- WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The
United States needs at least 10,000 more troops in Iraq and must curb
domestic
spending to pay for the war, John McCain, a Republican senator and former
rival of President Bush, said on Thursday.
-
- McCain, calling the Iraq conflict the "test of a
generation," said the United States would pay dearly if it left Iraq
before establishing a new order based on freedom and democracy.
-
- The Arizona senator is a Vietnam war hero whose relations
with Bush have been testy since he lost out in the race for the party's
2000 presidential nomination.
-
- In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations he called
the deteriorating security situation In Iraq a "wake-up call"
for Washington and said policymakers must show bipartisan resolve to
prevail.
-
- Bush has promised to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis
on June 30, formally ending an occupation which began after President
Saddam
Hussein's fall last April, although a big U.S. force will stay on to try
to keep order. A surge in bloodshed has clouded the run-up to the
transition.
-
- "America faces today our biggest foreign policy
test in a generation," McCain, an outspoken member of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, said.
-
- President Bush must be "perfectly frank,"
making
clear to the American people that bringing peace and democracy to Iraq
"will be very expensive, difficult and long," McCain said.
-
- TOUGH DECISIONS
-
- "We need to make tough decisions about where our
wartime priorities lay and this means that we have to reassess our domestic
priorities ... we simply cannot have it all -- tax cuts, pork for the
special
interests, ever-growing entitlement programs and war in Iraq," he
said.
-
- "Congress cannot demand discipline and sacrifice
only of the men and women fighting in the desert. We need it at home as
well," he said.
-
- The president, facing a tough re-election fight in
November,
has promised to go ahead with further tax cuts, which Democrats say will
further push up growing budget deficits.
-
- The White House has said that given the cost of fighting
an upsurge in violence, it might rethink a vow not to seek more money for
the Iraq operation until after the election.
-
- McCain called for more troops to be sent to the
battlefield
on top of 135,000 already there. "At least another full division and
probably more" is needed, he said. A division is roughly 10,000
troops.
-
- McCain criticized the administration for not yet having
a political strategy for transferring sovereignty to Iraqis on the target
date of June 30.
-
- The United States must stay in Iraq because "if
we leave, violence will fill the vacuum as groups struggle for political
power and we risk all-out civil war," he said.
-
- "If we succeed, we send a message to every despot
in the region that their day is done," he added.
-
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