Fed: Get foreign troops out of Iraq by end of 2006: Cosgrove

AAP General News (Australia)
08-08-2005
Fed: Get foreign troops out of Iraq by end of 2006: Cosgrove

Eds: Strictly embargoed until 0001 AEST Monday, August 8



CANBERRA, Aug 8 AAP - Coalition troops should be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of
2006 to remove one of the biggest provocations for the country's terrorists, a former
Australian military chief says.

Peter Cosgrove, who retired as head of the Australian Defence Force in June, has tipped
the end of next year as an ideal time for foreign forces, including Australians, to get
out of Iraq.

"I think we've got to train the Iraqis as quickly as we can and to a point where we
take one of the focal points of terrorist motivation away, and that is foreign troops,"

General Cosgrove said in a candid interview on ABC television's Enough Rope program.

"When there is an adequate Iraqi security force, foreign troops leave ... Iraq."

Asked how quickly that should happen, he said: "Well I figure that if we could get
that done by the end of 2006 that would be really good."

Australia has 1,370 troops in Iraq, including the recent deployment of 450 soldiers
to the southern province of Al Muthanna.

Prime Minister John Howard has vowed Australian troops will not be withdrawn before
their work is finished.

General Cosgrove said Australia is fighting the war against terrorism in "the only
way we can" while preserving the maximum amount of civil liberties for the community.

"When 9/11 happened we were tackled off ... a high building by terrorists and we were
in free fall with them. We can't climb back up," he said.

"We can't restore previous to 9/11. We're in a situation now where there is an overt,
obvious, manifest phenomenon of global terrorism or networked terrorism."

General Cosgrove's son, Phillip, was injured in a bombing while serving with Australian
troops in Baghdad.

The former ADF chief, who led an infantry unit in Vietnam, said coalition forces face
a very different conflict in Iraq.

"Certainly a different sort of a war to the one I was involved in in Vietnam where
we were out and hunting through the jungle and all that sort of thing," he said.

"(In Iraq) our soldiers are required to be enormously alert, but passive, so ... there's
something unique about what they do which I think is to their great credit."

General Cosgrove cited the American prisoner abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail
as a low point for coalition forces.

"I couldn't believe that an element of the US armed forces would be involved in an
improper way like that looking after detainees," he said.

"I can understand that you don't mollycoddle people who are detained for one reason
or another but that's light years away from maltreating them."

Torturing prisoners, he said, is not acceptable in any circumstances.

"You don't descend to (that) level. You've lost if you ... maltreat people.

"Whatever we do, whatever we gain from people, we've got to do so in a way which leaves
our morality, our integrity intact."

AAP rp/jjs/jlw

KEYWORD: IRAQ AUST COSGROVE (EMBARGOED)

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