By Phil Stewart
When
it comes to the tricky political calculus of deciding how many US troops to
keep in Iraq, President Barack Obama may truly have no good options. Obama was
an Iraq war opponent who repeatedly promised no US troops will remain in the
country beyond 2011, the deadline for the US withdrawal under a bilateral pact.
But his past two defense secretaries have publicly advocated keeping some US
forces there on a training mission, should Iraq ask for it. To that end, Iraq
and the United States agreed to start formal negotiations last month.
Sources
tell Reuters the Obama administration is now considering options including a
training force as small as 3,000 troops in the country. Obama's Democratic base
may still feel that is too many and Republican critics say that number is too
few to guard against a dangerous escalation in violence. Any deterioration in
Iraq could come back to haunt Obama during the 2012 US presidential election
year. It would remind Democrats that American forces are still in danger there
while bolstering a Republican narrative of policy blunder.
In
his State of the Union address, Obama vowed to "finish the job of bringing
our troops out of Iraq." Civilians, he said, would forge a lasting
partnership with the Iraqi people, a nod to an expanded role planned for the
State Department. To counter the impression of backpedaling, the Obama
administration appears to be flirting with the idea of rebranding current
military operations in Iraq as "combat" and future ones as
"training".
Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton said last month, at event where she was flanked by
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, "our combat mission in Iraq ends at the
end of this year". "Our support and training mission, if there is to
be such a one, is what the subject of this discussion (with the Iraqis) would
be," she said at the National Defense University.
There
is a problem though: Obama has already announced the end of the US combat
mission in Iraq. The remaining 43,000 or so forces in the country are already
in an 'advise and assist' role, even though the US military still sometimes
conducts air strikes. Declaring that the "tide of war is receding,"
Obama announced in June a faster withdrawal from Afghanistan than his military
had recommended. That may now happen in Iraq, although there are competing
visions within the military itself about just how big a force may be needed.
Eight
years after the United States ousted Saddam Hussein, Iraq is still building its
police and army to battle a lethal Sunni Islamist insurgency and Shiite
militias within, as well as defending against external threats. Anti-US Shiite
cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr, a key member of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki's
coalition government who openly opposes any continued US presence, has threatened
to escalate protests and military resistance if any American troops stay. So,
the US military has emphasized that "force protection" for American
troops will be key to any future mission in Iraq.
The
Pentagon declined to comment on internal deliberations, but sources familiar
with the matter said US officers have felt at least 10,000 troops would be
necessary to help Baghdad address all the shortcomings in its security forces.
Even so, Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno, until last year the top
US commander in Iraq, has not expressed alarm at the possibility of keeping on
just 3,000 troops. He told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday: "I
always felt that we had to be careful about leaving too many people in Iraq.
I'm not saying 3,000 to 5,000 is the right number. But what I would say is
there comes a time when ... it becomes counter-productive" to have too
many forces. Too many troops risk being seen as an occupying force, he said.
One
example of a mission that could fall by the wayside is US operations to keep
the peace between Arabs and Kurds. The president of Iraq's semi-autonomous
Kurdish region warned this week that the withdrawal of US forces will increase
the possibility of a civil war. "If you're doing 3,000, you could do a scaled-back
version of the Northern Iraq mission and that's all you'd be doing," said
a US official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Odierno,
who had long been the face of the Iraq mission before General Lloyd Austin took
over this year, said that wasn't necessarily the case. "I've heard some
discuss where we need 5,000 people to work the Arab-Kurd issue. Well, I've read
some things lately that we think that they are starting to handle that,"
he said. "So if that's the case, then we don't need those 5,000," he
added, without directly taking a position on the issue. – Reuters
This commentary was published in The Kuwait Times on 11/09/2011
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