No future for Iraq if sectarianism rules, Rice says
Source: Reuters
By Arshad Mohammed HANOI, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Iraqis "don't have a future" if they give in to the sectarian tensions tearing at their society, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Saturday. "They (only) have one future and that is a future together. They don't have a future if they try to stay apart," Rice said in a speech on the sidelines of an Asia Pacific summit. Iraq has been riven by sectarian violence for months and its prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has been unable to disband militias and death squads who appear to operate with impunity. While acknowledging the bloodshed, Rice said she believed the Iraqis were headed toward a better future and disputed that the United States was stuck in a "quagmire." "I don't mean to diminish the difficulties that we have in Iraq and that the Iraqi people have in Iraq," Rice said. "This is difficult going." As she has for months, Rice urged the Iraqi government to take tough decisions and the society as a whole to "face up to their differences." "If they do that and if we support them and if we remain committed to them and if they realise that the stakes in Iraq are (really) the stakes for a different kind of Middle East that can form the center of a more peaceful world -- they have a chance and (we also) have a chance," she added. Rice spoke on the sidelines of an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Hanoi that has drawn repeated comparisons between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War, an idea that she and other U.S. officials seek to rebut at every opportunity. Dismay over the Iraq war is widely regarded the key reason that the Democrats swept Bush's Republican party from control of the U.S. Congress earlier this month and has accelerated a search for a solution inside and outside the government. Rice sought to cast the Iraq war as comparable to the challenges the United States faced in history, including its independence from Britain, the Civil War, and the struggle against communism after World War Two. "We are talking about people that are struggling, we believe, toward a better future," she said of the Iraqis.
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