Lori Glenn
March 31, 2008 11:20 pm
—
BERLIN — U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Macon, was in Iraq over Easter weekend, the same time a Moultrie soldier, Sgt. Steve McCoy, was critically injured in a roadside bomb.
Marshall spoke with Berlin residents this week at city hall, and Iraq was one of the topics discussed.
“I hate it of course that this happened, and anything I can do, my office can do, we will do. We’ve been dramatically increasing funding to the Veterans Administration anticipating that there’s going to be a lot of young Americans and families that are going to need a great deal of help because of horrible wounds received in Iraq,” he told The Moultrie Observer later. “We’ve got not only a legal duty but a moral responsibility to stand by them.”
Marshall knows the horror of war firsthand. While fighting in the Vietnam War, Marshall held one of his close friends as he died from severe wounds, he said.
“It’s the nature of war, and I hope that we could put it behind us as a world, but we’re not there yet. As long as there’s going to be violence around the globe, there’s going to be young men and women — God bless them — stepping up to defend freedom. And that means some will die and some will be horribly injured. All of us who benefit from their sacrifice need to stand by them and their families.”
McCoy and his wife, Tabitha, have 3-year-old twins.
Community collections are going on. DeMott Tractor Co. and Heritage Church are serving as collection points. Tabitha Moore’s parents, Steve and Becky Moore, are members of Joyful Life Church of God. An address will be published soon where funds will go directly to the family.
On Saturday, Marshall led a congressional delegation north of Baghdad in Diyala Province to meet with representatives of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on neutral ground. Marshall had intended to meet with Sadr in Sadr City.
“Sadr wouldn’t meet with us, and the military did not want us to go into Sadr City — too dangerous,” he said.
Marshall and the delegation met with five Sadr representatives at Rashid Hotel. One was a lieutenant with the militia wing, Jayesh al-Mahdi.
“The other four were kind of limited in what they might say — not free to speak — not in a situation where they can speak freely. And we only found that out, because we got a note passed to us from one of the other four saying he would be saying different things if this guy wasn’t at the table,” Marshall said.
From there, the delegation went straight to meet with Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni leader, “probably the most prominent individual Sunni.”
“The idea was to see how reconciliation was going at the leadership level between Sunni and Shia, and to encourage them to move it along since time is not on our side here. Americans are not going to simply sit patiently while our kids get killed and horribly wounded, and the leadership just dithers is how I put it,” Marshall said.
The congressman said he almost walked out on al-Hashemi, which would have been an international incident.
“He spent quite a bit of time, saying that there was no point talking to the Shia leadership about reconciliation, because they do not proceed in good faith. A death penalty had been handed down to Chemical Ali and two other Sunni leaders who were very close to Saddam, part of Saddam’s inner circle. And it was his (al-Hashemi’s) belief that although ‘Chemical Ali’ deserved it that the other two did not and that their sentences should have been commuted,” he said.
“I said after listening to this — and I didn’t realize that the very next day we were going to have our 4,000th combat casualty — I said, ‘I’m sitting here listening to you describe how leadership will not come together to secure Iraq while we have had 4,000 Americans killed, 30,000 wounded and $5 billion (spent) and multiples of Iraqis have been killed and wounded.
“I’m sitting here listening to this knowing that if somehow you all can’t get together or refuse to get together, hundreds of thousands of additional Iraqis and thousands of additional Americans will be killed or wounded and you tell me that you can’t get together because you didn’t receive proper notice and there are two lives that might be lost?” he challenged.
According to Marshall, al-Hashemi responded, “You come into my house to insult me?”
Marshall said he replied, “I don’t come to insult. I come to let you know that the patience of America is wearing thin, that we want to help Iraqis secure Iraq, but Iraqis must ultimately do it. It’s a leadership issue.”
Marshall repeatedly told al-Hashemi, he said, that time is working against them.
“But I actually just thought about getting up and walking out, because I can’t deliver too strong a message to these folks that they need to get their act together,” he said.
However, Marshall didn’t get up and walk out, he said, because he was with a delegation and he wasn’t certain that every one of the delegation would walk out with him.
The delegation then met with General Petraeus for nearly two hours for a status report.
“Undeniable progress had been made as far as security is concerned. We’re still losing soldiers and having soldiers horribly wounded, but the numbers are way, way down,” he said.
Reconciliation in neighborhoods is evident, he said. There is less turmoil, and tens of thousands of people who have fled Iraq are coming back, he said.
A joint U.S./Iraq operation in Mosul will soon be under way, he said, like the one that cleared al-Qaeda from Baghdad, he said.
“That’s the last al-Qaeda stronghold,” Marshall said.
The congressman noted that the Iraqi government is taking full lead in recent fighting in Basra trying to stop Shia militia with the U.S. in a mere backup role, he said.
“On the one hand I’m just delighted. On the other hand, I’ve got a lump in my throat, because we really don’t need the Iraqi security forces to fail. That would be a step backwards here. There needs to be continual improvement,” he said.
Long-term trends appear to indicate the war in Iraq is heading in the right direction, he said. The real worry to Marshall is that unless the political side develops quickly, the security side might take over.
“And we’d have another Musharraf or Saddam,” he said.
Another long-term worry is whether a true representative democracy will establish in a country with diverse religious sects and where the economy is based on mineral wealth.
“Fortunately, Iraq has the potential to have a very broadbased economy and consequently get a middle class, but what usually happens in settings like this is somebody gets control over the oil and uses the wealth to first secure their wealth — secure their control of the oil — and they set up a security apparatus and it’s basically a dictatorship or an autocracy with one family, one tribe, one group in charge,” he said.
Marshall thinks, he said, any of the three front-runners in the U.S. presidential race would do a better job than the nation has been doing in reaching out and partnering with the rest of the world, which is important to long-term security interests.
“No matter who’s the president, Democrat or Republican, that individual is going to be wholly, wholly constrained by the realities of the circumstances that we’re in. There’s just cold, hard reality on the ground and internationally,” he said.
Marshall noted his good relationship with Republican Sen. John McCain and said he wouldn’t get involved with their races. But that is unavoidable, since he is a super delegate in the Democratic Party.
“A status I never asked for and don’t particularly wish to have,” he said in a wry tone. “...I didn’t know a thing about this super delegate status stuff until the press started talking about it because Obama and Clinton look like they might come down to the wire. And all of a sudden, I found out I’m a super delegate. I didn’t even know that. Nobody asked me to do this, and I’m not particularly interested in making a choice between those two. I’d just assume relinquish my responsibility. I certainly wouldn’t have signed up for it,” he said.
Marshall remains uncommitted, he said.
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