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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