The following address was delivered by George W. Bush to the people of Iraq on Monday, November 8, 2004. It was broadcast on prime-time TV and radio with a running translation in Arabic. It was also printed, in English and Arabic, as a leaflet, which was then widely distributed in Iraq.
... I am appearing before you tonight to tell you that the U.S. component of that expeditionary force will soon be withdrawn from your country. It is the judgment of the U.S. government that the principal aim of those U.N. resolutions — namely, that Iraq no longer be a threat to the peace of this region by the fact of possessing weapons of mass destruction — has been fulfilled. It now seems possible, in fact, that Iraq was no such threat even at the time our troops landed in your country. However, the Saddam dictatorship gave us every reason to believe otherwise, and we acted accordingly, with full justification. We do not, and never shall, apologize for our actions.
It is the further judgment of the U.S. government that Iraq no longer represents any threat to our country and her interests; or, at any rate, no threat that requires our continued presence in your country. Other nations in the Coalition must make their own judgments; but we believe your country will soon be free of foreign troops altogether... Iraqis must choose their own future. The number of possibilities from which you can choose is small, and the United States reserves the right, in our own interests, to foreclose some of them.One. You may become a prosperous modern nation, enjoying freedom under a constitutional government. That is, and has always been, our hope for Iraq.
Two. You may return to dictatorship under the rule of gangsters. While we hope you will not choose this path, we will accept such a choice calmly and without interference, provided that your new gangster-dictatorship is not hostile to the United States or our interests. A dictatorship that is hostile to us and our interests, we shall not tolerate. It will meet the same fate as Saddam Hussein's.
Three. Your country may degenerate into chaos, with a prolonged civil war, and perhaps ultimate disintegration. So long as you restrict yourselves to assaulting each other's lives and property, this state of affairs will be acceptable to us, though we shall regret your choice. Should Iraq disintegrate and separate nations arise in her place, under coherent governments, we shall urge international acceptance of those nations, as we have in previous cases of national disintegration — most recently Yugoslavia — and shall work with the U.N. to bring them under the scope of the U.N. Charter, preserving them from predatory neighbors, while reserving always the right to act in our own interests if we believe those interests threatened.
Four. A neighboring power may invade and attempt to annex part or all of your country. This will not be acceptable to the United States, and it will of course be a clear violation of the U.N. Charter. We shall seek U.N. authority to end any such adventure by concerted action on the part of the community of civilized nations; or, if that community is unwilling to act, we reserve the right to act unilaterally, subject to our calculation of our own interests, and to the approval of our people through their elected representatives. Its a column in NRO - Conservative bastion. And it shows an exit strategy for the US from Iraq. Only flaw: doesn't cover the elimination of terrorism and its support inside Iraq. Other than that, very plausible. Read the whole thing |