Washiington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The United States is looking forward to democratic institutions in Iraq making progress to the extent those have developed in South Korea according to the state department officials on Friday.
Mark C. Toner, Acting Deputy State Department Spokesman responded to a question on how many troops would finally need to stay and if Iraq position would be comparable to South Korea of today where there are thousands of troops still stationed, “We’ve already significantly reduced our military footprint. We’ve made this transition from a military to a civilian effort there, so I’m not sure that that comparison holds.”
Toner told journalists at a press briefing on Friday, “We are hopeful and indeed confident that Iraq will become a stable democracy sometime in the future on the level of South Korea, and that would be a wonderful thing.”
On the question of role of Turkey amid mounting tension between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq, Toner said, “We’ve got mechanism and dialogue in place between ourselves, between Kurdish authorities, the Iraqi Government, and Turkey, where we do coordinate on efforts to go after the PKK, who we all collectively view as a terrorist organization.”
Asked if the U.S. has received any comments from Iraqi top officials to treat PKK differently, Toner said, “I’m not aware of those comments. I can only just state what our position is, which is that we believe that the PKK is a terrorist organization.”
Moreover, the state department faced sharp criticism on Capitol Hill on Thursday as a report from Special Inspector General Bowen said the State Department had failed so far to oversee a lot of these projects.
On the subject of the criticism, Toner commented, “Certainly we recognize the enormous challenge of, and are devoting considerable effort to, the military-to-civilian transition, working in close collaboration with the Department of Defense.”
Calling it as a “tremendous challenge,” Toner, however, reiterated that the state department is “up to the challenge in Iraq,”
“Looking back from an historical perspective, from post-war Germany and Japan, to the unrest in Central and South America in the 1970s, to more recently East Timor and Bosnia, we’ve put staff, personnel in these challenging locations,” noted Toner.
“Their goals were to stabilize the governments, provide foreign assistance, promote stable and functional host governments. And so we believe that we are up to the challenge in Iraq,” Toner stated on a positive note.
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