Gates Tells Iraq Troops Budget Fight Could Delay Paychecks
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: April 7, 2011
BAGHDAD — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Thursday that if the United States government shuts down this weekend and into next week, American troops would experience a temporary halt in their pay.
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Mr. Gates, in comments to AmericanArmy soldiers in Baghdad and later to reporters, did not offer an opinion on how Congress was handling the budget impasse in Washington. “I’m not going to wade into that swamp,” he said at Camp Victory in Baghdad.
But he presented a clear scenario of what would happen to troops serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world: If the government shuts down from Friday for a week, troops would receive half their pay in the checks received on the 15th of the month. If the government were to stay shut down until April 30, Mr. Gates said, troops would miss a whole check. Troops are paid on the 15th and last day of each month.
Once the government starts up again, Mr. Gates said that troops would receive the back pay that had been withheld.
“But you all know as well as I do that a lot of these young troops live pretty much paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “And when I start to think about the inconveniences it’s going to cost these kids and a lot of their families, even half a paycheck delayed can be a problem for them. So I hope they work this whole thing out.”
Mr. Gates was in Baghdad on what he described as “probably my last” trip to Iraq. The defense secretary has said he is stepping down this year, probably this summer, althoughPresident Obama has yet to name a successor. Leon E. Panetta, the director of Central Intelligence, has been mentioned as a possible replacement for Mr. Gates, as has Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Mr. Gates said this trip was perhaps his 14th to the country since he took over from former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in late 2006. In briefly reflective comments, Mr. Gates told reporters:
“When I took this job, I was asked what my agenda was, and I said, Iraq, Iraq and Iraq. And political heat was quite hot in Washington, things were not going well here. When I gave my first press conference here in December of 2006, there was a firefight going on overhead and in the background. And then in the spring we were losing up to 140 soldiers,Marines a month. It was a very tough time.”
Today, Mr. Gates said, countries in turmoil across the Middle East “would be happy if they could get where to Iraq is today — it isn’t perfect, but it’s new and it is a democracy and people do have rights.”
He said the achievements were reached by the sacrifices of Iraqis and American forces and that today his agenda is no longer “Iraq, Iraq, Iraq” but “Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Japan, the budget.”
In conclusion, he recalled that people said four years ago that he would be judged as defense secretary by how Iraq turned out. “And I’ll let people judge for themselves,” he said.
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