WASHINGTON, Sept 30: Air Force Gen Richard Myers ended four years as the top US military officer on Friday with a warning that pulling out of Iraq would only make the United States more vulnerable.
Gen Myers also said there was great progress in Iraq – an assessment at odds with growing unease among Americans with the 2-1/2-year war and a surge of violence in Iraq that has killed 110 people in two days.
Gen Myers swore in Gen Peter Pace as his successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during an outdoor ceremony at Fort Myer, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon. Gen Pace became the first Marine Corps officer to hold the post.
Gen Myers, 63, became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff three weeks after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, and was given a second two-year term in 2003.
The former Vietnam war fighter pilot was principal military adviser to President George Bush, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the White House National Security Council during the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions.
“The stakes in this war on terrorism simply couldn’t be higher,” Gen Myers told an audience that included President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Opinion polls show US public support for the Iraq occupation slipping. More than 100,000 people last weekend attended an anti-war protest in Washington. There have been 1,925 US military deaths in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.
But Gen Myers, a plain-spoken Kansan who is retiring after more than 40 years in uniform, cited ‘great progress in Iraq’, which he acknowledged as a difficult task.—Reuters
