Senator also pushes for greater transfer of authority to Iraqis

By David Shelby
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- Senator John McCain called on the Bush administration to commit more troops to the effort to secure Iraq in a November 5 speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank focused on U.S. foreign policy.

"The simple truth is that we do not have sufficient forces in Iraq to meet our military objectives," McCain stated.

McCain, Republican from Arizona and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted that General Ricardo Sanchez, U.S. commanding officer in Iraq, acknowledged in September that his forces could not handle any new eruption of conflict in Iraq.

"Since then, attacks on American forces have doubled, to over 30 a day, and their increasing sophistication has made them more lethal," the senator said.

McCain insisted that it makes no sense "to defend a troop ceiling that has been in place since April as American forces and our Iraqi allies come under increasingly savage attack."

The senator suggested that another full division of troops would be in order, although he noted that the choice of troops should reflect the specific needs on the ground in terms of counter-insurgency and intelligence gathering.

McCain voiced concern that the administration might be tempted to adjust its military posture in response to domestic political pressures.

"The only legitimate reason to adjust our posture is to improve our ability to accomplish our mission or respond to our successes in stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq," he said.

As for the domestic political pressures, he said, "We must explain to the American people what our soldiers are dying for in Iraq, why their sacrifice matters, why we must win, and how we will win -- not how quickly we can get out and leave the Iraqis to their fate."

McCain observed, "Friends and adversaries across the Middle East are watching us closely to gauge our will to win," and he cautioned, "the United States will fail in Iraq if our adversaries believe they can outlast us."

He insisted, however, that the goal of achieving stability and security is realistic. Responding to a question from the audience, the senator noted, "We do have the advantage that -- I keep having to come back to that -- the north and the south of country are very stable and very progressive."

"The vast majority of Iraqis share our goal of defeating the remnants of Saddam's regime and their terrorist allies," he said, and "the United States and the Iraqi people share the same goal of building a free, prosperous, and secure Iraq."

McCain also insisted that "we must move more quickly to transfer meaningful political authority to Iraqi leaders."

"The CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] seems to think that all wisdom is made in America, and that the Iraqi people were defeated, not liberated," he said. McCain suggested that instead of thinking about post-war Iraq in terms of the reconstruction of Germany and Japan, we should look at it more in terms of Italy and France -- "liberated countries whose people were largely on our side."

"We are aggressively training Iraqis to perform security functions. We should be equally aggressive in training and advising political parties, transferring more authority to Iraqi leaders, and establishing a framework and timeline for a political transition," he declared.

"Victory can be our only exit strategy," McCain said.

He called on President Bush to show "a commitment to do what is necessary militarily, to deploy as many American forces for as long as it takes, to ignore the political calendar, and to trust Iraqis with a greater degree of authority to manage their own affairs."

He went on to say, "We must succeed in Iraq because every bad actor in the Middle East -- Baathist killers, terror's sponsors in Iran and Syria, terror's financiers in Saudi Arabia, terror's radical Shiite and Wahabi inciters, the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, Ansar al Islam, Hamas, Hezbollah -- has a stake in our failure.... Iraq must be important to us because it is so important to our enemies."

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)