Levin Statement on White House’s Changing Rhetoric on “Staying the Course” in Iraq

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made the following statement today after the White House said yesterday that it is no longer using the phrase “stay the course” to describe the administration’s Iraq policy:

The White House may be changing its rhetoric about “staying the course in Iraq,” but they haven’t changed their failed policies.

Setting timelines without real pressure on the Iraqis to meet them will simply be more of the same “stay the course” policies we have seen from the Administration for the past three years.

More than a year ago, for example, the President said that “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” The Iraqi security forces now total 312,000, an increase of 106,000 over the past year. Today we have 140,000 American troops in Iraq, the same number we had a year ago. We haven’t even begun to stand down.

The Administration needs to do a lot more than change its rhetoric, because just changing rhetoric won’t change the reality on the ground in Iraq. As our uniformed military leaders have repeatedly told us, there is no military solution to the violence in Iraq; there must be a political solution among the Iraqis.

We must set firm timelines for the Iraqi leadership to reach a political settlement, and stick to them. We must make clear to the Iraqis that we are going to begin the redeployment of our forces from Iraq by the end of this year. Only when the Iraqis understand that our commitment is not open-ended will they have the incentive to make the hard decisions that only they can make to create a unity government that can end the sectarian strife, disband the militias, and begin to defeat the insurgency.

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