By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published July 27, 2005
WASHINGTON -- The struggle against the Iraq insurgency passed a crucial tipping point Wednesday with the current prime minister calling for major U.S. troop withdrawals and the U.S. ground commander there acknowledging they will probably come next year.
The commander, however, made clear he did not expect the insurgency to have dropped by then significantly below its current level.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari made his comments in Baghdad at a joint news conference with visiting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"We confirm and we desire speed in that regard," he said.
In Washington, well-placed military sources told UPI that "as many as," "20,000 or 30,000" U.S. troops might be withdrawn from Iraq next year. That would bring the current force levels of around 140,000 -- which many U.S. military officers privately, and most counter-insurgency experts publicly. agree are already far too low to deal with the insurgency -- down to only 120,000 or 110,000 troops.
Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, did not give any figures but he said the troop withdrawals already being contemplated for as early as next year were "fairly substantial."
Casey made his comments the day after a particularly grim series of incidents in Iraq. Four U.S. soldiers from the Georgia National Guard were killed in Baghdad by a single roadside bomb Tuesday, and 16 Iraqi government workers were killed when their buses were machine-gunned by insurgents.
Al-Jaafari said his government would welcome the move provided it had "two aspects."
The first, he said, would be that the United States would step up the scale and intensity of its training of massive new Iraqi security forces. Rumsfeld is expected to give the go-ahead for that with no hesitation.
The second, al-Jaafari said, was that the U.S. plans its withdrawals in coordination with the Iraqi government and its new security forces. U.S. senior officials have already assured Baghdad that will be the case, U.S. military sources have told UPI.
However, some U.S. sources cautioned that there could be major risks in giving the Iraqi government and security forces detailed advance information about future U.S. troop withdrawals.
Both the Iraqi government bureaucracy and the new security forces have been heavily infiltrated, they said, by insurgency agents. The insurgents continue to enjoy excellent intelligence that enables them to attack Iraqi security forces and even massacre them at large gatherings. They remain able to kill officials in the new state structure at will around the country.
The U.S. forces' ability to protect Iraqi officials apart from the most senior remains "minimal," one U.S. military source said.
Therefore, sharing information about the details, times and routes of U.S. withdrawals with Iraqi authorities and forces could greatly increase the risks of disruptive insurgent attacks upon them.
Gen. Casey told U.S. reporters in Rumsfeld's party that the withdrawal could start as early as spring next year provided there was continued progress on the political front and that the insurgency did not further expand.
Casey's first condition came as no surprise and senior Bush administration officials remain confident it would be fulfilled. The next step on the long and tortuous road to setting up a permanent democratic political structure as U.S. leaders have envisioned is a referendum that is expected to approve the new permanent constitutional structures.
But Casey's second condition was, in fact, a remarkable admission that even with the current troop levels, U.S. military leaders acknowledge that they do not realistically hope to break the insurgency or even significantly depress the levels of violence from it over the next year or so.
Yet even as things are, as one U.S. military analyst told UPI on condition of anonymity, "We're operating at the margins. We're running to stand still."
Another highly respected U.S. military expert, speaking on condition of anonymity Tuesday, said that the levels of U.S. forces in Iraq were far too low to be able to secure the country against the current level of the insurgency and that the trend of the insurgency over the past two years had been "consistently upward" in terms of the number of incidents recorded by U.S. forces and in terms of the numbers of casualties inflicted, especially on Iraqi civilians and military forces.
"We're not making forward progress," he said. "The insurgency has great untapped resources. The insurgency isn't defeated. It just isn't so. The overall trend is up."
The sources did not dispute Gen Jack Keane, a former deputy chief of staff of the Army, who claimed at a meeting Monday of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that U.S. forces had killed or imprisoned 50,000 insurgents over the past seven months. But they cautioned that this figure included thousands of detained suspects as well as confirmed insurgents and that the insurgency among the 30 percent or so Sunni Muslim minority in central Iraq continued to enjoy massive popular support and extensive, decentralized organization.
U.S. military analysts believe that only 5 to 10 percent of the insurgents are of foreign origin. And although this number includes most of the suicide bombers, it does not include the gunmen who continue to operate at will, carrying out assassinations around the country, they said.
In many cases, gunmen routinely killed their victims in front of their own families and didn't even bother to hide their faces behind masks, these U.S. sources said.
"The ability of the insurgents to kill large numbers of Iraqis remains unimpaired," the respected military analyst cited above said. "They kill at all levels. They even kill washer-women working at U.S. bases. When they make a threat, they carry it out. Their ability to kill people is only increasing."