WASHINGTON - If Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki were inclined to bet his life on
President George W Bush's latest assurances that
there will be no timetable for withdrawing US
troops from Iraq, he should probably give it a
second thought.
While Bush, true to his
self-image as an uncommonly firm leader in the
mold of British prime minister Winston Churchill,
is undoubtedly sincere in his determination to
press ahead, political circumstances - not to
mention the accelerating slide into an
appalling civil war in
Iraq - are clearly conspiring against him.
The signs of eroding support for Bush's
"stay-the-course" strategy are virtually
everywhere in Washington, where senior
Republicans, such as the chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, John Warner, are moving
into open revolt against what they see as a
rapidly deteriorating situation and Bush's
bullheadedness in still believing that Iraq will
somehow become a model for democratic
transformation in the Middle East.
The
increasingly likely prospect of the Democrats
recapturing the House of Representatives, and
possibly even the Senate, too, after the November
7 mid-term elections should also spur second
thoughts on Maliki's part.
While
ever-fearful of being tagged as "weak" on
terrorism, it appears a strong majority of
Democrats currently favor a year-long timetable
for withdrawal from Iraq. That position, if
anything, is winning them increased popular
support and is one they may well be able to
effectively impose on Bush when Congress, which
controls the government's purse-strings,
reconvenes in January.
Similar auguries
are visible in London, Washington's closest ally
in the " war on terror" and the biggest
contributor of troops by far to the US-led
coalition in Iraq. In a lengthy newspaper
interview last week, Britain's new army chief,
General Sir Richard Dannatt, echoed the arguments
made over the past year by the Democratic Party's
most prominent advocate of a swift withdrawal,
John Murtha.
Britain should "get ourselves
out some time soon because our presence
exacerbates the security problems [in Iraq]," he
told the Daily Mail, adding that the best that
could be hoped for now was something less than the
kind of liberal democracy envisaged by both Bush
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Dannatt's views, according to a column by
a former senior instructor at the Royal Military
Academy and director of the Center for Foreign
Policy Analysis, Paul Moorcraft, reflect the
thinking of the "British military establishment".
The fact that Moorcraft's column was
published on Monday in the staunchly pro-Bush
Washington Times adds to the impression in
Washington that even right-wing Republicans,
despite their continued attacks on "Defeatocrats"
for wanting to "cut and run", have reached a
"tipping point" on the war.
Indeed, the
Times' front page featured an article contrasting
the optimistic assessments given by Washington's
top commander in Iraq, General George Casey,
earlier this year to his most recent briefings
this month, particularly about the ability of the
Iraqi security forces to take the place of US
troops in any reasonable amount of time - Bush's
central condition for a gradual US withdrawal.
The article noted that Casey had predicted
early this year that he might be able to reduce US
troops levels from 130,000 by as much as 30,000 by
the end of this year. But Washington has actually
increased troops to over 140,000 in recent months,
a level that US Army chief Peter Schoomaker said
last week may have to be sustained through 2010,
an estimate that provoked real panic among
Republican lawmakers who are ever more aware that
the war is the single biggest negative they have
to overcome to win re-election.
The recent
increase in US troops was due above all to the
increased violence in Baghdad, where the monthly
death toll, as recorded by Iraq's Health Ministry,
has risen steadily from over about 1,400 earlier
this summer to more than 2,600 in September.
By increasing the US and Iraqi troop presence
in the capital, US planners had hoped that the
violence could be quickly contained, but that
assumption has not been borne out.
"The US
military had a two-stage program for security in
Baghdad," Juan Cole, an Iraq specialist at the
University of Michigan, told an interviewer on US
public television Monday. "They were going to go
in and make sweeps of the Sunni Arab districts and
cut down on the guerrilla violence against the
Shi'ites, and then they were going to use that as
an argument to the Shi'ites that 'OK, now you have
to give up your militias'."
"But this
battle for Baghdad has already been going on since
August, and there has been not only no reduction
in attacks ... [but] the attacks have gone up!
We've got 50, 60, 70 bodies showing up every day
in Baghdad, bullets behind the ears," said Cole,
who is calling for a "phased withdrawal of US
troops".
Nor is the violence limited to
Baghdad or the Sunni insurgent stronghold of
al-Anbar province. Last weekend, a series of
reprisal killings by Shi'ites and Sunnis left over
100 dead in and around Balad, about 80 kilometers
north of Baghdad, in an area where US troops
turned over security to their Iraqi counterparts
just last month.
While most of the
violence is now sectarian, US casualties have also
been spiking, particularly since August when more
troops were sent to help pacify Baghdad.
Sixty-three US troops were killed in August; that
rose to 74 in September. Nearly 70 have been
killed in the first half of October, putting the
month on track to be the deadliest in almost two
years and adding to the pressure to bring the
troops home.
All of these developments
have created panic among the war's supporters,
particularly neo-conservatives who were most
enthusiastic about invading Iraq. In a cover
article in this week's Weekly Standard, in which
he warned, contrary to some critics, that "exiting
Iraq ... would fan the flames of jihadism", Reuel
Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute
conceded that a "consensus is growing in
Washington" on both the right and the left in
favor of a "rapid departure".
At the same
time, the neo-conservative New York Sun reported
that the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a blue-ribbon
task force created last spring by Congress to
develop a bipartisan strategy on Iraq, was
considering four basic options, two of which,
including a "stay-the-course" strategy and an
immediate withdrawal, had been ruled out by its
members.
Of the two left, according to the
Sun account, one, "Stability First", calls for
continuing efforts to stabilize Baghdad, major new
initiatives to coax Sunni insurgents into the
political process, and a regional effort,
including Iran and Syria - with which the
administration has refused so far to deal directly
- to cut off arms supplies to militias and help
reduce the violence.
The second option,
called "Redeploy and Contain", appears similar to
a plan floated last year by the Center for
American Progress and subsequently endorsed by
most Democratic lawmakers. It calls for a gradual
withdrawal of US troops to bases outside Iraq from
which they could strike against terrorist targets
in Iraq or elsewhere in the region.
The
fact that the ISG's co-chair is former secretary
of state and Bush family consiglieri James Baker,
with whom Bush reportedly talks on a regular
basis, is likely to give the final report, due out
early next year, serious heft, particularly for a
Congress, a military and top Republican
strategists that are already desperate for a
face-saving exit strategy, timetable included.
