Allawi: ‘Your Sacrifices Are Not in Vain’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

WASHINGTON – Thanking America for its leadership in liberating his country, Iraq’s prime minister, Ayad Allawi, vowed that national elections scheduled for January would proceed despite one of the deadliest months of fighting since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
In an address before a joint session of Congress yesterday, Mr. Allawi said he had a message he “would like to deliver directly from my people to yours: Thank you, America.”
“We Iraqis know that Americans have made and continue to make enormous sacrifices to liberate Iraq, to assure Iraq’s freedom,” he said. “I have come here to thank you and to promise you that your sacrifices are not in vain.”
The prime minister said “the overwhelming majority of Iraqis” were relieved “to be rid of Saddam Hussein and the torture and brutality he forced upon us,” and thankful “for the chance to build a better future.”
Mr. Allawi said the planned January elections “may not be perfect” but “they will take place, and they will be free and fair.”
“And though they won’t be the end of the journey toward democracy,” he said, “they will be a giant step forward in Iraq’s political evolution.”
Those words won the prime minister applause in Congress, but not from the Democratic contender for the White House. At a campaign stop in Columbus, Senator Kerry said the prime minister was contradicting his earlier remarks about the security challenges his country faces.
“I think the prime minister is obviously contradicting his own statement of a few days ago where he said the terrorists are pouring into the country,” the Massachusetts lawmaker said. “The prime minister and the president are here, obviously, to put their best face on the policy.”
President Bush warned yesterday there would probably be more violence as Iraq prepares for elections, but also said terrorists could “plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations” if America pulled out of Iraq.
Mr. Bush also shot back at Mr. Kerry at the press conference with Mr. Allawi.
“You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message,” the president said. “You can dispirit the Iraqi people by sending messages. You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages.”
What Mr. Bush calls mixed messages, the Kerry campaign has called straight talk. For the past two weeks, Mr. Kerry has said that the security situation is untenable and that the president is misleading both Iraqis and Americans by saying Mr. Allawi’s government can stick to an election timetable. An estimate from the American intelligence community completed in August predicted that the best-case scenario for Iraq would be a continuation of the current interim government without meaningful elections, whereas a worst-case scenario would be full-blown civil war.
Nonetheless, Mr. Allawi is optimistic. He told Congress yesterday that personnel in the Iraqi security services, which both campaigns have said are crucial to stilling the confederated insurgency of Al Qaeda, ex-Baathists, and foreign fighters, would total 145,000 by January and 250,000 by the end of 2005.
“We plan to build and maintain security forces across Iraq,” Mr. Allawi said. “Ordinary Iraqis are anxious to take over entirely this role and to shoulder all the security burdens of our country as quickly as possible.”
Mr. Allawi also pointed to the American-led campaign in Najaf and Kufa against the militia of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a success of the Iraqi forces. But the standoff was diffused only after the country’s most senior Shiite religious figure, Ayatollah al-Sistani, intervened, persuading the rebels to leave the holy shrine of Ali. American bombers have pounded the positions of Mr. Sadr’s militia in a Baghdad suburb named for his grandfather.
While Mr. Kerry and his campaign have chastised the president for failing to enlist more allies in the Iraq war effort, the White House managed some minor diplomatic successes this week. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced Wednesday that it would begin training the Iraqi security services, indicating a French veto had been lifted. Also, Secretary of State Powell announced Wednesday that Mr. Allawi would be traveling to Syria to enlist aid – that from a country criticized by the State Department in the past for allowing terrorists to flow into Iraq. Mr. Powell said Wednesday, after meeting with Foreign Minister Shara of Syria, that he “sensed a new attitude” from the world’s remaining Baathist state.
When Mr. Allawi does arrive in Damascus, he may be met by jeers for shaking the hand of Israel’s foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, on Tuesday at the U.N. General Assembly. Hezbollah, the southern Lebanese terror organization that has received aid and comfort from the Syrian regime, blasted Mr. Allawi for the handshake in a statement yesterday, saying it was, “a real affront to the Iraqi people and their history, culture and Muslim and pan-Arab commitment.”
With the high-profile visit to Washington from Mr. Allawi, Iraq has emerged at the center of the campaign for the White House, which just a month ago seemed mired in the personal history of the two candidates during the Vietnam War.
This week both campaigns unveiled television advertisements criticizing their challengers on Iraq. The Republican ad features a video of Mr. Kerry windsurfing, spliced to show him tacking in opposite directions, while a narrator charges he has changed his position on the Iraq war: first supporting it, then opposing it. The Democratic ad shows an American flag in the background as a narrator mentions the war has cost over 1,000 casualties. It ends referring to the Iraq conflict as a quagmire – a word critics of the Vietnam War used to describe how the war of an earlier generation was a stalemate and could only get worse for America.