Bush Won't Be 'Rushed' On Iraq, But Says He'll Press Maliki

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
December 14, 2006
Pg. 16

By David S. Cloud
WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 — President Bush said Wednesday that he was “not going to be rushed” into making decisions on a new strategy in Iraq but intended to press Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government to reach out to Iraq’s minority Sunni Muslim population.
Mr. Bush spoke to reporters after meeting at the Pentagon with top civilian and military leaders, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is stepping down as defense secretary on Monday, and Robert M. Gates, who is to be sworn in to the post the same day. Mr. Rumsfeld presided at the meeting, which lasted more than an hour, but Mr. Bush indicated that he would rely heavily on Mr. Gates’s advice in deciding on a new strategy for Iraq.
“I really do want the new secretary of defense to get to know people and hear people and to be a part of these deliberations,” Mr. Bush said.
A senior administration official said that Mr. Bush had decided to postpone a national address on Iraq strategy until early next year after having breakfast with Mr. Gates early on Tuesday and realizing that his new defense secretary was not being given much time to get up to speed.
Mr. Bush’s comments about the Maliki government were among his most pointed, and they seemed at odds with another idea considered early in the review, that the United States should tilt more toward the majority Shiites in Iraq and abandon efforts to reach out to Sunnis.
“I can hold people to account,” Mr. Bush said, indicating that he would press Mr. Maliki and his Shiite-led government to carry out reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. He added, “It’s my job to get the Maliki government to make the hard decisions.” Mr. Bush also said that he had “heard some ideas that would lead to defeat, and I reject those ideas.” He said those ideas included “leaving before the job is done” and not helping the Iraqi government “take the necessary and hard steps to be able to do its job.”
Mr. Bush offered no details on military options that were presented to him by the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the hourlong meeting, but Defense Department officials said the strategy review was likely to back a plan being drafted by Gen. George W. Casey Jr. that calls for shifting thousands of American combat troops into training teams responsible for advising Iraqi Army and police units.
The officials, including military officers and civilian Pentagon employees, spoke on condition of anonymity because the planning was still in motion.
Among other ideas said to have been broached in the meeting of Mr. Bush and the joint chiefs was a plan to permanently increase the size of the United States Army and the Marine Corps, according to a Defense Department official involved in the review. The active duty Army has an authorized force level of 512,000 next year, and some officials contend it needs to increase for the Army to handle continued deployments in Iraq and elsewhere.
A civilian Army official said that an increase, the size of which had not been decided, had become more likely, but that officials were still examining how quickly new units could be trained and brought into the deployment rotations.
General Casey’s plan to augment Iraqi police and army units with more American advisers, who now number between 4,000 and 6,000, envisions eventually redeploying American combat units outside of Baghdad and giving Iraqis primary responsibility for security there.
But that would occur, under General Casey’s plan, only after progress in coming months on political reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite factions as well as a major increase in the size of the adviser teams, a senior military officer said. “How do you accede to the desire for a turnover but still keep a modicum of control,” said the officer, describing the thinking behind attaching conditions to the turnover of responsibility to Iraqi units.
The blueprint “is something that Casey is talking to the president about and the secretary of defense about directly,” said a military official in Iraq.
Under General Casey’s plan, the number of American troops in Iraq, now around 140,000, could begin to be reduced by early 2008, another military official said.
But American commanders worry that Iraqi police units, many of which are believed to be infiltrated by Shiite militias, would respond to a pullback of American combat units in Baghdad by carrying out even more sectarian killings in Sunni neighborhoods, the military officials said.
Increasing the size of the American adviser teams would be aimed at maintaining discipline among police and army units.
American combat units that were withdrawn to the periphery of Baghdad would operate as a “quick reaction force” that could re-enter the city to assist Iraqis on short notice if necessary. Otherwise, American combat units would focus on “taking down networks and cells” of insurgents and bomb makers, said the senior Defense Department official involved in the review.
In addition to more advisers and a Sunni-Shiite reconciliation process, the plan envisions a major employment program in Baghdad and increased spending on reconstruction projects in areas of the city already cleared by American and Iraqi forces. The redeployment would not occur until those “other pieces were in place,” the senior official said.
Among the benchmarks under discussion are rough timetables for the United States to hand over operational control of Iraqi units to Mr. Maliki’s government, passage of laws providing for amnesty for some insurgents and for sharing oil revenues, continuation of a conference aimed at achieving a Sunni-Shiite reconciliation, and for retraining of police units.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting from Washington, and Sabrina Tavernise from Baghdad.
 
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