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Rice: Differences can be strength in Iraq
(AP)
Updated: 2005-11-11 23:33

Rice's trip's was her second to Iraq as secretary of state. It comes five weeks before elections for a permanent Iraqi government. Like initial elections last January and a constitution-writing exercise this summer, the new round of voting is a marker of Iraq's political development. The Bush administration also hopes it is a step closer to the day when U.S. forces can leave the country.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the Iraqi forces as "very, very capable. I'm very optimistic about what I'm seeing in the Iraqi armed forces right now."

"We need to hand over to the Iraqi people and the Iraqi armed forces their country as they are trained and ready to do so," he said on ABC's "Good Morning America" Friday. "This is very much an evolutionary process," he said.

Rice met with the provisional governor, Duraid Kashmoula, a Sunni, whose cousin and predecessor was killed by insurgents last year.

She was also helping launch an experiment in the fight to clear insurgents from Iraqi cities and keep them at bay. She reviewed three combined civilian-military units known as provisional reconstruction teams, which are rapid response units meant to move into violent areas once insurgents are gone and quickly establish order.

"If Iraq does not succeed and should Iraq become a place of despair, generations of Americans would also be condemned to fear," Rice said at a ceremony for the first of the teams. "So our fates and our futures are very much linked."

Units in Mosul, Hillah and Kirkuk are the first of 16 planned.

Sunnis, stripped of their former political primacy under Saddam, first boycotted U.S.-backed efforts to establish a new representative government in Iraq, and then last month voted in large numbers against a national constitution many saw as sealing their fate as a minority stripped of any power. The constitution passed, and Rice framed the voting as a success because Sunnis turned out at all.

In the province of Nineveh, which includes Mosul, the vote was 55 percent against the referendum and 45 percent for it.

Political progress has been offset in Mosul and elsewhere by pernicious violence, including the deaths last month in Mosul of four U.S. Embassy employees killed by a roadside bomb.
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