Tim Leeds Havre Daily News tleeds@havredailynews.com
Montana’s U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, after spending his first day in Iraq, said Thursday that his opinion on the U.S. presence there hasn’t changed: the United States needs to set up a plan to withdraw its troops from the wartorn country to force the Iraqi government to control its own destiny. “I think we need to start pulling troops out, no ifs, ands or buts,” Tester said in a telephone press conference from Ramadi in Iraq. “We need to start putting pressure on (the Iraqi government) and let them know we aren’t going to be there forever.” Tester, a Democrat, traveled to Iraq with Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., to see the country first-hand. He said one of the things he wanted to find out was if reports of conditions improving in some parts of the country were true, and it seems to be so. That is probably because the United States has been using diplomacy and working more closely with local leaders, he added. “I think the reason deaths are down is that the sheiks have reached out to us and we have reached out to the sheiks,” Tester said. While that is not true everywhere in some areas the civil-war mentality continues to make situations very dangerous Tester said the United States should not be the agency resolving that. We ought not to referee, we should let them settle it themselves,” he said. Tester and Webb met with Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the multi-national force in Iraq, and members of his staff and Iraqi leaders. He said Petraeus said he would be issuing a report on the situation in March. “I doubt he wants to get (the troops) out as quick as I do, but he didn’t say that,” Tester said. Tester said that when he asked troops how quickly the U.S. presence could be taken out of Iraq, he was told that it would take at least eight months if virtually all U.S. military equipment was left behind. To remove all equipment, withdrawl would take more than two years, he was told. Tester said he is not advocating a
