Christopher Shays: “after my oversight trips to Iraq in July and August of 2006, I concluded we needed to encourage the Iraqi government…”

“after my oversight trips to Iraq in July and August of 2006, I concluded we needed to encourage the Iraqi government, and specifically Prime Minister Maliki, to take stronger action to improve the situation in their country, and that the best way to do this was to set firm timelines for Iraqi security forces to replace our troops who are doing police work. I believe a workable timeline will incentivize the Iraqis to make the hard choices necessary to ensure stability among the three primary sects--Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds. We need to motivate the Iraqis to set firm deadlines for provincial elections, reconciliation and amnesty, and a final drafting of their constitution. During 2005, Iraqis set timelines to establish and ratify a constitution and hold national elections. They accomplished each benchmark successfully. I do not believe they would have achieved this success if we had not pushed Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds to resolve their differences and compromise in order to meet the timelines we helped set. The United States went into Iraq on a bipartisan basis, with two-thirds of the House and three-quarters of the Senate voting to authorize the use of force. I believe we need to draw down the majority of our troops on a bipartisan basis, and have sought to achieve bipartisan solutions to improve our operations and reduce the violence.”