Contradictory messages underline US dilemma on Iraq pullout

by Yang Qingchuan, WASHINGTON (Xinhua) The US government has sent out seemingly conflicting messages in less than one month over the duration of its military presence in Iraq, underlining its dilemma on the issue of US troops' withdrawal.

On July 27, George Casey, commander of the US forces in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad that there could be "fairly substantial reductions" in the number of US troops in Iraq in 2006, and since then the US media have been abuzz with the issue.

However, after meeting with his national security team early this month, US President George W. Bush dismissed the pull out talk as "speculation and rumor" and warned against "withdrawing before the mission is completed." He was echoed by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers, who told the media that there is no set time table for pull out and the decision is based on Iraq's security situation. Furthermore, US Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker said last Saturday that the current troop level in Iraq may be kept for another four years in preparations for the worst-case scenario.

These messages, though contradictory on the surface, reflect the de facto dilemma which the Bush administration is faced with in finding out an exit from Iraq under amounting pressure from many sides, local analysts said.

Although the Bush administration has carefully avoided mentioning the exit timetable, it is under growing pressure to make a clear statement on the issue. First of all, the ever-rising US casualties in Iraq are fanning up public antipathy to the war and increasing doubts about Bush's ability to handle it.

In Iraq, US troops are attacked at least 70 times every day and more than 40 have been killed so far this month. There have been 1,864 deaths and thousands of injuries among the Americans since the war began in 2003 and the figure will surely grow further amid prevalent insurgency.

More and more Americans now believe that the price is too high to bear. Just 38 percent of Americans in a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll approved Bush's handling of the war, the lowest point ever in that survey. In another poll conducted by The USA Today, CNN and Gallup, more than half of the interviewees said it is a mistake to send US troops to Iraq while 56 per cent support an immediate withdrawal. As next year's congressional mid-term elections draw near, Bush has to consider the weight of public opinion.

Second, from a pure military point of view, the US armed forces have already been overstretched by the war and the morale is very low. If the US Army has to do another rotation in the fall of 2006 to keep the current force level in Iraq, it will "go off a cliff," Barry McCaffrey, a retired US general, told a congressional committee last month.

After a week-long visit to Iraq in early June, the general said the strain of the war is pushing the US forces toward a "meltdown." His assessment was supported by a US Army mental health report, which said 54 percent of the US soldiers in Iraq rated their unit's morale as "low" or "very low," and the major reason is their prolonged stay.

Meanwhile, the harsh reality in Iraq and long-term US strategic interests in the region could hardly allow a massive pull out. Rumsfeld has repeatedly said he wishes the newly-founded Iraqi forces could take over security responsibility from US troops as soon as possible, but the Iraqi troops are in no position to replace US soldiers to fight the insurgency.

According to US military reports, among the 145,000 "combat-capable" members of the Iraqi security forces, 50,000 exist only on paper with their pay being pocketed by their officers. Meanwhile, 55,000 others refuse to fight anti-occupation militants and only 14,000 are fully trained, but are believed to be infiltrated by the militants.

As US Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Peter Pace concluded, only a very small number of Iraqi troops can fight militants without "US assistance." More importantly, it is unlikely that the US military will give up its strategic plan for Iraq, despite all the pullout talks.

According to US media reports, an internal report of the Pentagon calls for building large, small-city-sized bases in Iraq, which will accommodate large numbers of US troops and provide a platform for mounting future campaigns in the region.

In a letter published in The New York Times on July 30, a reader from California argued that the US government has "no real withdrawal plan," saying his brother-in-law, a US soldier in Iraq, witnessed the enlargement of US bases in that country.

To sum up, local analysts said the US dilemma on the exit issue reflects the uncertain nature of the "mission in Iraq" and Bush's ambiguous definition of "victory" of the war. Peter Paker, a writer for The Washington Post, recently said there is an evident gap between the clarity of Bush's vow to "stay not one day longer than needed" and the muddled reality that no one can say exactly when the exit time will come.

Retired US General McCaffrey described the situation in Iraq as "a race against time," because the US government cannot arrange a real pull out before the security situation there is stabilized. However, that is something beyond the control of the Bush administration.