French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has urged that power be handed over to a provisional Iraqi government by the end of the year. Mr de Villepin said the June 2004 date favoured by the US was “too late”.
“We need to move faster. This is an extremely urgent situation,” he told French newspaper La Croix.
He proposed creating an assembly of members of existing bodies and other “forces” that would elect a government by the end of this year.
Dominique de Villepin translated:
If we don’t have a weak government in place soon that can be toppled quickly by insurgents and Saddam loyalists, all of our former Ba’ath party business partners might be dead or in custody, and with two real functioning democracies in the Middle East, it will be very difficult to continue our proxy colonialism by playing the entire Arab world off against Israel.
Also, go read this Eliot Cohen piece on the dangers of cutting and running or making the transition too quickly:
Cut-and-run cannot be disguised, and the price to be paid for it would be appalling. No one else would take on the burdens of Iraq; talk of handing it over to the United Nations or NATO is wishfulness, not strategy. Whatever one’s view of the war’s rationale, conception, planning or conduct, our war it remains, and we had best figure out how to win it.
John Anderson
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin: “We need to move faster. This is an extremely urgent situation.”
We? Do people who do this still get asked if they have a mouse in their pocket to justify “we?”
slots
nice blog