Wall Street Journal July 26, 2006
White House plans troop shift in Iraq
By Yochi J. Dreazen
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration said it would move thousands of additional U.S. troops to Baghdad, a major shift in strategy that appears to sharply reduce the possibility that a reduction of American military personnel can begin later this year.
Meeting at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, President Bush said U.S. forces stationed elsewhere in Iraq would be shifted to Baghdad to help fledgling Iraqi security forces try to reconquer, and then secure, each of the capital's neighborhoods.
A Pentagon official said the additional U.S. presence in Baghdad would likely number between 2,000 and 5,000 soldiers, many of whom would be embedded with Iraqi police units. The official said no new troops would be sent to Iraq as part of the effort.
The shift is a frank acknowledgment that more than three years after U.S.-led forces swept into Iraq, much of the country, including major sections of the capital, remains outside the control of either U.S. forces or the Iraqi government. It also highlights the country's dire security situation amid a surge in violence that is killing nearly 100 Iraqi civilians every day.
Washington's new approach comes after an array of Iraqi and American security plans for Baghdad were implemented with no discernible impact on the violence, racking the city of more than five million people.
Al-Maliki, who took power in late May, has significantly increased the number of checkpoints and security personnel around the capital, but the number of attacks continues to rise. U.S. forces, meanwhile, spent years trying to secure the highway connecting the city with its international airport, but the road remains so dangerous that most U.S. personnel are instead flown into the city by helicopter.
Bush acknowledged prior setbacks, telling reporters at the White House there is "no question it's tough in Baghdad, and no question it's tough in other parts of Iraq." He said, "Obviously the violence in Baghdad is still terrible."
The rising tide of violence is complicating the administration's hopes of beginning a troop withdrawal later this year.
With the administration facing mounting pressure for force reductions from fellow Republicans who are concerned that the war's unpopularity at home could cost the party its control of Congress in the November elections, senior U.S. military commanders have been working on a plan to withdraw at least a few thousand soldiers in coming months.
But with Iraq teetering on the brink of open civil war, administration officials privately concede that any cut in troop levels might shrink in scope or be postponed into next year. A low-level sectarian conflict has been raging for months between Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims and minority Sunni Muslims, and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters yesterday that the communal warfare is a bigger threat to the country than the insurgency.
Public confidence in Iraq's security forces is so low, meanwhile, that even many Sunnis — whose ranks have supplied most of the insurgents — want American forces to remain in the country as a buffer.
Bush said al-Maliki told him during a private meeting in the Oval Office that "he does not want American troops to leave his country until his government can protect the Iraqi people."
The president said he assured the Iraqi prime minister that U.S. forces won't leave precipitously. Al-Maliki will address Congress today, where many lawmakers are infuriated with his refusal to condemn Hezbollah's attacks on Israel or state unambiguously that the Jewish state has a right to exist.
The strategy outlined by Bush closely parallels the "ink spot" theory of counterinsurgency detailed last fall in a widely read essay by military analyst Andrew Krepinevich. Krepinevich argued that instead of focusing on killing insurgents, U.S. forces should instead concentrate on securing specific areas of the country so rebuilding projects can take hold and citizens can gain confidence that their government can protect them from attack. Iraqis living in secure areas would in time turn against the insurgency and cooperate with the coalition, Krepinevich wrote.
Several analysts said the new approach represented a clearer appraisal of the root cause of many of Iraq's security problems.
"I read it as being a much better understanding of what the granularity of the problem is: They have lost control of Iraq at the neighborhood level," said John Pike of national-security policy think tank GlobalSecurity.org. "The problem is not control of Baghdad; the problem is the 1,000 neighborhoods of Baghdad."
© Copyright 2006, The Wall Street Journal
