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WASHINGTON: Maintaining US combat troops in Iraq “helps al-Qaeda”
and Washington should pull them from the ravaged country if it wants
to see progress in the war on terror, former US anti-terror czar
Richard Clarke said Tuesday.
“I think the best thing that we could do to
hit al-Qaeda’s attractiveness to the Muslim world was in fact to
get out of Iraq in an orderly way over the course of the next two or
three years,” Clarke said on CNN.
“Our being in Iraq helps al-Qaeda. We have to
beat them in the ideological struggle and getting out of Iraq will
help that,” he added.
The US presence in Iraq has become a flashpoint
issue in the 2008 presidential race. Democrats Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton have both said they will withdraw troops if elected,
while Republican John McCain supports the war in Iraq but recently
said he envisioned most troops could be home by 2013.
Clarke said that wasn’t soon enough.
The security and counter-terrorism advisor to
three US presidents who resigned in the first term of President
George W. Bush’s administration, also said Washington should
reassure Muslim nations that the “war on terror” launched after
the September 11, 2001 attacks is not a war on Islam.
“We’re not fighting Islam,” he said.
“And it’s not terrorism we’re fighting, it’s the
fundamentalist Islamic movements that use terrorism as part of their
overall approach.”
In 2006, Clarke said US security can easily be
beaten and the country remained vulnerable to attack—an assessment
he reiterated Tuesday by warning that despite “hundreds of
billions of dollars” spent on securing US borders, “no
significant vulnerability in homeland security has been removed.”
-- AFP
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