Downing Street Says » MOD-Iraq & Afghanistan

» Monday, October 16, 2006

MOD-Iraq & Afghanistan

Asked whether Adam Ingram was right to say that we needed a national debate on Iraq and Afghanistan, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said that he had not seen the comments so he could not talk about them directly. In general the Government had contributed to the national debate on both Iraq and Afghanistan and if people had not noticed this yet the Prime Minister was not afraid, at any opportunity, to put forward the arguments as to why we were in Iraq and Afghanistan. No doubt he would be given the opportunity to do so again with the usual vigour at tomorrow mornings monthly press conference. Asked why a Minister thought there needed to be a debate, the PMOS said that he suspected that it was a case of saying, in a different way, that we constantly needed to remind people why we were in Iraq and Afghanistan. In its simplest form that argument was about defending democracies. There were democratically elected governments in both countries who were under attack and we were part of the defence of those democratic governments.

Put that it had been suggested in The Sunday Times that the Iraqi Prime Minister had told the Prime Minister in May that we should withdraw our troops by the end of the year, the PMOS said that if the article and question were suggesting that this had been on the trip to Baghdad he had heard no such suggestion. In fact the message that we had received from the Iraqi Prime Minister, his Deputy and from the Kurdish, Sunni and Shia quarters had been that they did not want to see an immediate withdrawal. They wanted to see a process whereby as their capability grew they took over responsibility. This was our shared analysis – a withdrawal as and when Iraqi forces were capable of taking control. It was a process, which depended on the capability of the Iraqi government’s own forces as well as first and foremost the views of the Iraqi government.

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