WASHINGTON – Iraq is not on track to become another Iran despite the disconcerting images last week of Iraqis burning U.S. flags and chanting “Death to America,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.
“I have no doubt that this is an Iraqi government and an Iraq that is going to be a fierce fighter in the war against terrorism, because they themselves are experiencing the effects of terror on their population,” Rice said. “I have no doubt that this is going to be a government that is on the right side in the war on terror.”
While Rice gave her positive view on the eventual outcome, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska questioned whether the U.S. should keep sending more troops to Iraq.
Hagel said this country cannot “ask them to do the things that we’re asking them to do in the middle of a civil war, and that’s where it’s headed.”
“We’re ruining our United States Army. We are decimating our Army. We can’t continue with the tempo and the commitment that we are on right now,” Hagel said on CBS “Face the Nation.”
Rice, during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was asked whether the United States has helped create another fundamentalist Islamic regime in Iraq, such as the one in Iran. Rice said she did not like what the protesters said, but she believes that Iraq today is better off than when sectarian differences were oppressed through the iron rule of Saddam Hussein.
“That people would go out and demonstrate and say what they feel is the one sign that perhaps Iraq is one place in the Middle East where people are exercising their right to free speech,” she said. “No. I don’t like what they said.”
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