Doug Lorimer
Under the headline "Military Plans Gradual Cuts in Iraq Forces", the August 7 New York Times reported that it had been told by "three senior military officers and Defense Department officials" that at a classified briefing given to senior Pentagon officials last month, the top US commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, had "outlined a plan that would gradually reduce American forces in Iraq by perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 troops by next spring".
This plan, the NYT added, "tracks with a statement made" on July 27 by the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, that the Pentagon might make "some fairly substantial reductions" next year in the number of US troops in Iraq.
However, in its fourth paragraph the article reported that "Abizaid also warned that it is possible that the Pentagon might have to keep the current levels of about 138,000 American soldiers in Iraq throughout 2006 if security and political trends are unfavorable for a withdrawal".
The NYT went on to report that "under the current thinking, as reflected in briefings that General Abizaid and General Casey have provided" to US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the number of US troops in Iraq will be increased to 160,000 by December. This will be "achieved through overlapping the normal rotation of incoming forces and those who have finished their tour" — meaning that about 20,000 US troops who have finished their "normal" 12-month tours of duty in Iraq will not be permitted to leave.
After reporting that there is "mounting anxiety" among top Pentagon officials about "an overtaxed military, dismal recruiting in the Army and National Guard [and] dwindling public support" for the Iraq war, the NYT detailed Abizaid's "withdrawal" plan for 2006.
When stripped of its unrealistic "best-case" scenarios, this amounts to little more than a plan to have the extra 22,000 US troops deployed in Iraq by December "gradually withdrawn" early in 2006 — thus bringing the US occupation force back down to its present size.
Even the possibility of this withdrawal is highly conditional, going ahead only "if security conditions allow", and "some troops leaving Iraq could be held in Kuwait as a reserve force", the article added.
"Further reductions of tens of thousands of troops are possible throughout 2006", the NYT reported, "if conditions set by the American-Iraqi commission are met".
This commission, headed by US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, met on August 3 and set the guidelines for any withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. "The key consideration is the capability of Iraqi security forces", a US military statement on the meeting announced.
Publicly, Pentagon officials claim they are making rapid progress in developing the fighting capabilities of their puppet Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). On August 7, for example, Agence France Presse reported that US military officials in Baghdad said that in just under a year the ISF had doubled in size and "as of August 1, the total number of trained Iraqi Security Forces stood at more than 176,300, with nearly 96,000 answering to the interior ministry and almost 81,000 to the defence ministry".
However, these US officials have a rather peculiar definition of what "trained" means. "When I say trained and equipped, I mean they have a flak vest, a helmet, an AK-47 and a pistol", Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Wellman, spokesperson for the US mission in charge of training the ISF, told AFP.
A public report prepared by the incoming top US military commander General Peter Pace and presented to the US Congress on July 22, admitted that "only a small number of Iraqi Security Forces" were capable "by themselves" of taking on the Iraqi anti-occupation guerrillas.
While Pace's public report did not quantify how small the number is, speaking on the August 7 Fox News Sunday TV program, Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the US Senate's foreign relations committee, estimated that "fewer than 3000 [ISF soldiers] are able to take over totally without US support".
Biden based his estimate upon what he learned from US military officials in June, during his fifth visit to Iraq. After his return from Iraq, he told the July 1 Boston Globe that General David Petraeus, the head of the US mission training the ISF, had told him there were 107 Iraqi army battalions: "He said three — three — are fully trained and capable of executing missions on their own without American help. You are talking 500 to 800 troops in each of the units. So if you add it all up, at most they have 2400" ISF soldiers capable of fighting independently of the US occupation forces.
With opinion polls since June showing that a majority of US voters want some or all US troops to be withdrawn from Iraq, the Pentagon's deliberate leaks about a "classified plan" to start troop withdrawals next year is just what the establishment media needs to divert public attention away from the fact that Washington actually intends to put more US troops into Iraq.
From Green Left Weekly, August 17, 2005.
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