New Mexico News
| 1st Congressional District Candidates Give Opinions on Iraq War |
| Posted by () on May 21 2008 at 3:42 PM |
Michelle Lujan Grisham, Democrat
"The easy way you (get the Iraqi government to take responsibility for their problems) is, you leave. It's much harder to take responsibility if we're there. So the only way to create any responsibility is to leave.
"We're not going to get three independent religious groups to agree ideologically, and the notion that this war will do that is false. What we can do and what we have done is create an opportunity for a centralized government to operate in those conditions, and now it's time for us to come home.
"You've got to cut the funding. And the only funding that you support is funding that's tied to the safety and security of the troops" during a withdrawal.
"I don't believe that we can have effective security (in the Middle East) unless we engage our partners around the world. And they aren't going to do that as long as we are situated in the war in Iraq in the way that we are."
Rebecca Vigil-Giron, Democrat
Vigil-Giron favors reducing funding in order to encourage a troop withdrawal and said beginning that withdrawal will spur Iraqi responsibility.
"We pull out and the Iraq people see we're leaving, then they're going to have to take control. I think that's going to be the key. They've been dependent on us, and if we show this pullout— I'm not saying a 100 percent pullout immediately, but just to slowly go into that transition with them— they'll begin taking over their government buildings, their neighborhoods and their streets. "It took us five years to get to this point, and I hope it does not take us that number of years to be 100 percent out there or at least 95 percent out.
"We were lied to about why we should be in Iraq as opposed to Afghanistan and it's now time for us to leave and concentrate our efforts on our own domestic issues here in the United States."
Darren White, Republican
"This cannot be an endless war. What I think we need to do now is talk about measures of accountability, and they have to be both military and political.
"We have to push the Iraqi government to do more toward reconciliation, but we also need to give the commanders that flexibility to create an environment that's conducive to these government officials getting together and working toward reconciliation. You don't accomplish that with hard and fast time lines. I think that it would be counterproductive if we started with hard and fast deadlines at this point. "This is something that I think about every day because of my son (who just completed basic training in the Air National Guard). This thing is a mess. Mistakes have been made, big mistakes, in the execution of the war. But the thing that we should be focusing on, putting politics aside, is how do we bring our troops home as quickly as possible and as safely as possible?"
Joe Carraro, Republican
"We're in a quagmire, and I really think we needed to have somebody ask the questions before we got in. Now that we're there, we need to define our mission there. Are we there to establish a democracy or to establish a stable government? "They have to fight the war, and we have to protect the area. We need to be in more a protective mode than a fighting mode, and we need to supply them with the training and the equipment" to allow them to succeed.
Carraro does not favor a timetable for troop withdrawal independent of the success of the mission. "When we leave Iraq we want to leave with some sort of stability that allows us to know we're not going to have to go back if another country comes in and takes over."
Martin Heinrich, Democrat
"As long as we're the de facto power base within the country, the pressure won't be there for political reconciliation. "I don't believe you'll see the kind of movement we'll need to see in the Iraqi parliament until we begin to withdraw our troops.
"I really think that setting time lines and beginning to bring our men and women in uniform home is going to be the critical piece to showing the Iraqi parliament that we're not going to be a permanent occupying force and that they need to resolve their differences and move forward together.
"There is no reason that we couldn't have most of our troops home within approximately a year."
Heinrich supports attaching withdrawal timetables to continued funding for the war.
Robert Pidcock, Democrat
"My position on Iraq is that one day the Iraqi people are going to decide whether they're going to kill each other over religion or whether they're going to come together as a country and make a country. And we have no means of doing that for them.
"There is no excuse after five years to say we can't train Iraqi soldiers. The problem I think is the will of the Iraqi people. They're not yet sold on how they want to stand up for their own country. Our continued involvement produces a situation where they don't need to do it themselves. They're not going to make a decision to stand up for their own country until they know we are leaving. "The only way the Congress can end the war is to not fund the war. The only way you can cut off funding for the war and not leave a military member at risk is tell president ... here's four months of the funding, that gives you time to get everybody out of there safely and to hand over control to the Iraqis."
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