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May 18, 2004 Senators Press Wolfowitz on Duration of U.S. Security Role By BRIAN KNOWLTON, International Herald Tribune WASHINGTON, May 18 — Members of Congress pressed the Bush administration today to accelerate Iraqi elections, speed the handover of full sovereignty and step up talks on a new United Nations resolution. But a top Pentagon official said it was too soon to say how long a large United States military force might have to remain in the deeply unsettled country. As the June 30 deadline nears, the administration is under intense pressure, militarily and politically, to turn over greater powers to an interim government, whose members have yet to be named. The pressure grew further with the Iraqi prison abuse scandal, and with the killing Monday of the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Ezzedine Salim. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the Republican who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, has pressed the administration for weeks to answer key questions about what will happen on June 30 and afterward. Today he urged officials to do everything possible to accelerate the political transition and to speed elections. Delays, he said, "undercut United States credibility and increase suspicions among Iraqis." Lugar called for opening a United States embassy in Baghdad even before June 30, and accelerating the negotiations on a United Nations resolution covering sovereignty and other matters. While administration officials agreed on the need for speed, the deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, could not answer one key question on which foreign support for Iraq will largely turn: how long United States forces would retain chief responsibility for security in Iraq. "The course of war is simply not something one can determine," Wolfowitz told a Democratic questioner in the Lugar committee, but "very substantial" Iraqi security forces would be trained and ready by year`s end. Did that mean, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin asked him, that by the year`s close the United States would no longer be primarily responsible for security? "Senator," Wolfowitz replied, "that`s more than what I just said." Senators pressed some basic questions, such as who will lead the interim government, and what authority it will have over Iraqi security forces, courts and prisons. Just last week Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed one key point of uncertainty, saying that an interim government could order coalition forces, including United States troops, to leave, though he viewed that as unlikely. Of late, congressional committees have been plunging into their oversight role in an activist way that tends to happen most in time of war or crisis. Iraq was the focus today in several congressional venues. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who spent a full day before congressional committees May 7 explaining and apologizing for the abuse scandal, met behind closed doors with members of the House Armed Services Committee. The confluence of the funding requests with the latest Iraqi violence and the abuse scandal, along with polls showing eroding public support for the war amid the uncertainties of transition, produced some unusually anguished questioning. Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said that she senses Americans were as distraught over setbacks in Iraq as had ever been, and that the two top administration officials appearing before the Foreign Relations Committee — Mr. Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — appeared not to appreciate this. "Listening to you," she said, "one would never know what`s happening in America, how people are so distraught over this. "And I think if you look at the faces of the colleagues, my colleagues, I`ve never seen us quite look this way." And Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, quoted senior army officers as criticizing what they considered an incoherent strategy for Iraq that might mean that "we will lose strategically." "The American people may not stand for it," he said. "There`s cause for alarm." Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who has frequently criticized administration conduct in Iraq, warned that "we`re losing the support of the Iraqi people" and appeared to lack "an effective political strategy" to regain it. Senator Lugar said that he feared the Bush administration would lose support at home and abroad, as well, unless it furnished a detailed plan to "prove to our allies and to Iraqis that we have a strategy and that we are committed to making it work." The prison abuse scandal was a powerful undercurrent throughout the day, though not to the extent of last week, when it spilled into hearings meant to focus on other matters. Lawmakers said they were only partly satisfied with the answers they obtained today. Mr. Wolfowitz, when asked whether American troop strength would remain around its current level of more than 135,000 through next year, would not venture a guess. "I have no idea what it will — I mean, I really don`t know," he said. Mr. Armitage confirmed that Iraq forces would operate after June 30 under an Iraqi general "in partnership" with coalition forces led by a United States general. But could they, he asked rhetorically, "opt out of an operation" if they objected to it? "The answer to that has to be yes," Mr. Armitage said. "They are sovereign and they will be in charge of their forces." Mr. Armitage also said that control of military prisons would be given to Iraqis "as rapidly as possible." Mr. Lugar urged the officials to accelerate the opening of the new United States Embassy, a huge facility with perhaps 1,400 employees, an annual budget of $1 billion, and control, once the Coalition Provisional Authority shuts its doors June 30, over yearly reconstruction spending of $20 billion. But Mr. Armitage said the administration wanted to avoid overlap between the outgoing provisional authority and the embassy, which will use some of the same buildings. "We want to make sure that there is a clean break," he said. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
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| aus der Diskussion: | Guten Morgen Mr. Bush |
| Autor (Datum des Eintrages): | Joerver (18.05.04 23:38:46) |
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