November 29 2003 at 01:06PM
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BY Haitham Haddadin
Mubarak Air Base, Kuwait - United States Senator Hillary Clinton said on Saturday President George Bush's administration was moving too fast in a planned transfer of power to the Iraqis by July.
"It's going to take more time than has been allotted for the process to take hold," the New York Democrat told Reuters during a brief stopover to visit US troops in Kuwait.
"I don't think we should be setting artificial timelines, as this is a very challenging undertaking and we need to work with our Iraqi counterparts and make sure that the steps that are being taken are going to work."
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'I don't think we should be setting artificial timelines'
Washington's plan for handing power back to Iraqis has been criticised by the top cleric among Iraq's Shia Muslim majority for paying too little heed to Islam and including too little Iraqi involvement.Clinton arrived from Iraq with fellow Democrat Senator Jack Reed, who said the United States had overextended itself in Iraq. He said a failure to get the Shias' backing for the handover plan could cause huge political problems in the future.
"We could look back and see the decision to attack Iraq was one that ended up being very, very costly and peripheral to the real enemies that are trying to attack the United States."
"And its connection with the terrorist cells that attack the United States are tenuous at best," he added, casting doubt on one of the administration's justifications for the invasion.
He said the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had critical shortages of specialised troops such as military police, civil affairs and psychological operations troops.
"We are beginning to see the cracks now because as these forces rotate out, and many of these troops here are reserve National Guard people who have that expertise, we don't have a second echelon of those types of troops," Reed told Reuters.
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