WASHINGTON, March 20: Leading Democrats on Monday called on US President George Bush to seek international help to contain the surging violence in Iraq that one prominent Democrat depicted as a ‘low-grade civil war’.
“Today marks the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and is a milestone moment where we have to ask ourselves not only where are we but where are we going from here?” said Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leading administration critic on Iraq.
“The president, instead of making speeches to the American people which should have been made three years ago about where we were, should be on an airplane going to the world capitals insisting that the rest of the world step up to their responsibility, put collective international pressure,” Mr Biden said at a Washington press conference.
“America should play a much higher stakes game,” he said.
Mr Biden called on the Bush administration to step up its pressure on political factions in Iraq to find a consensus as they struggle to write a constitution and form a functioning government.
“Iraq’s future and the future of success or failure of our effort there will be played out in the next several months in my view. We cannot want democracy and peace more than the Iraqis want it,” he said.
“The Iraqis have to form a unity government. They must take the key security ministries in the hands of ... people who will pursue the national interests, not sectarian agendas,” he added.
Mr Biden said that the burgeoning civil war also brings military risks for US troops.
“The good news so far is those militias haven’t turned full bore on the United States of America,” he said.
“Imagine what happens if this breaks out into a full-blown civil war.”
BREMER BLAMED: Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi on Sunday blamed former US civilian administrator Paul ‘Jerry’ Bremer for failing to anticipate the violence in Iraq.
Asked by CNN television’s ‘Late Edition’ program who was responsible for ‘blunders’ in Iraq, Mr Chalabi said: “I will give you a name. I would not have given the name if he had not published a book — Ambassador Jerry Bremer.”
Mr Chalabi slammed Mr Bremer ‘for not appreciating the situation, appreciating the size of the threat from anti-US insurgents.
“He kept, for months and months on end, to say, those are diehards who have no coordination and no plan to move forward,” he said.
“He refused to accept the obvious. He refused to believe what was right in front of him,” Mr Chalabi said.
“In general, this is largely responsible for what we are seeing now,” he said, speaking of the sectarian violence plaguing the country.
Mr Chalabi also dismissed as ‘great fiction’ a recent book by Mr Bremer that pinned some of the blame for the violence on poor military planning by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. —AFP