U.S. must accept help in Iraq, Cantwell says

The United States needs to bring the world community to the negotiating table – and convince Iraqi factions that such a table exists – to have any hope of making progress in Iraq, Sen. Maria Cantwell said Tuesday.

“You have to be for the hard slog of diplomacy, not just the hard slog of deployment all the time,” Cantwell said during an interview with The Spokesman-Review editorial board.

The Democratic senator repeated a theme she sounded during her re-election campaign last year, that the United States needs to encourage more international involvement in Iraq. She said the Bush administration should welcome help from the United Nations, the European Community, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Arab League to help the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds resolve their differences and stabilize the country politically.

Her biggest concern right now is the threatened pullout of Sunnis from the Iraqi coalition government.

“It’s pretty hard to say you’re making progress as the government disintegrates,” she said. “The goal was to stand up a government and let that government make progress. Well, that government is falling apart.”

Perhaps President Bush would be comfortable sending his father and former President Clinton to the Middle East to talk with other countries in the region to help stabilize Iraq, she said: “They did a good job raising money for Katrina.”

On other topics, Cantwell said Congress has an energy bill and a farm bill with important proposals for the Northwest, including incentives for producing alternative fuels as well as incentives for research and development on energy conservation. While the energy bill will also have some incentives for nuclear power, she said uncertainty about nuclear power is still a problem for developing new plants.

She thinks conservation has the most potential for improving the nation’s energy outlook. “A 10 percent savings is like having another fuel,” she said.

When it returns from recess, Congress is likely to take a close look at the nation’s bridges in light of the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, she said. The nation keeps a list of “vulnerable” bridges, but it’s not clear if that’s a good measure of the true condition of the bridges, she said.

“Congress wants to know what the real vulnerabilities are,” she said.

Cantwell was in Spokane at the start of Congress’ August recess to mark the ceremonial launch of the $2.5 million Inland Northwest GigaPop network, a fiber-optic system that allows for the transmission of extremely large amounts of computer data around the world by linking a site at the Washington State University Spokane campus with Pacific Northwest Nuclear Laboratories in the Tri-Cities and University of Washington in Seattle.