Transcript of answers to journalists given by Mr. Gordon Brown, Basra, 17 December 2008
Question:
Prime Minister I think the point you are trying to make today is that Iraq is a much safer place, but it is still very dangerous, both here in Basra and in Baghdad. You have been criticised before for pulling out from Basra City prematurely, are we in danger of doing the same thing?
Prime Minister:
Well most of the places I have visited today I couldn’t have done a few months ago, and I think that is the change that is actually taking place. I said we would stay until we finished the job that we set out to do, and that was to make Iraq, and the Basra area, more stable and secure, to help create economic development in the area, to build up the systems of local government with the elections quite soon. Now that we have done that I feel that the task that we set out to do is being done and that is why we can take a decision to bring most of our forces home and to do so by agreement with the Iraqi government, staying probably until sometime before the end of May.
Question:
But pulling our forces out now, does leave you open to the charge, given the state that Iraq is in at the moment, that this job is being done prematurely. We haven’t completed the mission yet.
Prime Minister:
Yes, but part of the job was to train up the Iraqi forces to do the job themselves, and so we have trained, even in this smaller area, about 20,000 armed forces, we have trained about 22,000 police, we are doing officer training. One of the reasons that we are staying for the next few months is to finish that training process. The whole idea was that the Iraqis do it for themselves and they neither need British nor other forces, because they are doing the job of protecting their own livelihoods and getting on with the job of building a strong economy. This is a change that has taken place I think quite radically over the last year, and what I have seen today is very different from the picture a year ago.
Question:
Is the reason that we are able to leave, because the objectives that you have set, these four objectives, are so much more modest than the original objectives that we went to war to pursue, and in the words of your predecessor that we would leave Iraq at peace with itself. Clearly it still isn’t.
Prime Minister:
We have said that we would help create a democracy. We have got local government elections coming, and national government elections coming, and I believe these will pass off successfully. We have said we would deal with the problem of terrorism and you can see that there is far more stability, far less attacks, far less violence happening in the area. We have said that we wanted to create economic and social development so that people had a stake in the future, and these are the things that we are doing. So having done this work and having completed most of these tasks - with a few more to do - I believe that the British forces have done a tremendous job, we can be incredibly proud of what we have achieved and one of the reasons I am here today is to thank them for what they have done. They have worked courageously, sticking with it, and actually bringing Iraq to a far better place than it was even a few months ago.
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