I don't have any more information for you on that. |
It indicates that the path to national reconciliation and the path to a national compact that we're striving so much for has a ways to go. It means we better continue working and work harder on it. |
The political process has made immense progress, Iraqi security forces are making a powerful difference, and the Iraqi population strongly rejects the insurgency and participates in the political process. |
There can only be an Iraqi solution to this violence. |
They would be the first target (for suspicion) you would look at and frankly there aren't too many other obvious ones. |
This is the one bit of construction we will be doing. |
This is the year that we are going to try to sustain the accomplishments on the political, economic and security tracks. |
We are using technical means to try to verify that. |
We certainly have not done as much as we originally had hoped for. |
We decided to draw the line and start focusing on traditional forms of aid, Certainly, that doing massive reconstruction in the midst of an insurgency drives up costs and diverts funds. |
We find all of these things extremely troubling. We find all of them to be certainly efforts to spark a civil war. And we think that the Iraqis will do their very best to avoid just that. |
We see ourselves moving away from large-scale construction... and into capacity developing. |
We think that with the transition, eventually the Iraqis will be taking more of the people we've detained as the Iraqis put them into the legal system, and they need to have a greater capacity there. |
We're putting a total of almost 15 billion dollars of US money into the Iraqi security forces. Obviously we have an obligation to the US taxpayer to ensure that that money is correctly used. |
What is happening right now is considerable jockeying for positions, be it the prime minister, be it other key ministerial positions among the various groups. Of importance is [that] all of the groups, including the Sunni Arabs, are participating in this informal, but very active, and I think very positive negotiations. |