Bush calls Iraq election major step forward

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Standing with Iraqis whose
ink-stained fingers showed they voted, President George W. Bush
said Iraq’s election on Thursday was a big step to meeting U.S.
goals and he hoped it would send a message to Iran and Syria.

Faced with wide U.S. public disapproval of his Iraq
strategy and eager to show progress, Bush hailed the millions
of Iraqis who voted for “defying the terrorists and refusing to
be cowed into not voting.”

“There’s a lot of joy as far as I’m concerned in seeing the
Iraqi people accomplish this major milestone on the march to
democracy,” Bush said.

He appeared in the Oval Office with five Iraqi Americans
who voted at ballot places in the United States and who had
ink-stained fingers to indicate they had voted.

Bush is under mounting pressure from Americans to show
progress in Iraq that will enable a reduction in U.S. troops
next year.

“This is a major step forward in achieving our objective”
of a democratic Iraq and ally in the Middle East, Bush said. He
hoped Iraq’s example would “send such a powerful example to
others in the region, whether they live in Iran or Syria for
example.”

Washington says Iran and Syria are interfering with a drive
to end the Iraqi insurgency and create a democratic Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an architect of a war
fought over unproved allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of
mass destruction, called the election “a defeat for the enemies
of the Iraqi people.”

“It constituted a defeat to the people who have been doing
the beheading, and conducting the suicide raids, and
threatening people and assassinating people,” he said.

CUTTING TROOP LEVELS

There are now about 155,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, but the
United States plans to reduce the force, recently bolstered to
help protect elections, down to the usual level of about
137,000 early next year.

Going lower than that would depend on the security
situation.

Twenty-four House Democrats, including Minority Whip Steny
Hoyer of Maryland and 11 members of the Armed Services
Committee, said in a letter to Bush the elections gave the
United States the chance to reduce its involvement in Iraq.”

It said the U.S. military presence “should decrease
significantly in the next 12 months” and its role should be
limited to isolating and defeating foreign terrorists there.

Iraq must take responsibility for defeating domestic
security threats, the Democrats said, and the United States
“must not be a proxy in an Iraqi civil war” if Sunni and
Baathist violence against the government continues.

The election will pave the way for establishing a permanent
government. The U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad,
told Reuters: “Since no single party will have a majority there
will be a need for a very broad-based coalition.”

But the determining factor for the Bush administration in
bringing home U.S. troops is whether Iraqi forces are
sufficiently trained to fight the insurgency.

“There is still lots of tough work to do and we should
expect the insurgency not to just go away because there were
elections,” said U.S. Army Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S.
and coalition forces in Iraq, in remarks piped into the
Pentagon from Iraq.

U.S. officials believed the turnout was higher than the 10
million who voted in the October constitutional referendum in
Iraq, and they thought that more disaffected Sunni Arabs had
voted than previously.

(Additional reporting by Charles Aldinger, Caren Bohan and
Vicki Allen)