McCain: Not Time to Withdraw From Iraq
June 21, 2006 — -- As relatives mourn the brutal slayings of two U.S. soldiers who disappeared Friday during an insurgent attack, the Senate today will debate two Democratic proposals on troop withdrawal from Iraq.
The Senate will debate Sen. John Kerry's proposal -- which says essentially that all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by July 2007 -- and a nonbinding resolution that advocates a phased withdrawal, which would begin this year but has no specific end date.
"The administration's policy to date -- that we'll be there for as long as Iraq needs us -- will result in Iraq's depending upon us longer. We should tell the Iraqis that the American security blanket is not permanent," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.
Opponents to the proposals say that troop withdrawal -- and setting timetables -- will embolden insurgents. They have argued that arbitrary timetables do not make sense for the mission in Iraq.
"If you have a planned withdrawal, there's going to be an end date, and we don't feel that's what's called for at this time," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "We think that if you have a planned withdrawal, then you announce to the insurgents that you're leaving. There is an old adage that work expands to fill time."
McCain, who was a prisoner of war for five years, has repeatedly rejected comparisons between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War.
Unlike with Iraq, McCain said, the United States could have walked away from Vietnam without fearing that it would destabilize an entire region. If Iraq is abandoned, McCain said, the conflict will spread to other parts of the Middle East.
The killings of the two soldiers believed to be Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore., came less than two weeks after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. military airstrike.
Their bodies arrived in Dover, Del., today where they would be identified by DNA testing.
"They told me my son had disappeared in Iraq somewhere near Baghdad," Menchaca's mother, Maria Vasquez, said in a phone interview with ABC News.
Vasquez said that two soldiers had told her about her son's disappearance during dinner Friday. Menchaca's family is holding out hope that DNA testing will prove that the mangled body does not belong to Kristian.
"There's always a ray of hope," said Sylvia Grice, Menchaca's cousin. "Until we hear from that soldier stationed at my aunt's house, there's always a ray of hope."
In Madras, friends and neighbors expressed shock at the death of their native son, Tucker.
"They live just over there, not very far away," said neighbor Terry Hanlon. "I really feel bad. I really do."
U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said that 8,000 American and Iraqi forces had searched for the soldiers after the men disappeared on Friday. The search party found the bodies late Monday near Youssifiyah, 3 miles from where they had disappeared Friday after a checkpoint located 12 miles south of Baghdad had been attacked by insurgents.
Caldwell said that troops could not recover the bodies until Tuesday morning because they needed daylight to cordon off the area for an ordnance team for fear it was booby-trapped.
"This terrible atrocity committed on those two young soldiers enrages us," McCain said. "But the fact is that it is a long, slow, hard process, and one that we need to win. And what I mean by winning, we can withdraw and the Iraqis govern themselves."
Meanwhile, military investigators have found that two California soldiers shot to death in Iraq in 2004 were killed by Iraqi civil defense officers patrolling with them.
Army Spc. Patrick R. McCaffrey Sr. and 1st Lt. Andre D. Tyson died on June 22, 2004. At first, officials believed that they had died in an ambush patrol near Balad. The Army's Criminal Investigation Command, however, concluded that at least one of the Iraqi soldiers on patrol with the American soldiers had fired at them.
