Hawks Push Deep Cuts in Forces in Iraq
By Bryan Bender
The Boston Globe
Monday 22 November 2004
Washington - A growing number of national security specialists who
supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein are moving to a position
unthinkable even a few months ago: that the large US military presence is
impeding stability as much as contributing to it and that the United States
should begin major reductions in troops beginning early next year.
Their assessments, expressed in reports, think tank meetings, and
interviews, run counter to the Bush administration's insistence that the
troops will remain indefinitely to establish security. But some contend that
the growing support for an earlier pullout could alter the administration's
thinking.
Those arguing for immediate troop reductions include key Pentagon
advisers, prominent neoconservatives, and some of the fiercest supporters of
the Iraq invasion among Washington's policy elite.
The core of their arguments is that even as the US-led coalition goes on
the offensive against the insurgency, the United States, by its very
presence, is stimulating the resistance.
"Our large, direct presence has fueled the Iraqi insurgency as much as
it has suppressed it," said Michael Vickers, a conservative-leaning Pentagon
consultant and longtime senior CIA official who supported the war.
Retired Army Major General William Nash, the former NATO commander in
Bosnia, said: "I resigned from the 'we don't have enough troops in Iraq'
club four months ago. We have too many now."
Nash, who supported Hussein's ouster, said a substantial reduction after
the Iraqi elections in January "would be a wise and judicious move" to
demonstrate that the Americans are leaving. The remaining US forces should
concentrate their energies on border operations, he added. "The absence of
targets will go a long way in decreasing the violence."
Yonadam Kanna, secretary general of the Assyrian Democratic Movement and
a member of Iraq's interim National Assembly, also backed the US-led removal
of Hussein. He now says Washington must "prove that the United States is a
liberator, not an occupier."
Kanna wrote in an e-mail interview yesterday that the elections and
expanded training of new Iraqi security forces "must go in parallel with the
partial withdrawal of multinational or US forces." He added that the
remaining forces should be kept "away from daily and direct dealing and
friction with the people, which lead sometimes to sensitivity and problems
or clashes with the innocent."
Exactly how long the roughly 140,000 American troops will stay in Iraq
remains unclear. Administration officials have been reluctant to make
predictions, saying a departure date would only embolden Iraq insurgents.
President Bush has said the US military will stay "as long as necessary" to
set the country on the path toward democracy.
Some former top officials have predicted that it will be many years
before most of the troops can come home. The former Iraq war commander,
retired Army General Tommy Franks, said this month that tens of thousands of
American troops will have to stay in Iraq for up to three more years.
But the view that it would be dangerous for the United States to pull
out soon and that it may even need more troops is becoming another casualty
in this war - a war that has taken the lives of more than 1,200 Americans
and shows little sign of abating.
The best strategy is to substantially reduce the number of American
forces after the Iraqi elections, according to the specialists, who say
maintaining the large occupation could be as dangerous to long-term American
interests as a precipitous pullout.
"I have seen a metamorphosis," said Robert Pfaltzgraff, president of the
Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Cambridge and a vocal supporter of
Bush's Iraq policy, referring to debate both inside and outside the halls of
government. "We should not be there with a large force. We should be there
with a force that begins to quickly diminish."
Few specialists are calling for a complete pullout. They say the United
States must first finish training Iraqi forces and use its military might to
buy Iraqi authorities breathing space against the insurgency.
Still, a report completed over the summer calling for a complete pullout
next year has struck a chord.
"The end of the foreign occupation will seriously undermine the
terrorists' claims that their acts of violence against Iraqis are somehow
serving the interests of Iraq," according to "Exiting Iraq," published by
the conservative-leaning Cato Institute. Moreover, "The occupation is
counterproductive in the fight against radical Islamic terrorists and
actually increases support for Osama bin Laden in Muslim communities not
previously disposed to support his radical interpretation of Islam."
"Staying on the current course, looking at the trends, is not going to
work," said the report's chief author, Christopher A. Preble, Cato's
director of foreign policy studies.
Evidence is growing of an anti-American backlash that threatens Iraq's
stability. Dozens of Sunni political leaders, angered by the recent military
onslaught of Fallujah, are threatening to sit out the nationwide elections.
Even leading war supporters such as Max Boot, an influential
neoconservative thinker derided by critics as one of those who believe the
United States must stick it out for an undetermined amount of time, contends
that the US presence is beginning to threaten long-term goals.
"This is turning out to be a lot harder than anyone expected - and
harder than it needed to be," Boot said last week.
"I'm not one of those calling for a quick pullout," he added. "I agree
there is some downside to the US troops' presence; it definitely fuels some
nationalist resentment. All things considered, I think we're doing better in
Afghanistan partially because we have fewer troops there."
Indeed, Afghanistan, where the United States has one-tenth the troops it
has in Iraq, was cited by several specialists as a model for the American
presence in Iraq following the elections. The US troops are rarely seen by
the wider Afghan population, operating primarily along the borders and
flushing out remaining pockets of resistance.
"I think that many are now beginning to see that El Salvador and
Afghanistan are better counterinsurgency and postconflict reconstruction
models than the strategies we've pursued in Iraq," said Vickers, the
Pentagon consultant, who as a CIA agent helped oversee US support for Afghan
rebels in their guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
"In counterinsurgency, an indirect approach is superior."
Still, officials frequently debate whether more US troops in Afghanistan
would stem the burgeoning drug trade and curb the power of warlords. But
most agree that anti-Americanism is far less prevalent in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, some specialists say the increased sentiment in think tanks
for an expedited Iraqi pullout will spread to the administration, despite
its tough rhetoric.
"Bush will surprise his opponents by disengaging from Iraq," predicted
Edward Luttwak, a longtime Pentagon consultant who has argued that the push
to create a democracy in Iraq will prove futile.
"I personally think it will start with a drawdown, and that, I suspect,
will begin in April," said John Hamre, president of the center for Strategic
and International Studies and former deputy secretary of defense in the
Clinton administration who remains in close contact with senior Pentagon
officials.
Said Ken Adelman, a member of the Defense Policy Board who predicted the
Iraq war would be a "cakewalk": "If there is a [stable] Iraqi government
after January you can withdraw. I would be OK with that."
________________________________
Go to Original
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2565-2004Nov21.html>
Officers See Need For Bigger Iraq Force
By Bradley Graham
The Washington Post
Monday 22 November 2004
U.S. assessments cite tenacious resistance.
Baghdad - Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq say it is increasingly
likely they will need a further increase in combat forces to put down
remaining areas of resistance in the country.
Convinced that the recent battle for Fallujah has significantly weakened
insurgent ranks, commanders here have devised plans to press the offensive
into neighborhoods where rebels have either taken refuge after fleeing
Fallujah or were already deeply entrenched.
But the forces available for these intensified operations have become
limited by the demands of securing Fallujah and overseeing the massive
reconstruction effort there - demands that senior U.S. military officers say
are likely to tie up a substantial number of Marines and Army troops for
weeks.
"What's important is to keep the pressure on these guys now that we've
taken Fallujah from them," a high-ranking U.S. military commander said,
speaking on condition he not be named because of the sensitivity of the
deliberations on adding more troops. "We're in the pursuit phase. We have to
stay after these guys so they don't get their feet set."
The possibility that additional troops would be required to battle the
insurgency in this critical period preceding the Iraqi elections, scheduled
for Jan. 30, has been signaled for weeks. The Pentagon took an initial step
in this direction last month, ordering about 6,500 soldiers in Iraq to
extend their tours by up to two months.
With some fresh U.S. forces already arriving in Iraq as part of a
long-scheduled rotation, and two newly trained Iraqi brigades due to start
operating next month, U.S. military leaders had hoped to avoid further
increases.
But over the past week, a closer assessment of the forces needed for the
Fallujah recovery effort and future offensive operations revealed a gap in
desired troop strength, at least over the next two or three months,
according to several officers familiar with the issue.
The officers said the exact number of extra troops needed is still being
reviewed but estimated it at the equivalent of several battalions, or about
3,000 to 5,000 soldiers. The number of U.S. troops in Iraq fell to nearly
100,000 last spring before rising to 138,000, where it has stayed since the
summer.
To boost the current level, military commanders have considered
extending the stay of more troops due to rotate out shortly, or accelerating
the deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is scheduled to start in
January. But a third option - drawing all or part of a brigade of the 82nd
Airborne Division on emergency standby in the United States - has emerged as
increasingly likely.
Hinting at this possibility at a Pentagon news conference on Friday, Lt.
Gen. Lance Smith, the deputy chief of U.S. Central Command, recalled that
airborne forces were deployed to Afghanistan on a short-term basis to
bolster military operations. Smith noted, however, that the Afghan case was
"a little bit different" because "we had a very small number of forces to
begin with" there.
If airborne units were rushed to Iraq, commanders here said, they likely
would not be used in the offensive actions being planned, given their lack
of heavy armor and their unfamiliarity with the targeted neighborhoods.
Rather, their purpose would be to take over policing and other functions in
Baghdad's International Zone, where American and top Iraqi government
officials work. That would free locally seasoned units of the 1st Cavalry
Division for such actions.
Much of the division's 2nd Brigade, which had been patrolling Baghdad,
was shifted to Fallujah for the battle there earlier this month and remains
unavailable for action elsewhere. This situation is the cause of much of the
pressure for reinforcements.
"We feel that we need to keep the 2nd Brigade out there longer than we
had originally thought, so we're not going to have all the flexibility we
wanted in December," one senior military officer here said.
Some senior officers have worried that any move to bring in more U.S.
troops could be perceived as a sign of U.S. vulnerability in the face of the
tenacious insurgency or as a vote of no confidence in the ability of Iraq's
new security forces to fill the gap. It also could fuel the U.S. political
debate over whether the Bush administration has committed enough forces to
secure Iraq.
But several officers who discussed the matter said any such appeal
should simply be seen as reflecting the desire of the military command here
to press the fight.
To further bolster U.S. forces in the short term, commanders also are
considering extending the scheduled departure of the 2nd Brigade of the 25th
Infantry Division, which has been assigned to the Kirkuk area.
U.S. military intelligence assessments portray the Fallujah offensive as
having destroyed the insurgency's largest haven, but the assessments also
acknowledge that the violent resistance campaign is far from broken
nationwide. Since the Fallujah operation, insurgent attacks have continued
across a broad stretch of Iraq, from northern cities to a restive area in
Babil province south of Baghdad.
Although U.S. military officials have reported 1,600 or more enemy
fighters killed in Fallujah, no key leaders of the insurgency were either
killed or captured, according to senior officers here. Many insurgents who
fled the city either before or during the battle are now thought by U.S.
commanders to be looking for opportunities to regroup and mount new attacks.
"Our assessment is that the insurgency remains viable," a senior
military intelligence officer here said. "One of the things we see the
insurgents doing is moving to areas where we don't have a lot of presence."
The number of daily attacks, which surged to about 130 at the start of
the Fallujah operation, has declined to between 70 and 80 in recent days,
roughly the level before the operation. But the senior intelligence officer
said it is still too early to gauge the full impact of the Fallujah battle
on the insurgency, estimating another week or two will be necessary for
military analysts to get a clearer picture.
Everything found so far, the officer said, has confirmed Fallujah as the
insurgency's largest and most significant stronghold. The sheer number of
bombs, shells and other munitions discovered has stunned some senior
analysts.
"The number of caches they're finding, the weapons and things like that,
are greater than we probably assessed," the intelligence officer said. "So
we may have done more damage to their capability than we previously
understood."
In discussing battle plans, commanders here did not want to telegraph
the areas U.S. forces might be focusing on for their next offensives. But
some of the potential targets can easily be discerned by mapping the
locations of attacks on U.S. forces, including areas in or around the
restive cities of Mosul, Ramadi, Baqubah, Samarra and Baghdad.
At the same time, officers cautioned against expecting anything on the
scale of Fallujah, which involved more than 10,000 U.S. troops and about
2,500 Iraqi forces.
"They're not going to be big operations like Fallujah, because there's
no place else in Iraq where the situation is like what it was there," one
commander said.
-------
