U.S. ambassador warns against early Iraq exit

By John F. Burns and Alissa J. Rubin

BAGHDAD: The American ambassador to Iraq has urged policy makers in Washington to give "some very, very serious thought" to the consequences that could follow an early reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq, warning of a surge in sectarian killings in which civilians "by the thousands" could die.

The ambassador, Ryan Crocker, laid out his grim forecast two months ahead of a pivotal assessment of progress in the war that he and the American military commander in Iraq are scheduled to make to the White House and Congress.

Congress is scheduled to renew debate on the question of withdrawal this week, as four more Republican senators have declared they can no longer support President George W. Bush's strategy, and administration officials debate whether Bush should announce his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops to forestall more defections.

"You can't build a whole policy on a fear of a negative, but, boy, you've really got to account for it," Crocker said in an interview on Saturday at his office in Saddam Hussein's old Republican palace, now the seat of American power in Iraq.

Setting out what he said was not a policy prescription but a review of issues that needed to be weighed, the ambassador compared Iraq's current violence to the early scenes of a movie, suggesting that those urging an early troop withdrawal might have underestimated the potential for much greater killing.

"In the States, it's like we're in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we're done here and the credits come up and the lights come on and we leave the theater and go on to something else," he said. "Whereas out here, you're just getting into the first reel of five reels" he added, "and as ugly as the first reel has been, the other four-and-a-half are going to be way, way worse."

He continued: "And you've got to give some very, very serious thought to ways it could be worse," including "sectarian violence on a level we just haven't seen before" that could escalate if American troops are not available to restrain the killing.

"You have to look at what the consequences would be, and you look at those who say we could have bases elsewhere in the country - well yes, we could, but we would have the prospect of American forces looking on while civilians by the thousands were slaughtered. Not a pretty prospect."

The 70-minute interview took place in Crocker's paper-piled office on the palace's upper floor, separated by a short walk through rooms busy with support staff from the office of General David Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq.

The two men will travel to Washington for what the ambassador described as a "side-by-side" progress report on the war that is due by Sept. 15, an event Bush and congressional opponents of the war have both marked as a potential watershed in American policy on the war.

Crocker, who has spent most of his 36-year diplomatic career in the Arab world, including a posting to Lebanon during which he survived the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1982, emphasized in the interview what he called "the almost infinite complexity" of the situation in Iraq, and the hard choices facing the United States.

But the crux of his remarks was a view that Petraeus has pressed in behind-doors briefings for senators in Washington: that while the United States faces a high price for staying in Iraq, with mounting American casualties and a bill that is already over $500 billion, the price for leaving could be high, too.

Crocker spoke of the pressures the September deadline has imposed on two American officials to come up with what he described as "the best assessment we can," and "the most honest." He compared their situation to the one faced by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and General Creighton Abrams Jr., the two top Americans in Vietnam when the decisions that led to the American withdrawal from that war were made nearly 40 years ago.

"That's the only kind of situation that I can think of in which something like this might have arisen," the ambassador said, referring to the burden of expectation he and Petraeus now face.

In setting out what he called "the kind of things you have to think about" if American troops are withdrawn, the ambassador set out several possibilities.

He said these included a resurgence by insurgents linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which he said had been "pretty hard-pressed of late" by the "surge" of an additional 30,000 troops ordered by Bush earlier this year; the risk that Iraq's 350,000-strong security forces would "completely collapse" under sectarian pressures, disintegrating into militias; and the specter of interference amid the chaos by Iran, neighboring Sunni Arab states and Turkey.

"I'm not saying any of this is going to happen or is likely to happen, but it's the kind of things you've got to think about," he said. "The movie will go on with us, or without us. So what are the actors likely to do in our absence under the conditions as we can best see them?"

He said his experience in Lebanon in the early 1980s was that "generally when you try to think about future scenarios, your main mistake is often a failure of imagination," and that he could not have predicted the violence that came in 1982, including the attacks that killed hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut, and the devastating truck bombings of the embassy and the American marine barracks.

"All those things exceeded my imagination, and I'm sure that what will happen here will exceed my imagination" he said. "But these things have to be thought about, and they are serious."