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[OS] IRAQ/US/MIL - Plan Would Keep Small Force in Iraq Past Deadline

Released on 2012-10-16 17:00 GMT

Email-ID 3654908
Date 2011-09-07 04:47:00
Plan Would Keep Small Force in Iraq Past Deadline
Published: September 6, 2011

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is supporting a plan that
their withdrawal at year's end, but only to continue training security
forces there, a senior military official said on Tuesday.

The recommendation would break a longstanding pledge by President Obama to
withdraw all American forces from Iraq by the deadline. But it would still
involve significantly fewer forces than proposals presented at the
Pentagon in recent weeks by the senior American commander in Iraq, Gen.
Lloyd J. Austin III, to keep as many as 14,000 to 18,000 troops there.

The proposal for a smaller force - if approved by the White House and the
Iraqi government, which is not yet certain - reflected the shifting
political realities in both countries.

American forces home and the widely held view among commanders that Iraq
mounting pressures to reduce the costs of fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan, both wars that have become increasingly unpopular as the 10th

Even as the United States military reduces its troop strength in Iraq, the
private security contractors working for the State Department.

In Iraq, a lingering American military presence is hugely contentious,
even though some political leaders, especially among the Kurds and Sunnis,
will be Shiite political dominance, coupled in turn with the rising
influence of neighboring Iran.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, has also indicated he would
consider allowing American trainers to stay beyond the deadline,
negotiated by President George W. Bush. At the same time, he owes his
position as prime minister to the political followers of the Shiite cleric
Moktada al-Sadr, who vehemently opposes any Americans remaining.

The Iraqi cabinet authorized the beginning of talks over an American
military presence, but insisted that they be limited to a training
mission, a senior administration official said. Mr. Panetta's
recommendation fell "within the confines of what the Iraqis said they
need," the official said.

Mr. Panetta himself, in comments to reporters as he traveled to New York
for a Sept. 11 commemoration on Tuesday, said that no decisions had been
made about how many American troops would remain in Iraq after the end of
this year.

But despite the reluctance of several administration officials to publicly
get out ahead of a formal recommendation and a presidential decision on
such a delicate issue, as a practical matter Mr. Panetta has almost run
out of time for the military to plan the logistics of a withdrawal by
year's end.

A recommendation to keep 3,000 American troops, first reported on Tuesday
by Fox News, would leave in place a token force where many commanders had
hoped to see a robust presence continue in a region that is viewed as
strategic to American interests.

News of the plan was met with dismay by three senators who visited Iraq
many times during the war: Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut
independent, and his Republican colleagues John McCain of Arizona and
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The three released a statement calling
the 3,000 troops "dramatically lower than what our military leaders" have
said "is needed to support Iraq in safeguarding the hard-won gains that
our two nations have achieved at such great cost."

Mr. Obama has steadily withdrawn troops from Iraq since taking office - to
fewer than 50,000 now from more than 140,000 in January 2009 - without the
drastic deterioration of security that many predicted along the way.

With the deadline for a final withdrawal now less than four months away,
the debate over what if any to leave has intensified. Iraq remains deeply
unsettled, if less violent than the worst years of the war in 2006 and
2007. In the last several weeks, a string of bombings and attacks have
intensified the violence, renewing fears about Iraq's ability to main
security without American backup. Its political system, though democratic,
remains riven by sectarian conflicts and crippled by corruption.

Underscoring the delicacy of the question at home and in Iraq, the senior
administration official referred to any potential post-2011 force as "a
small, temporary military presence." Even that might be difficult for Mr.
Maliki to sell. The security agreement Mr. Maliki's government negotiated
with the Bush administration outlined, among other things, the legal
protections for American forces in the country.

Those protections expire with the agreement on Dec. 31, and American
officials have long said they will have to negotiate new ones to cover any
soldiers that remain.

In some ways, the debate over an American military presence is a
rhetorical one. The administration has already drawn up plans for an
extensive expansion of the American Embassy and its operations, bolstered
by thousands of paramilitary security contractors. It has also created an
Office of Security Cooperation that, like similar ones in countries like
Egypt, would be staffed by civilians and military personnel overseeing the
training and equipping of Iraq's security forces.

Even without an extension of the deadline after 2011, that office is
expected to be one of the largest in the world, with hundreds if not
thousands of employees. Officials have previously suggested that keeping
American soldiers in this office might not require a new security
agreement to replace the expiring one since they would be cover by the
same protection offered to diplomats.

All year administration officials have repeated the vow to withdraw all
American troops but left open the possibility of an extended mission - if
the Iraqi government requested one.

The State Department's spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, reiterated the
administration's pledge to go to zero by the end of the year.

our plan is to withdraw by the end of the year," she said on Tuesday when
asked about reported comments by the Kurdish regional leader, Massoud
Barzani, that he favored an American presence beyond 2011. "Were the Iraqi
government to come forward and make a request for some continued security
assistance, we would be prepared to look at it."

Military and administration officials emphasized again on Tuesday that the
Iraqis had not yet made any request and still might not. Nor has the
administration made its final decision, though the planning for various
contingencies has been under way for months. "Absent a request from the
Iraqis, it's difficult to settle on any one thing," one of the military
officials said.

With the year-end deadline looming large because of the lead time the
Pentagon needs to withdraw forces from Iraq, the combination of these
pressures has been forcing military commanders in Iraq to come up with
options that call for fewer and fewer American troops.

American military analysts and planners say that 3,000 American troops
would represent a bare-bones approach, with those forces likely to be
assigned a training mission "with a limited capability at that," said one
military official, who like others interviewed for this article agreed to
speak on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the
talks with the Iraqis.

A senior American military officer said the planning at this point seemed
to be driven more by the troop numbers than the missions they could
accomplish, exactly the opposite of how military planners ideally like to
operate. "I think we're doing this backwards," the officer said. "We
should be talking about what missions we want to do, and then decide how
many troops we'll need."

Clint Richards
Global Monitor
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