|
||||||||
  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
U.S. disputes Iraq occupancy plans
From Suzanne Malveaux (CNN Washington Bureau)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration Friday disputed a report it is focusing on U.S. military occupation of Iraq as a leading option if Saddam Hussein's regime is toppled, but acknowledged an American presence would be needed "until such time as you can put in a better system." The report, in the New York Times, quoted senior administration officials as saying the White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the post-World War II occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if U.S. forces oust Saddam. It quoted one senior official as saying the administration was "coalescing around" the concept. Asked about that during an interview Friday afternoon on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "We are obviously doing contingency planning and there are lots of different models from history that one could look at -- Japan, Germany -- but I wouldn't say that anything has been settled upon." Earlier at a White House news briefing, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said, "The U.S. being an occupying power, no one views us as that." He said U.S. forces would be on the ground in Iraq, possibly as part of a United Nations or international coalition aimed at keeping the peace, or through a "U.S. military civil affairs unit" responsible for restoring Iraq's infrastructure. "We are looking for how to quickly transfer power to the Iraqi people both from inside Iraq and from outside Iraq and in the process we want to make sure stability is achieved so that Iraqi people can have water, they can have food, they can have heat, they can have electricity. And those are the issues that are being looked at now," Fleischer told reporters. U.S. presenceThe question also came up at the Defense and State Department briefings. "I would specifically and aggressively wave you off any hard and fast conclusions about what might happen in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq," said Pentagon spokeswoman Tori Clarke, adding that President Bush "has not said that military action will occur." Powell said that if Bush does decide on war, "Obviously troops are going to a theater and to a country and in the immediate aftermath of such a conflict, there would have to be a need for some presence until such time as you can put in place a better system. "I mean, the United States has done this many times in the course of the last 50 or 60 years and we always try to get out as quickly as we can once we have re-established peace, put in place a stable system," he said. "It is never our intention to go and stay in a place and to impose our will by the presence of our military forces." Fleischer said an American presence inside Iraq after a regime change would be welcomed by the Iraqi people. "People want to be free, around the world. It doesn't matter what country they are, whether it is the United States or anywhere in the world," he said. "Nobody wants to live under a brutal dictatorship, and the people of Afghanistan view the United States as liberators." The president himself, in a recent speech on the progress of restructuring Afghanistan, used the example of U.S. military and diplomatic involvement inside that country to make the case for staying in Iraq. "We've got a great tradition of liberating people, not conquering them," Bush said. "We never seek to impose our culture, or our form of government. We just want to live under those universal values, God-given values. We believe in the demands of human dignity that apply in every culture in every nation."
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
