'Depth of mistrust' in Iraq unforeseen

With Sunnis' exit from government, Pentagon chief Gates says the focus will be on achieving reconciliation at a provincial level.
By Peter Spiegel and Alexandra Zavis
Times Staff Writers

August 3, 2007

ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates acknowledged Thursday that the Bush administration underestimated the difficulty of getting a political truce in Iraq, where Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government has been crippled by a walkout by Sunni Arab ministers.

Gates said he was optimistic about military progress in several Iraqi regions, particularly Al Anbar, a western province that was once a haven for insurgents.

But he said he was discouraged by the Shiite-dominated government's inability to reach a compromise to pass legislation aimed at reconciling the country's ethnic and sectarian groups. Reaching such political agreements, a central goal of the troop buildup strategy, may still be a long way off, he said.

"I just think in some ways we probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together," Gates said.

The Pentagon chief's remarks Thursday were his closest yet to acknowledging that the Bush administration's top political goals for Iraq may not materialize during the buildup, even if it is extended into next spring, the latest the military could sustain the increase. He also is the top Bush administration official to express such concerns publicly.

The Defense secretary was speaking to reporters aboard his plane as he headed back to Washington after a three-day, four-country visit to urge Sunni Arab allies in the region to do more to support the Maliki government.

Until now, Gates has been circumspect in his assessment of the "surge" strategy launched in February, and has been careful not to wade into the political fight between the White House and Capitol Hill over its duration.

Although Gates did say in testimony on Capitol Hill that he would like to see the "surge" end by December, a senior Defense official familiar with his thinking said those views had "been overtaken by events." Gates, the official said, is waiting for an evaluation due next month from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, to decide how long to continue the security plan.

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Political yardsticks

The Bush administration's benchmarks for progress include passing laws to divide the nation's oil wealth, set dates for provincial elections and allow former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, predominantly Sunni Arabs, to obtain government jobs and pensions.

Gates highlighted progress being made in local and provincial governments, another sign that Pentagon strategy may be shifting away from trying to impose a top-down solution to Iraq's sectarian conflict.

"The developments at the local level I think are more encouraging than I would have expected three or four months ago," he said.

Shifting focus away from the central government and toward provincial leaders would be a significant change for the administration, which has said the troop increase was aimed at calming violence enough to allow for political reconciliation at a national level.

Gates was careful not to say he had given up on national leaders.

"I think the developments on the political side are somewhat discouraging at the national level, and clearly the withdrawal of the Sunnis from the government is discouraging," he said. "My hope is it can all be patched back together."

But he said such progress would be dependent on Iraqi army and police forces holding difficult neighborhoods, an effort that has proved elusive.

In Baghdad, Maliki's party urged the main Sunni Arab bloc to reconsider its decision to quit the Cabinet. Maliki had not accepted the resignations Thursday, said Sami Askari, an aide to the prime minister and a member of his Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite group.

In a statement, the Islamic Dawa Party said it was concerned that the Sunni bloc had quit "before exhausting all means of dialogue."

"The current situation in Iraq and the continued terrorist operations targeting innocent civilians and infrastructure demands national solidarity," the party said.

U.S. officials had hoped that including members of the Sunni Arab minority in the Cabinet would give them a stake in Iraq's political process and undercut support for the insurgency. But a year later, Sunni Muslim politicians complain that they have nothing to show for their participation.

"The issue cannot be resolved with appeals alone," said Iyad Samarrai, secretary-general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading member of the Sunni coalition, known as the Iraqi Accordance Front, or Tawafiq. "The basis of the problem must be resolved."

The Sunni bloc, which had been boycotting Cabinet meetings since late June, had given the government a week to respond to a list of demands, including the release of detainees not charged with specific crimes, the disbanding of militias and inclusion of all major groups in security decisions. Maliki's office had called the move political blackmail.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who led attempts to head off the walkout, used a meeting Thursday of the Political Council for National Security to try to kick-start a new round of talks to heal the rift, aides said.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. Petraeus discussed the political crisis with Maliki during a regular meeting Thursday, Askari and U.S. officials said. Talabani also briefed British Ambassador Dominic Asquith.

The Accordance Front has 44 seats in parliament, and Samarrai said it would remain engaged in the political process. He said the group planned to take part in a meeting of parliamentary bloc leaders in the coming days, at which all sides hope to work out differences on key legislation.

The Sunni bloc also is exploring possible alliances with moderate Shiite, Kurdish and other politicians, said its leader, Adnan Dulaimi.

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Suicide attack

As talks continued, at least 28 Iraqis were reported killed in bomb blasts, mortar fire and other violence. In the worst of the incidents, a suicide bomber drove his explosives-laden car into a crowd of recruits at a police station northeast of the capital, killing at least 13 people and injuring 15 others, police said.

Police in Baghdad recovered at least 24 bodies, many of them apparent victims of sectarian killing in the city's western neighborhoods.

The U.S. military reported the deaths of two soldiers, one during combat operations Thursday in a western section of Baghdad, and another Wednesday near the southern port city of Basra.

At least 3,662 U.S. personnel have died since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, according to the website icasualties.org, which tracks military casualties.

North of the capital, more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, backed by U.S. troops, launched a campaign Thursday to clear militants from Samarra, where the bombing of a revered Shiite Muslim shrine, which destroyed its golden dome, unleashed a vicious cycle of sectarian killing last year. The shrine's two minarets were destroyed in an attack in June.

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peter.spiegel@latimes.com

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

Spiegel reported from Abu Dhabi and Zavis from Baghdad. Times staff writer Saif Hameed in Baghdad and special correspondents in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Hillah contributed to this report.

In Strategy Shift, Gates Envisions Troop Cuts

Pullback Is Deemed Key To Forging a Consensus On Long-Haul Plans
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN and GREG JAFFE
July 3, 2007; Page A1

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates and some allies in the Bush administration are seeking to build bipartisan political support for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq by moving toward withdrawing significant numbers of troops from Iraq by the end of President Bush's term.

The complicating factor is how long the administration will stick with its "surge" strategy of keeping high levels of troops in Iraq to try to tamp down violence there. On this issue, the administration -- and even the military -- is deeply divided.

The longer the surge lasts, the harder it will be to achieve the longed-for political consensus. Without such agreement, Bush administration officials fear, the U.S. could be forced into a hasty withdrawal that could have dire consequences both for the region and for U.S. stature in the world.

What Mr. Gates and some other high-ranking administration officials have in mind is a modern-day version of President Harry Truman's "Cold War consensus," a bipartisan agreement on the need to contain the Soviet Union. They hope lawmakers from both parties will ultimately agree to make a scaled-back U.S. mission in Iraq a central component of U.S. foreign policy even after Mr. Bush leaves office.

The emerging plan would shift the U.S. mission in Iraq to a more-modest attempt to contain its civil war, rather than the current effort to end the conflict. A smaller force of American troops, operating out of large bases far from Iraq's major cities, would focus on battling al Qaeda, securing Iraq's borders and training the country's struggling security forces.

The approach represents a stark shift for many senior administration officials, who have gone from arguing to maintain existing troop levels in Iraq -- if not increasing them, as with the surge -- to embracing a large-scale withdrawal as part of a shrinking of the overall U.S. mission there.

The change in thinking underscores administration officials' increasing concern that rapidly diminishing support for the war among Americans and in Congress could spark a precipitous withdrawal. Administration officials fear such an outcome could endanger U.S. national security by leaving a failed state in the hands of Shiite and Sunni Islamic extremists.

"My formative experience in Washington was an unwritten bipartisan consensus through nine successive presidencies on how to deal with the Soviet Union through a policy of containment," Mr. Gates told reporters recently. "There were huge disagreements over tactics...[but] on that fundamental strategy there was broad bipartisan agreement."

See continuing coverage of developments in Iraq, including an interactive map of day-to-day events in Iraq and a tally of military deaths.

While administration officials increasingly agree on the need to wind down the U.S. presence in Iraq by the end of Mr. Bush's term, they remain divided over how long the surge should last. As the current centerpiece of the administration's Iraq policy, the strategy has sent about 30,000 additional troops to Iraq to bring Baghdad and its environs under control. Some 125,000 other troops remain deployed in the country as well.

Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Mr. Gates say it is too soon to judge how the surge has fared. The commanders also argue that the effort needs more time to work. Vice President Dick Cheney's views on the success of the surge remain opaque; the only thing he has said publicly is that there are signs of progress in Iraq and it is too soon to give up on this strategy.

But continuing the present approach too long risks a backlash from Congress, where support for the war hit a new nadir last week. A pair of Republican senators -- including one of the party's most-respected foreign-policy voices -- called for the White House to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq as part of a shift in the overall U.S. strategy there.

Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and George Voinovich of Ohio joined the growing ranks of lawmakers demanding that the administration change the focus of the U.S. mission from ending Iraq's civil war to trying to contain the conflict by battling al Qaeda and securing the country's borders.

"It is critical that our nation start a new course in Iraq immediately to work toward bringing stability to the nation," Mr. Voinovich said in an interview. "Regardless of the past or current missions, this new course should begin now, and not be delayed one more day."

In an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Mr. Lugar urged Mr. Bush to work with a "bipartisan group of people in the Congress" on a new strategy and said he would be willing to take part in such an effort.

A critical Iraq funding vote scheduled for this month could see other skittish Republicans join with Democrats to force the White House's hand.

In an administration consumed by Iraq, Mr. Gates holds the most pivotal -- and conflicted -- position. The low-key defense secretary has spent months trying to find a long-term strategy that could defuse some of the fury over the war.

Mr. Gates has been reluctant to take a public stand on the surge or to say how long he believes the U.S. should maintain the 155,000 troops now deployed to Iraq.

But he and other senior administration officials recognize that the uptick of troops is sapping political support for the war at home, according to people familiar with internal White House deliberations. These people said Mr. Gates and the other administration officials are also concerned that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other key Iraqi leaders may be unable or unwilling to strike the political compromises needed to persuade their nation's warring sectarian groups to stop fighting.

At the same time, however, the defense secretary is anxious about the repercussions of abandoning the surge and of the U.S. appearing to be heading for the exits, these people said. Mr. Gates's biggest fear is that Iraq's sectarian factions would react to signs of an impending U.S. withdrawal by turning to countries such as Iran or Syria for protection, they said. That could cause Iraq to degenerate into greater chaos.

Senior American military commanders in Iraq want to maintain the current strategy, which they insist offers the best chance of diminishing Iraq's daily violence and buying time for Iraq's political leaders to strike key compromises. U.S. forces have been engaged in heavy combat as they mount aggressive offensive operations across Iraq, and troop numbers are expected to remain at current levels until next spring at the earliest.

Indeed, the military's recently initiated offensive into al Qaeda strongholds to the north and south of Baghdad is predicated not just on driving the Islamic militants from those areas, but also on keeping the enemy from returning by maintaining a substantial U.S. presence there until struggling Iraqi forces are able to hold their own.

"The really decisive activity [in these areas] will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence to comb out insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have gone quiet as we have moved in," said David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in an email.

With Iraq's security forces unreliable and largely incapable of preventing insurgents from returning to regions that have been cleared by U.S. forces, most of that work is expected to fall to U.S. troops over the next several months, if not longer, senior U.S. commanders said.

But with American casualties rising and the Iraqi government unable, or unwilling, to strike needed political deals, it is far from clear that U.S. lawmakers would be willing to give the administration's current strategy much more time.

Democratic and moderate Republican lawmakers want the administration to shift to a smaller footprint in Iraq and a more modest mission there. They warn that the surge, which polls show to be deeply unpopular among Americans, could ultimately lead Congress to abandon all support for the broader U.S. mission.

Continuing the surge strategy to the end of the Bush administration "contains extreme risks for U.S. national security," Mr. Lugar said in a Senate speech last week. "It would greatly increase the chances for a poorly planned withdrawal from Iraq."

If the Bush administration and Mr. Gates don't shift to a new strategy in the fall, they may well be compelled to change course by next spring, anyway.

The U.S. has about 21 Army brigades, each numbering between 5,000 and 7,000 soldiers, in Iraq. By the spring, manpower and materiel strains mean the Army might only be able to maintain 15 of those brigades, a senior Army official in the Pentagon said.

The official said the Army could only maintain the larger presence if the administration chose to recall National Guard units for second tours or extend the tours of other troops -- who already have had their stints extended to 15 months from 12 -- to 18 months.

Either move would likely draw a huge backlash from lawmakers, particularly with the 2008 presidential elections drawing closer.

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com and Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com