WASHINGTON - Despite US President George W
Bush's victory last week in his protracted battle
with Democrats in Congress for unconditional
funding for the Iraq war at least through
September, his administration appears to have
given up hope that it can maintain his "surge"
strategy well into next year, let alone beyond.
A slew of news articles and columns by
well-connected journalists and analysts over the
past week report that the White House now believes
US troop levels in Iraq - currently nearing the
165,000 "surge" target set in
January - must start coming down by early 2008 at
the latest, and quickly after that.
The
new conventional wisdom is that Bush, however
grudgingly, has now accepted key recommendations
of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), or, as
he called it during a press conference late last
week, "Plan B-H" after the ISG's co-chairs, former
secretary of state James Baker and former
Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton. The plan was
released in early December.
"Yes, that
same Baker-Hamilton plan now seems to be official
White House policy," wrote David Ignatius in his
column in the Washington Post on Thursday, titled
"Time for 'Plan B-H' in Iraq?" "Administration
officials insist that the president supported it
all along, though you could have fooled me."
While it did not rule out a short-term
"surge" lasting no more than a few months, the
ISG's main military recommendation was to withdraw
virtually all US combat troops - about half of the
current deployment - by next March 31 and refocus
the remaining contingent on training Iraqi troops,
protecting US installations and attacking
suspected al-Qaeda forces.
While that
deadline is unlikely to be met, the New York Times
reported that administration policymakers are
developing "concepts" for reducing US troop
strength in Iraq to 100,000 by the middle of the
2008 presidential campaign next summer.
The "surge" strategy, which called for the
addition of roughly 30,000 troops to the some
130,000 deployed in Iraq as of the end of last
December, was announced by Bush in early January
and officially launched the following month under
the direction of General David Petraeus.
The strategy was designed to use the
additional troops to curb growing sectarian
violence in Baghdad to arrest the country's drift
into full-scale civil war. Proponents hoped it
would provide the political space needed for
"moderate" forces on all sides - particularly the
Shi'ite-led government of Iraqi Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki and Sunni political leaders
sympathetic to the insurgency - to forge a
consensus on key obstacles to national
reconciliation, such as the distribution of oil
revenues, holding local elections and reversing
the de-Ba'athification that followed Washington's
2003 invasion.
The strategy's security
component appeared to succeed during the first two
months of its implementation, as Shi'ite militias
in the capital sharply reduced their activities to
avoid confrontations with US forces. At the same
time, however, sectarian violence around Baghdad
and in other major cities increased.
Worse, despite persistent pressure from
Petraeus, the new US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan
Crocker, and even Vice President Dick Cheney, who
made a surprise visit to Baghdad in May, the
political component of the strategy has made
little, if any, progress.
In just the past
week, senior US officials, including Pentagon
chief Robert Gates, have suggested that specific
"benchmarks" for assessing progress on national
reconciliation that were included in the
legislation giving Bush the war funding he
requested are highly unlikely to be met by
September when Petraeus is due to report on the
progress of the "surge". Then Congress will vote
on new funding. Even the enactment of a new oil
law, which was approved by the Maliki government
in April, is now considered a "long shot" by
Petraeus, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Meanwhile, initial gains made by the
"surge" in improving security and reducing the
death toll in Baghdad appear to be eroding at an
accelerating rate, while the strategy's more
aggressive deployment of US troops to neighborhood
outposts and other more vulnerable positions has
resulted in significantly higher US casualties.
Some 120 American soldiers were reported killed in
May, making last month the deadliest for US troops
since the November 2004 battle for Fallujah.
All of these factors have contributed to
the growing conviction - even among some of Bush's
most loyal Republican supporters - that the
continued deployment of US troops at current
levels through 2008, as has been urged, for
example, by the top US field commander in Baghdad,
Lieutenant-General Ray Odierno, is no longer
politically viable.
"Few if any
Republicans want to go into the [2008] election
with 150,000 American troops still under attack,"
wrote the Post's veteran political analyst, David
Broder, in his Thursday column titled "Endgame
ahead", which was paired with Ignatius'.
In it, he quoted the "supremely realistic
Senate Republican leader", Mitch McConnell, as
telling reporters this week that "the handwriting
is on the wall that we are going in a different
direction in the fall, and I expect the president
to lead it".
To most commentators in
Washington, as well as to the administration, the
default option appears to lie with the ISG's
recommendations for a relatively rapid drawdown of
US combat troops and the reorientation of the
military mission there toward training and, in
Bush's words last week, "having special forces ...
chase down al-Qaeda".
The ISG also urged
the administration to launch a "new diplomatic
offensive" to engage Iraq's neighbors, including
Syria and Iran, to help stabilize the country -
advice that Bush, as with the ISG's withdrawal
recommendation, at first resisted but now appears
to have accepted, albeit reluctantly and without
conviction.
In an op-ed published on
Thursday in the Los Angeles Times and titled "The
lessons of Vietnam", Henry Kissinger, a major
backer of the Iraq war who has personally advised
both Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
came out with his strongest endorsement yet of the
ISG's strategy, including the necessity of
reducing rather than expanding the US military
presence in Iraq.
"A strategic design," he
wrote, "cannot be achieved on a fixed arbitrary
deadline ... But it also must not test the
endurance of the American public to a point where
the outcome can no longer be sustained by our
political process. A political settlement has to
be distilled from the partly conflicting, partly
overlapping views of the Iraqi parties, Iraq's
neighbors and other affected states, based on a
conviction that the cauldron of Iraq would
otherwise overflow and engulf everybody."
While "the essential prerequisite is
staying power in the near term ... President Bush
owes it to his successor to make as much progress
toward this goal as possible; not to hand the
problem over but to reduce it to more manageable
proportions. What we need most is a rebuilding of
bipartisanship in both this presidency and in the
next," Kissinger argued.
Remarkably, that
analysis appears to echo what is being said within
the administration, according to Ignatius. "While
the Democratic leadership isn't likely to join
Bush in a top-down push for consensus, White House
officials hope that by embracing Baker-Hamilton,
they can begin to build out from a new center. The
goal is a policy that has broad enough support
that it could last into the next administration."
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