U.S. troops will likely be fighting in Iraq when the next president takes office in 2009 and some U.S. forces will need to stay there to deter regional threats, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani said on Tuesday.
Like President George W. Bush, Giuliani cautioned against a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, saying Washington must avoid what happened in Vietnam when the U.S. pullout led to "the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union and a weaker America."
"The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse," the former New York mayor wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine laying out the broad contours of his foreign policy.
He called for broadening NATO membership beyond Europe to confront global threats from territorial aggression to terrorism.
"We should open the organization's membership to any state that meets basic standards of good governance, military readiness and global responsibility, regardless of its location," he wrote.
Giuliani named no prospective new members, but under his description any number of democratic countries could qualify, such as Australia, Japan and India.
He singled out for specific criticism the Bush administration's push for Palestinians to hold elections in the Palestinian territories. The elections were won by the anti-Israel Islamic militant group Hamas.
At a time when the Bush administration is trying to resuscitate Israeli-Palestinian negotiations aimed at creating a peaceful Palestinian state, Giuliani said, "Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians -- negotiations that bring up the same issues again and again."
"It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamic terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism," he said. - DDNEWS
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