Secretary Rice's Remarks on Iraq at BBC Today-Chatham House Lecture   Excerpt from "Remarks at BBC Today-Chatham House Lecture" Well, we could spend a long time on the differences between Vietnam and Iraq, including questions of the nature of the Middle East at this point and the relationship of a different Middle East to the core security interests of the United States, or for that matter Great Britain. But we could perhaps have that debate sometime. Let me just -- let me address the question of how long the United States feels that it needs to be there. We are there at the request of this, first the interim government, and we'll see -- I assume at the request of the national unity government when it is formed. We're there under UN mandate. We're there to try to train Iraqi forces so that they themselves can do the security tasks before them. But I think it would be wrong to somehow leave Iraq to the mercies of the Zarqawis of the world or former Baathists who really do want to unravel the political process. And while it is true that there is a great deal of violence, that people can kill innocents and that can be the dominant image of Iraq on television or in the newspapers, there is another story to what is going on in Iraq; and that is that the people of Iraq, through leaders that are emerging, are trying to find a way to make use of democratic institutions to overcome their differences and to form a national unity government and to have a way to overcome those differences peacefully. |
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