• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Analysis: Deployments, Deadlines in Iraq

Council on Foreign Relations

November 3, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

The war in Iraq has entered a critical stage, driven as much by escalating violence on the ground as by political calendars in the United States. Throughout all the ups and downs, President Bush has stood by his embattled defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, despite calls for his resignation (NYT) by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Central to this criticism of the defense chief is the accusation he refused to supply enough troops to secure a territory roughly the size of California.

A clamor for a so-called “strategic redeployment” of U.S. forces has risen from congressional Democrats. But how and where would these forces be redeployed? And what effect might their removal have on the rising violence around Iraq? Some lawmakers, inspired by Lawrence J. Korb of the Center for American Progress, have called for a redeployment that envisions 60,000 troops left in Iraq by the end of 2006 and no one left there by the end of 2007 (Korb debates Steven Metz of the U.S. Army War College on America’s long-term presence in Iraq). The soldiers would be redeployed to Afghanistan, Kuwait, or other countries in the Persian Gulf region to act as “rapid reaction forces” should things get ugly in Iraq without their presence. Another plan, hatched by former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, calls for U.S. troops to be redeployed to the predominantly Kurdish—and peaceful—areas of northern Iraq. They would be nearby to keep an eye on events in Iraq, but, more important, they would “reduce the very real risk of a Turkish-Kurdish war” (WashPost).

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.