National

Bush Outlines Plan for Returning Sovereignty to Iraq

By Robert Siegel, Don Gonyea

Published May 23, 2004 at 9:00 PM PDT

This story was published more than 20 years ago.

President Bush says in a national address that keeping the June 30 deadline to return sovereignty to an Iraqi government will help prove the United States has no plans of permanently extending its occupation.

The president's speech from the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., was the first of a planned series of talks on Iraq. In it he emphasized major events in the planned reconstruction of Iraq, beginning with the June 30 deadline and including international involvement and full military support. Hear NPR's Robert Siegel and NPR's Don Gonyea.

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National

Robert Siegel

Prior to his retirement, Robert Siegel was the senior host of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine All Things Considered. With 40 years of experience working in radio news, Siegel hosted the country's most-listened-to, afternoon-drive-time news radio program and reported on stories and happenings all over the globe, and reported from a variety of locations across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. He signed off in his final broadcast of All Things Considered on January 5, 2018.

Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.