U.S. warns Iraq on new government
WASHINGTON ---Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Iraqi politicians Sunday to be "darned careful" in forming a new government so that they not weaken Iraqi security forces. He also indirectly blamed Turkey for the persistent strength of the Iraqi insurgency, saying U.S. troops could have sharply curtailed it had they been able to invade Iraq from the north.
His caution to the Iraqi politicians struggling to assemble a government seemed a rather unusual intervention by a Pentagon chief in the internal deliberations of a nascent democracy, albeit one that would not have existed without the U.S.-led occupation.Rumsfeld, speaking two years after the war began, sought above all to underline accomplishments in Iraq. We have 25 million Iraqis that are free," he said.
"The economy is coming back. The dinar is strong. The schools are open. The hospitals are open."But he made clear that he had concerns as well. Rumsfeld noted the ferment, turnover and slippage inherent in the process as Iraq has moved from post-invasion governing council to interim government to transitional government.
He then warned that Iraqis had to "be darned careful about making a lot of changes just to be putting in their friend or to be putting in someone else from their tribe or from their ethnic group.
""This is too serious a business over there," the plain-spoken Rumsfeld said on Fox News, "and the United States has got too much invested and too much committed and too many lives at stake for people to be careless about that."
The defense secretary, tempering his comment, said that Iraqis should "put in who you want - it's your country and your sovereignty." But he then repeated that they should "be darned careful that you don't cause undue turbulence and weakness in the security forces, because it's the security forces of Iraq that are going to defeat that insurgency."
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