Rep. Martry Meehan (D-Ma5) Calls for Timetable for Iraq Troop Pullout

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Sun Jan-16-05 11:46 AM
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Rep. Martry Meehan (D-Ma5) Calls for Timetable for Iraq Troop Pullout

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/01/16/meehan_calls_for_timetable_on_iraq_pullout/

Meehan calls for timetable on Iraq pullout
After trip, notes erosion of security
By Michael Levenson, Globe Correspondent | January 16, 2005

Deteriorating security and rampant anger toward US troops in Iraq is emboldening insurgents, according to Representative Martin T. Meehan, who returned from a fact-finding trip yesterday calling for an exit strategy that would significantly reduce the number of troops there over the next 12 to 18 months.

Meehan, speaking at a Logan Airport press conference following a weeklong trip to Iraq and Afghanistan with fellow members of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was only able to travel through the country in armored convoys and visit US military bases, unlike his last trip to Iraq in August 2003, when he said he was free to walk the streets and speak with average Iraqis.

The marked change in the country's security, and polls that he said show 70 percent to 80 percent of Iraqis want the US to leave, demonstrate the need, Meehan said, to define an endpoint to significant US troop involvement in Iraq. A concrete plan to bring ''the majority" of the approximately 150,000 troops in the country home by summer 2006 will eliminate the perception, Meehan said, that the United States is an occupying force in Iraq, and splinter disparate insurgent groups who have set aside their differences to battle Americans.

''We really need to let the Iraqi people and the world know that we are not going to be an occupying force forever," the 48-year-old Lowell Democrat said. ''And that's why we need to set out a timetable that makes sense." Meehan, previewing a policy he will detail in a paper to be released early this week, said a smaller, more mobile military force should remain in Iraq after summer 2006, to advise and support Iraqi security forces.

During his trip, Meehan met with troops from Massachusetts and senior military commanders, as well as Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, and Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, who, he said, ''wants to work with the United States to develop some kind of a timetable" for the departure of US troops.

Most striking, Meehan said, was the heavy guard under which he was forced to travel in Iraq. Meehan spent two days in the country and returned each night to Jordan to sleep.

''It's a contrast from the last time when I was in Iraq," Meehan said, ''when I drove down the streets and had Iraqi people giving the thumbs-up and saying 'Thank you very much,' 'We're with you,' 'Great job.' I didn't see any of that this time."

Meehan said he was heartened by the troops' bravery and morale, and by what he said were the arrival of new shipments of Kevlar vests and armor for their Humvees. But Meehan said the Pentagon must now give troops a date when they can plan to return home.

''What they need and what the American people need is to see light at the end of the tunnel," Meehan said.

Meehan's proposal comes as others in Washington are considering plans to reduce the number of US troop in Iraq, 19 months after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations there.

In an interview last week with National Public Radio, Secretary of State Colin Powell said US troop involvement in Iraq ''is related to the security environment, and our deployment will start to draw down as the security environment improves."

Powell, however, did not suggest the type of timeline Meehan is seeking.

''I would like to see our troops come out as quickly as possible," Powell said. ''The Iraqis would like to see our troops come out as quickly as possible. But it's not possible right now to say that by the end of 2005, we'll be down to such and such a number. It really is dependent upon the situation."

US Representative Martin Meehan, Democrat of Lowell, spoke to reporters yesterday in Logan Airport after returning from a fact-ﬁnding trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. (AP Photo)