AMBASSADOR JAMES JEFFREY HOLDS A STATE DEPARTMENT NEWS BRIEFING ON ASSISTANCE TO IRAQ IN THE FISCAL YEAR 2006 SUPPLEMENTAL REQUEST AND FISCAL YEAR 2007 BUDGET REQUEST.

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Congressional Quarterly, Inc.

Original Source: Political Transcript Wire

STATE DEPARTMENT NEWS BRIEFING ON ASSISTANCE TO IRAQ IN THE FISCAL YEAR 2006 SUPPLEMENTAL REQUEST AND FISCAL YEAR 2007 BUDGET REQUEST

FEBRUARY 28, 2006

SPEAKERS: AMBASSADOR JAMES F. JEFFREY, SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE AND COORDINATOR FOR IRAQ

JAMES KUNDER, ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR ASIA AND THE NEAR EAST, USAID

J. ADAM ERELI, STATE DEPARTMENT DEPUTY SPOKESMAN

[*] ERELI: Welcome back, everyone. We're pleased to see you again.

And we're also pleased to have with us today Ambassador James Jeffrey, who is the senior adviser to the secretary and coordinator for Iraq. He's here to brief us on assistance to Iraq in both the FY '06 supplemental, as well as the FY '07 budget request. He'll begin with a few comments, and then open it up to your questions.

JEFFREY: Thank you, Adam.

Good afternoon, everybody.

What I would like to do now is to go through the president's FY '06 supplemental and FY '07 budget submissions for Iraq, the logic behind it, some of the facts and figures, and open it up to questions, as Adam said.

First of all, I'd like to also introduce Jim Kunder from USAID and George Folsom (ph) from the Department of State, who have worked very closely with this and can answer the technical questions that I may not.

You have before you, I think, all a five-page brochure on the budget, but what I'd like to do is to talk a little bit about the logic of it, which is also covered in there.

Frist of all, as the president noted in his Victory Strategy for Iraq, we're working on three separate tracks. One is economic, one is security, our military, and one is political.

All three require U.S., international and Iraqi engagement and funding. And we have been funding all three under the IRRF, which I'll get into in a second.

Our logic is that you cannot fund simply one portion of this program, one track or two tracks, because all three tracks support the other. And there are many examples of this in post-conflict scenarios and in our efforts to build up the Iraqi security forces, our efforts to work with the political parties and such. We need a great deal of money in all of these areas.

The other guiding philosophy of this budget is that 2006 is going to be a year of transition in Iraq: transition to the Iraqi lead, ever more in the security area, but also with the stand-up of a permanent parliament and we hope a permanent four-year government in the near future, an Iraqi lead in the political and capacity-building areas as well. And the budget is organized to support just that.

In setting up the budget, Secretary Rice, in consultation with USAID, with the U.S. military and with the president and the National Security Council, decided that we would put all of our security track funding requests as an emergency supplemental in this fiscal year. And they make up the bulk of the $1.61 billion we're requesting for foreign assistance.

JEFFREY: We're also requesting a little over $1.6 billion for State Department operations and some for USAID operations in the supplemental, as well.

For fiscal year '07, we're asking for $771 million in the economic and the political tracks.

What I'd like to do is to go through the three tracks, beginning on page 4 of your document, and spell out what exactly we're doing.

Once again, the security track, there's a total of $962 million, all in the supplemental for '06 because we see this as emergency funding.

What are we going to do with this?

Most of it, about two-thirds, is supporting our regional outreach, through a variety of programs. One of them being the PRDCs, which is a provincial reconstruction development council programs, that we initiated early last year and are now trying to support with the stand-up of PRTs, but we have other U.S. elements out there that are working with the PRDCs right now.

And in addition, we are also supplementing this with a USAID focused development of strategic cities program. This is to deal with cities in post-conflict environments, as we saw after the fighting in Najaf and the fighting in Fallujah in 2004 and the fighting in Tal Afar in 2005, we need to get in with an integrated approach to do initial relief work, but also to do some reconstruction, to prime the pump for the Iraqi government, to restore basic services, and to begin employing some of the local people.

USAID has several programs in that for that purpose.

Finally, we have $287 million for infrastructure security. One of the biggest challenges we have right now in Iraq is focused attacks on the oil and electrical infrastructure. And $287 million of that is focused on hardening the infrastructure,...

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