Remarks by Gen. James L. Jones at the Atlantic Council of the United States

As his head was being battered against the ground and he was near -- moments away from unconsciousness, to his great fortune a Marine sergeant who was shopping at Wal-Mart saw him and quickly unplugged the horse. (Laughter.)

Q Thank you! (Laughter continues.)

GEN. JONES: It's in honor of General Scowcroft. (Laughter, applause.)

(Chuckles.)

I'm not sure Iraq is really what you all really want to talk about after having gone through the marathons that you've witnessed and no doubt listened to and the myriad of articles that you've read. So I'm certainly not going to go through a long dissertation here about the commission. Hopefully some you may have read it, some of you may have heard something about it, but I'll just give you a very, very brief overview, and we will get to Q's and A's as quickly as possible.

On the 6th of September, this commission did report to the Congress, and I want to just go over the four or five main points of the enacting legislation because it's important as you consider what the commission did and what it didn't do.

The first part of the enacting legislation was that the commission was asked to evaluate the capability of Iraqi security forces with regard to the territorial integrity of the country. In other words, can they -- could they protect the country. And our finding there was generally no, with some -- with a distinction, and the distinction being that Iraqi security forces, which comprise the police forces and the emerging armed forces, have made some progress in being able to respond to the internal threats of the country. But the traditional defense of the nation, the defense of the borders, is something that is still a ways away, and that distinction is important to keep in mind. So the answer to the question is no, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's unsatisfactory, it just means it hasn't arrived yet.

The second one was to deny international terrorists a safe haven, evaluate their capability with regard to that. And that's more along the lines of the internal threat that I was just talking about. And we found that on that score the developing Iraqi security forces, notably the Iraqi army, was more able to take on that mission.

The third question was whether the emerging Iraqi security forces would be able to bring greater security over the next 12 to 18 months to Iraq. And we found that basically, based on the current trend lines and assuming that they continue, that there were indications to believe that that answer could be a positive one as well.

And the last one was to evaluate the potential of bringing to -- an end to sectarian violence by the Iraqi security forces to achieve national reconciliation. After our study, we really -- we really came to the conclusion that that question should have been turned on its head and the question should have been can the government of Iraq bring about political reconciliation in order to end sectarian violence. It's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg question. But the idea that the armed forces of Iraq are going to -- by themselves or the coalition -- to bring an end to sectarian violence is not really the recipe that we think is the most -- the easiest one to tackle. As a matter of fact, it's a little backwards. The real overall conclusion is that the government of Iraq is the one that had to find a way to achieve political reconciliation in order to enable a reduction in sectarian violence.

So those were the -- well, the other thing we were asked to do was to evaluate the Iraqi security forces' capabilities in such areas as training, equipment, command and control, intelligence, logistics, those kinds of enablers. And so we did that as we went along everywhere, and we found that generally speaking, that while the Iraqi army, in particular, was able to take on more responsibilities in terms of the day-to-day combat operations against the internal threats of the country, that they were still lacking in critical enablers along those lines. And so, much more needs to be done before the army can move in to what is termed an "independent ability to act on its own."

<< Previous Page	Page 3 Next Page >>
Print Friendly Version