the world’s help, they refused it. Afterwards, you had a government that was chosen in election, but it took them three months, four months before they came together — momentum lost. We can’t afford to lose momentum after December 15th, and I think part of the creation of momentum and the transfer of the sort of heeding of our generals is to announce publicly — and Secretary Rumsfeld actually did on TV last week, but it was sort of a major, bold statement — “We’re pulling out 20,000 troops. We’re cutting back to where we were.”

The next major event is going to be the constitution itself, which has to be ratified by April, and that is going to be the central issue of determining the future of Iraq, in my judgment. It’s going to be determined politically, not militarily. And unless we do what’s necessary — and it hasn’t been done yet — and, you know, I had a long conversation with King Abdullah when he was here, and other leaders here, you can feel the sort of frustrations of the lack of significant effort within the Sunni world to bring people to the table sufficiently, including the Shi’a and the Kurds, so that you get the elements of compromise necessary to resolve what the constitution did not resolve.

Now, Ambassador Khalilzad, in my judgment, is doing a terrific job. I respect him. I think he’s been very good at trying to make up for lost ground over two and a half years. Whether it’s behind the 8-ball so much that he can’t is yet to be determined. But the benchmarks beyond that have to be set — the president began to address yesterday — not sufficiently, in my judgment — is how you get the reconstruction, how you provide the jobs, what kind of projects are you going to set; how rapidly can you transfer authority for Anbar province, Nineveh province, or, you know, run through the different provinces. You only have four provinces where there’s major conflict. You have 12 provinces that are pretty quiet. And it ought to be possible to reduce the American presence and pull them back into a more rear garrison status, which is what I would have done a long time ago; push the Iraqis out into the more average, day-to-day kinds of operations.

Now, I’ve said in my speech that we’re going to have keep American special forces capacity there for some time to come, and we’re going to have to chase intelligence that’s hard intelligence for some time to come, to chase a Zarqawi or somebody. But the only chance of diminishing the sense of occupation, reducing the targeting and beginning to establish confidence among Iraqis is to begin to transfer that authority.

And again I say, folks, we’re not asking them to fight World War II. We’re not asking them to engage the Warsaw Pact or something, not even asking them to fight against armed forces in any kind of uniform. The two killers in Iraq are IEDs and suicide bombers, and 160,000 American combat troops aren’t going to stop that.

Unless you defuse the elements of the insurgency itself, which is motivated by several different ingredients, you don’t have the ability to be able to reestablish the sovereignty and the independence necessary in those troops.

So you set a series of benchmarks, Paul, beginning with the election — that’s benchmark one — moving on to benchmarks you set about specific areas of responsibility for security. You pull back. You’re there to back them up. They start standing up more. And then you turn over whole provinces, and you begin to reduce down the numbers of troops as you stand them up. And that’s precisely how you begin to change the entire dynamics of the region.

Final comment:

The jihadists are the least present. The president finally admitted that. For two and a half years, we’ve been fighting in America about the war on terror, the central front, jihadists, but finally the administration acknowledged what we’ve all been saying for a long period of time. The jihadists are the lowest percentage of insurgents.

And if you talk to Shi’a and talk to Kurds and talk to Sunni — and those of us who have gone over there have — they don’t want those folks there. You get those folks standing up for themselves, and Zarqawi and company are not going to last long in Iraq.

So the real way you deal with this is to accelerate that stand-up. And I don’t think we’ve done it sufficiently, but we can — those benchmarks.

MODERATOR: So just to try to quantify it, 160,000 now; this time next year, if you were in charge —

KERRY: I believe you could get at least 100,000 out over that period of time, bring it down to somewhere in the vicinity of 30(,000) to 40,000, and then, you know, you’re going to have to see where you are. But the — that would be my goal. And I would not do it on a fixed automatic table; it has to be results-coordinated. And that’s the way I would do it.

MODERATOR: And you don’t buy the argument of some who say that, look, Americans are the focus of the jihadists and the insurgents; let’s just get them all out, out of the — after the election?

KERRY: I think if the United — I mean, when you say after the election, you look at — look at Congressman Murtha’s proposal that has drawn such heated fire from the right and elsewhere. He has talked about approximately a six-month period. But he’s also talked about sort of a results-connected process. He sees it in six months. I don’t. I think it’s going to take longer, and I see it as more connected to the series of events that I’ve talked about.

But in the end, if you just up and left in a matter of a month or two months, and there isn’t a sufficient base underneath you, you will, as I said in my prepared comments, encourage the radicalization of the region, have an enormous negative impact on those who are seeking this transformation in the Middle East that I talked about, and, I think, endanger our interests as well as other people’s interests in the region.

But I think you have to find the best way to get out of a terrible mess that has been exacerbated by almost every single decision they have made. Think how extraordinary it is that almost three years afterwards, we’re just getting around to this business of doing what we’re doing now. It’s stunning, folks. And we still have the same secretary of Defense who was the architect of this.

What’s happened to accountability in America? I mean, you know, this would not have stood in prior generations, I believe. And it says something about all of us that it’s allowed to stand today.