White House Press Secretary Tony Snow Holds White House Regular News Briefing

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White House Press Secretary Tony Snow Holds White House Regular News Briefing

WHITE HOUSE REGULAR NEWS BRIEFING

JULY 9, 2007

SPEAKER: WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY TONY SNOW

[*] (JOINED IN PROGRESS) SNOW: ... we want to get to the situation, we want to get to a condition where the Iraqis do, in fact, have the freedom of space and the security necessary to go ahead and put together the building blocks for civil society. that not only includes security in the streets, but it also means other things.

Economic development; it means a rule of law that can be administered fairly through the army, the military services and the courts; it means having electricity and water. All of those things, the building blocks of a civil society. And that's the way the president's been expressing it from the start.

QUESTION: Clearly, that's true. We all heard him say those things. We've heard you say those...

SNOW: Yes.

QUESTION: We've heard other administration officials say those say things. But that isn't the question, because that's talking about an eventual goal which nobody's arguing with.

The question is a simple one: Is there a debate now about trying to speed up the timetable by which you bring combat troops home from Iraq?

SNOW: There's no timetable. I think, again, let's...

QUESTION: That's not what I asked.

(CROSSTALK)

SNOW: No, you just said -- you just asked speeding up a timetable.

QUESTION: I didn't ask: Is there one? I said: Is there a debate about setting one?

SNOW: Oh, is there a debate about setting one? No. Right now what the discussion in the White House is, let's go ahead and proceed with what Congress itself decided to do just two months ago.

Two months ago, Congress said: OK, we're going to do the way forward, we will adopt the way forward, having given General Petraeus an 81-0 vote in the United States Senate. And they said: But we want some -- we want some reporting here, we want to get a starting point glimpse of this on July 15th, and on the 15th of September we want recommendations from the generals about how they want to proceed after that.

In other words, it's the same sort ...

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