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BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. will not “walk away” from the challenge of
Iran’s stepped-up arming of Iraqi insurgents who are targeting and
killing American troops as they prepare to leave Iraq, U.S. Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday.
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Panetta also pointedly pressed Iraqi leaders to appoint a defense
minister, after more than a year of indecision, and to make up
their minds about asking the U.S. to keep a military presence here
beyond December.
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“Damn it, make a decision,” he told a group of soldiers on his
first visit to Iraq as Pentagon chief. He was responding to a
soldier who asked whether Iraqi leaders are ready to properly
govern their country. Panetta said the Iraqi indecision was
frustrating to the American government, but added that political
complications are part of being a democracy.
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Panetta and the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin,
expressed worry about increasingly deadly attacks on U.S. troops by
Shiite militias using weapons that Panetta and others assert are
supplied by Iran.
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“We’re very concerned about Iran and the weapons they’re providing
to extremists in Iraq,” Panetta said.
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“We cannot simply stand back and allow this to continue to happen”
he said. “This is not something we’re going to walk away from. It’s
something we’re going to take on head-on.”
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Panetta said Iraq must more aggressively go after the Shiite
militias that are using what he called Iranian-supplied weapons.
And he said the U.S. is determined to act on its own to “go after
those threats” from Iranian weapons.
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“We’re doing that,” he said.
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Asked later in an interview with a group of American reporters what
unilateral action U.S. troops had taken against the Iranian-armed
militias, Austin suggested that the emphasis was on defensive
actions such as patrolling the perimeter of U.S. troop
positions.
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“We’ll do what we need to protect ourselves,” Austin said. Pressed
to say whether Panetta was correct in saying the U.S. was acting
unilaterally against the Iranian problem, he said, “I won’t discuss
our operations.”
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Three rockets fired from a mainly Shiite neighborhood hit Baghdad’s
Green Zone during Panetta’s visit, Iraqi police said. No casualties
were reported.
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Panetta was visiting the U.S. military’s Camp Victory on the
capital’s western outskirts at the time of the attack on the Green
Zone, the heavily secured district in central Baghdad that is home
to the U.S. and other embassies as well as Iraqi government
offices.
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In his pep talk to the troops on the sprawling compound outside of
Baghdad that houses the U.S. military headquarters, Panetta
appeared to slip on the politics of the Iraq war, which was started
by the Bush administration in March 2003 on grounds that then-ruler
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Some in the Bush
White House also suggested a Saddam link to the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaida – a connection that
President Barack Obama and other Democrats have called wrong and
unproved.
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Panetta told the troops he is firmly focused on ensuring that
al-Qaida never again is able to attack the U.S.
homeland.
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“The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States
got attacked,” he said.
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Asked later to explain that remark, he said he was not talking
about the rationale for the U.S. invasion of Iraq but instead the
need to go after al-Qaida in Iraq once it developed a lethal
presence in the country following the invasion. He has said there
are about 1,000 al-Qaida fighters in Iraq. That compares with an
estimated 50-100 in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden’s group was
sheltered by the Taliban until the U.S. invaded
Afghanistan.
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Panetta will also huddle with the top U.S. military and diplomatic
representatives in Baghdad before meeting with Iraqi leaders to
discuss the possibility of keeping some U.S. troops in Iraq beyond
2011. He will also press Iraq for stronger action to stop
stepped-up attacks on U.S. forces.
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Panetta was meeting separately with Austin and with Ambassador
James Jeffrey.
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Later, he was to talk with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and
President Jalal Talabani.
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The Obama administration believes Iraq needs a slimmed-down U.S.
military presence beyond 2011, when virtually all U.S. troops are
scheduled to depart. Many Iraqi leaders agree, but they’ve been
unwilling to make a formal request.
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There are now 46,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
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