Doug Lorimer
With a growing majority of US voters favouring the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Washington's failed counter-insurgency war in Iraq, and many in his own Republican Party worried about a voter backlash in the 2006 mid-term congressional elections, US President George Bush's administration is having to give the impression that it has an Iraq "exit strategy".
In a departure from previous statements, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News on November 22 that the current level of US troops in Iraq — 160,000 — would not have to be maintained "for very much longer", because the US-recruited and trained Iraqi security forces would soon be able to take over the fight against the anti-occupation insurgency from the US occupation forces.
Rice claimed the training of Washington's new puppet Iraqi army was going "extremely well", adding: "The president has said that as soon as Iraqi forces are ready, we want to see a reduction in our own forces, and I think those days are going to be coming fairly soon when Iraqis are going to be more and more capable of carrying out the functions to secure their own future."
The November 26 Los Angeles Times reported that a "former top Pentagon official who served during Bush's first term said he believed there was a 'growing consensus' on withdrawing about 40,000 troops before next year's congressional election".
However, Lawrence DiRita, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, told Agence France Presse on November 28 that no decisions have been made on US force levels next year beyond withdrawing the 20,000 troops used for a build-up of US forces for the December 15 Iraqi parliamentary elections.
The LA Times article observed that the "administration's pivot on the issue comes as the White House is seeking to relieve enormous pressure by war opponents. The camp includes liberals, moderates and old-line conservatives who are uneasy with the costly and uncertain nation-building effort.
"It also followed agreement this week among Iraqi politicians that the US troop presence ought to decrease. Meeting in Cairo, representatives of the three major ethnic and religious groups called for a US withdrawal and recognised Iraqis' 'legitimate right of resistance' to foreign occupation."
The November 26-27 Cairo conference was organised by the League of Arab States. The fact that all of the representatives of the political parties in Washington's puppet Iraqi regime had to accept the legitimacy of the nationalist armed resistance movement is a reflection of the huge antipathy among the Iraqi people toward the US-led occupation.
According to a survey of Iraqi public opinion conducted in August for the British Ministry of Defence (MoD), 82% of Iraqis are "strongly opposed" to the presence of US and other foreign troops in their country, and up to 65% of Arab Iraqis support attacks by the Iraqi armed resistance on the US-led occupation forces.
Reporting on results of the MoD-commissioned survey, the October 23 London Sunday Telegraph commented that it "demonstrates for the first time the true strength of anti-Western feeling in Iraq after more than two-and-a-half years of bloody occupation. The nationwide survey also suggests that the coalition has lost the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people."
The November 26 LA Times article reported that some US military analysts "say the emerging consensus" on the need for the US to withdraw some of its troops from Iraq "might have less to do with conditions in Iraq than the deployment's long-term strain on the US military. And major questions about the readiness of Iraq's fledgling security forces remain, posing risks for any strategy that calls for an accelerated American withdrawal.
"As recently as late September, senior US military commanders said during a congressional hearing that just one Iraqi battalion, about 700 soldiers, was considered capable of undertaking combat operations fully independent of US support."
Lieutenant Kenrick Cato, a US Army officer assigned to train the puppet Iraqi troops, told the June 10 Washington Post: "I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the US Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period. But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won't be ready before I leave. And I know I'll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don't think they'll be ready then."
In an article in the December 5 New Yorker magazine (posted on its website on November 28), renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that "a key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the president's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by US warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what."
However, Hersh also reported that within the US military, "the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection."
Hersh reported that the US Air Force commanders he had spoken to expressed the concern that with the US-backed Iraqi security forces so heavily infiltrated by the Iraqi resistance movement, US warplanes would be directed to bomb targets selected by the insurgency.
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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