Senator Clinton Calls Bush Plan ‘a Losing Strategy’
By PATRICK HEALY
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — Fresh from a weekend trip to Iraq, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton this morning intensified her opposition to President Bush’s new plan to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad, calling it “a losing strategy” and a “very bad mission” and proposing new limits and conditions on the overall war effort.
In laying out her latest set of positions and talking points on Iraq during appearances on the NBC and CBS morning shows, and on National Public Radio, Mrs. Clinton — a likely candidate for president in 2008 — did not call for a fixed deadline for withdrawing all American forces, saying only that the troops should leave Iraq “eventually.” Nor did she endorse blocking money for the new troop deployment. Those two positions are favored by many antiwar Democrats who are expected to be a force in the presidential primaries, and by at least one likely rival in 2008, former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
Instead, Mrs. Clinton called for capping the number of American forces in Iraq to the total number there on Jan. 1 — before Mr. Bush proposed adding forces. That total is roughly 140,000. She also proposed making a new threat to Iraqi government leaders to force their cooperation: the loss of American funds to train and equip Iraqi forces, rebuild the economy, and, to make the pressure more acute, to provide security for the leaders themselves.
Mrs. Clinton did not outline benchmarks for that progress, but she indicated that the Shiite-led government would be expected to crack down on sectarian militias in Baghdad and elsewhere and to find new ways to work with Sunni political groups.
She also called for sending more troops to support the American military mission in Afghanistan, which she referred to as “quite a success story.” And she opposed any shift of forces out of Afghanistan as part of the troop expansion in Iraq.
(The rest is here.)
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — Fresh from a weekend trip to Iraq, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton this morning intensified her opposition to President Bush’s new plan to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad, calling it “a losing strategy” and a “very bad mission” and proposing new limits and conditions on the overall war effort.
In laying out her latest set of positions and talking points on Iraq during appearances on the NBC and CBS morning shows, and on National Public Radio, Mrs. Clinton — a likely candidate for president in 2008 — did not call for a fixed deadline for withdrawing all American forces, saying only that the troops should leave Iraq “eventually.” Nor did she endorse blocking money for the new troop deployment. Those two positions are favored by many antiwar Democrats who are expected to be a force in the presidential primaries, and by at least one likely rival in 2008, former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
Instead, Mrs. Clinton called for capping the number of American forces in Iraq to the total number there on Jan. 1 — before Mr. Bush proposed adding forces. That total is roughly 140,000. She also proposed making a new threat to Iraqi government leaders to force their cooperation: the loss of American funds to train and equip Iraqi forces, rebuild the economy, and, to make the pressure more acute, to provide security for the leaders themselves.
Mrs. Clinton did not outline benchmarks for that progress, but she indicated that the Shiite-led government would be expected to crack down on sectarian militias in Baghdad and elsewhere and to find new ways to work with Sunni political groups.
She also called for sending more troops to support the American military mission in Afghanistan, which she referred to as “quite a success story.” And she opposed any shift of forces out of Afghanistan as part of the troop expansion in Iraq.
(The rest is here.)
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