WASHINGTON - In an apparent bid to
unify fractious Democrats behind a consensus plan
on Iraq, a think tank with strong links to the
administration of former president Bill Clinton
has called for a two-year "strategic redeployment"
of US forces that would ensure their almost total
withdrawal by January 2008.
The plan,
released by the Center for American Progress
(CAP), also calls for Washington to begin
withdrawing troops in January 2006 and completely
withdraw from Iraq's urban areas at the outset,
leaving security in the hands of Iraqi police,
troops and militias.
By the end of 2006,
according to the plan, 80,000 of about
150,000 US troops
currently deployed in Iraq would be withdrawn from
the country, with all 46,000 National Guard and
Reserve units demobilized and returned to the US.
The other 34,000 troops would be
redeployed - 14,000 to Kuwait and in a Marine
expeditionary force located off-shore in the Gulf,
prepared to strike at specific terrorist targets;
18,000 to Afghanistan to fight a resurgent Taliban
insurgency; and 1,000 each to the Horn of Africa
and Southeast Asia as part of the broader "war on
terror", according to the 10-page document titled
Strategic Redeployment: A Progressive Plan for
Iraq and the Struggle Against Violent Extremists.
At the same time, the plan, co-authored by
CAP associates Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis,
calls for Washington to enlist regional states,
including Iraq's next-door neighbors, in a major
diplomatic initiative to ensure Iraq's stability.
Such an initiative should include both Syria and
Iran, both of which are considered by the George W
Bush administration to be high-priority targets
for "regime change".
"Strategic
Redeployment rejects calls for an immediate and
complete withdrawal, which we conclude would only
serve to further destabilize the region and
embolden our terrorist enemies," the authors
write.
"But Strategic Redeployment also
rejects the current approach - right out of
[al-Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden's playbook for
us - a vague, open-ended commitment that focuses
our military power in a battle that cannot be won
militarily."
The report, the result of a
series of consultations that began in late July,
comes amid growing pressures on the Bush
administration to reconsider its determination to
"stay the course" in Iraq.
On September
24, Washington hosted more than 100,000 people who
had gathered for one of the largest anti-war
demonstrations in the capital since the 1991 Gulf
War. At the same time, the huge costs associated
with relief and reconstruction in New Orleans and
along the Gulf Coast in the wake of hurricanes
Katrina and Rita have spurred growing concern in
Congress - among Republicans and Democrats alike -
about how much longer the Treasury can afford to
pay the estimated US$5 billion a month that its
presence in Iraq is costing.
A recent
series of public opinion polls has also shown
growing disillusionment with the occupation, with
nearly two-thirds of the US public roughly evenly
divided between those who favor either an
immediate withdrawal or beginning a more gradual
drawdown now.
Nor are those who believe
Washington must change course confined to
Democrats. At a news conference for a new,
bipartisan "Homeward Bound" Congressional
resolution that calls on Bush to announce a
withdrawal plan by December and begin withdrawing
troops from Iraq no later than one year from now,
five of the 60 co-sponsors were Republican.
Still, the administration has so far
rejected any talk of withdrawal and is actively
discouraging the military brass from even
suggesting, as they have for several months now,
that they hoped to draw down a substantial number
of troops some time in the first half of next
year.
"Now is not the time to falter or
fade," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a
Princeton University audience Friday.
With
just a few exceptions, leading Democrats,
particularly those with presidential ambitions -
such as the ranking member on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, and New York
Senator Hillary Clinton - have so far also
rejected withdrawal or even the adoption of a
timetable for withdrawal, even as they have
attacked the way in which Bush has carried out the
war in Iraq.
The result has been a growing
divide on the issue between the party's grassroots
activists and its most prominent leaders. Unable
to offer a coherent position on Iraq, the party
instead has been mostly silent, apparently in the
hope the public will blame only Bush and the
Republicans for the ill effects of the war.
It is in that context that CAP is
presenting a plan. The fact that CAP's director,
John Podesta, served as Clinton's White House
chief of staff and that many of its top national
security associates also served in senior
positions under Clinton, will not be lost on many
here.
"Many Democrats have been fearful of
taking any position that can be viewed in any way
as critical of the military effort in the middle
of a war, while others believe that the US needs
to begin withdrawing," said Jim Cason, an analyst
at the Friends Committee on National Legislation,
a lobby group. "This seems to be designed to split
the difference to try to unify them."
The
plan, which is not shy about attacking Bush's
"multiple failures" in Iraq, argues that "the
status quo is untenable" but rules out "a hasty
withdrawal", decrying the "simplistic debate
centered on a false choice - should US forces
'stay the course' in Iraq or 'cut and run'?"
It also criticizes "many Democrats", who,
"scarred by Vietnam, helicopters going down in
Iran and soldiers being dragged through the
streets of Mogadishu, continue to suffer from
national security deficit disorder" and, as a
result, "are reduced to offering only tactical
criticisms of President Bush's game plan".
The US troop presence in Iraq, according
to the paper, is "actually attracting and
motivating America's terrorist enemies", while at
the same time preventing Iraqi leaders from making
the difficult compromises they need to create a
stable society. "Not setting a timetable [for
withdrawal] is a recipe for failure and sends the
wrong message to the [Iraqi] leadership ..."
During the two-year withdrawal and
redeployment, according to the report, US troops
in Iraq would be focused on "core missions" only,
including training of Iraqi forces, improving
border security, providing logistical and air
support to Iraqi security forces, advising Iraqi
units and tracking down terrorist and insurgent
leader with Iraqi units.
By the end of
2007, the only US military forces in Iraq would be
a small Marine contingent to protect the US
Embassy, a small group of military advisers to the
Iraqi government and counter-terrorist units that
work closely with Iraqi security forces.
The continued presence of US forces in
Kuwait and the Gulf would be adequate, in the
authors' view, to conduct strikes with Iraqi
forces against enemy targets or "deal with any
major external threats to Iraq".
In
addition to the regional diplomatic initiative,
Washington should conduct a more aggressive
public-diplomacy campaign to counter radical
Islamist propaganda, particularly any efforts to
depict the US redeployment as a defeat, and
increase its support for local civil society
groups and businesses in Iraq, according to the
plan.
