Henry Kissinger: Military Victory Not Possible in Iraq
April 2nd, 2007 @ 11:19 am
Henry Kissinger, “who helped engineer the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam” broke with the Bush Administration on Sunday and said, “the problems in Iraq are more complex than that conflict, and military victory is no longer possible.”
In an AP News exclusive, Kissinger noted that “A ‘military victory’ in the sense of total control over the whole territory, imposed on the entire population, is not possible.”
The faceless, ubiquitous nature of Iraq’s insurgency, as well as the religious divide between Shiite and Sunni rivals, makes negotiating peace more complex, he said.
“It is a more complicated problem,” Kissinger said. “The Vietnam War involved states, and you could negotiate with leaders who controlled a defined area.”
But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam War who has also advised Bush on Iraq, warned that a sudden pullout of U.S. troops or loss of influence could unleash chaos...
Kissinger said in the interview, echoing what John Kerry has been saying for a very long time that, “the best way forward is to reconcile the differences between Iraq’s warring sects with help from other countries.” He also “applauded efforts to host an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Iraq’s neighbors, “including bringing Iran to the table, as Kerry has suggested.
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