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Bush to Outline Broad Iraq Plan
| quote: | Bush to Outline Broad Iraq Plan; Push on Training
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: November 30, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - President Bush on Wednesday will put forward for the first time a public version of what the White House calls a comprehensive strategy for victory in Iraq.
In a related effort to begin extricating American forces next year, military officials said Tuesday that they would seek billions of additional dollars to better train Iraqis to defend the country.
The military officials in Iraq said they had requested $3.9 billion for next year to help train and equip Iraqi troops, build new police stations and outfit Iraqi soldiers with new uniforms.
That amount would be part of a larger spending request to Congress for the overall war effort and is on top of the $10.6 billion that lawmakers have already approved to rebuild Iraq's security forces.
Mr. Bush continued to emphasize that American forces cannot withdraw before their job is done.
"I want our troops to come home, but I don't want them to come home without having achieved victory," he said in brief comments to reporters in El Paso during a visit to the Mexican border. "And we've got a strategy for victory." The president was describing a speech he plans to give Wednesday at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, too, emphasized the imperative for Iraqis to gain control of their country, echoing the thought that instead of "an exit strategy, we should be focused on our strategy for victory."
The catchphrase will reappear Wednesday morning in a document elaborating on Mr. Bush's speech, titled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."
Taken together, the activities amount to a carefully calibrated effort to answer critics, including Democratic leaders in Congress who have argued that Mr. Bush has no plausible plan for bringing home the nearly 160,000 troops engaged in a war against the insurgency.
As Mr. Bush returned from Asia last week and flew home to the debate in Congress over the American presence, administration officials have begun to acknowledge that the levels of forces and spending may be politically unsustainable.
The White House said that the strategy to be outlined Wednesday was not new, but that it had never been assembled into a single unclassified document. As the 27-page booklet was described by administration officials, much of it sounded like a list of goals for Iraq's military, political and economic development rather than new prescriptions on how to accomplish the job.
The Pentagon now spends $6 billion a month to sustain the American military presence in Iraq. A senior administration official said Mr. Bush's ultimate goal, to which he assigned no schedule, is to move to a "smaller, more lethal" American force that "can be just as successful."
It is unclear how much of that vision Mr. Bush will explicitly describe Wednesday, in the first of four speeches about the Iraqi transition that he plans to give before the election of a long-term Iraqi government on Dec. 15.
Aides said Mr. Bush would argue that although he is determined to stay his course and that to withdraw precipitously would invite disaster, American tactics have already been refashioned to confront the insurgency more effectively. Since landmark elections this year, the attacks have continued to inflict death and injury on Iraqis and Americans alike.
"He is going to talk about victory in Iraq in the short term, the medium term and the long term," said an official familiar with the speech, which was redrafted on Tuesday.
The president will describe the short-term objective as "defeating terrorists, building institutions, meeting political milestones and standing up security forces," the official said.
Without claiming that the victory he seeks is already at hand, the president will argue that Iraq is already moving into a new phase, providing its own security and establishing a permanent government.
"The long-term vision is a peaceful, democratic, united nation that is well integrated and a full partner in the war on terror," the official said.
Despite the new emphasis, Pentagon officials and senior commanders in Iraq no longer talk in terms of outright military victory in the sense of eliminating all resistance. Rather they discuss what Mr. Rumsfeld said at the Pentagon on Tuesday was a "coalition strategy to help the Iraqi people increasingly take control of their country."
He responded sharply to suggestions that United States troops alone would carry out a military strategy to "clear, hold and build" in towns and other territory formerly controlled by insurgents. The phrase has been adopted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Mr. Bush is expected to repeat it on Wednesday.
"Anyone who takes those three words and thinks it means the United States should clear and the United States should hold and the United States should build doesn't understand the situation," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters. "It is Iraq's country, 28 million of them. They are perfectly capable of running that country. They're not going to run it the way you would or I would or the way we do here in this country, but they're going to run it.
"Our problem is that any time something needs to be done, we have a feeling we should rush in and fill the vacuum and do it ourselves. You know what happens when you do that? First of all, you can't do it, because it's not our country. It's their country. And the second thing that happens is they don't develop the skills and the ability and the equipment and the orientation and the habit patterns of doing it for themselves. They have to do it for themselves."
Mr. Bush is expected to define his other goals in a concise triptych, as well. One is for the reconstruction, which is badly behind schedule and short of money, to be an effort to "restore, reform and build." The political effort, he is expected to declare, is an effort to "isolate terrorists, engage and build institutions."
"This clearly is not the level of specificity some people are going to want to see in a plan," another administration official said. "But it is a lot more than has been said before."
Another official said the publication of the strategy paper had been under way for more than a month and involved declassifying parts of a larger strategy that the White House and the Pentagon had used for some time.
In advance of Mr. Bush's speech, Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sought Tuesday to outline the progress that the Iraqi security forces had made in the last year. They said that the Iraqis had taken control of 29 of 110 military bases held by the Americans and had more than doubled the number of trained and equipped troops, to 212,000 soldiers and police commandos.
The Pentagon continues to rate about a third of those forces as able to take the lead in combat operations, with some American support, and several hundred Iraqi troops as capable of operating fully independently of American troops.
Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who was in the 82nd Airborne Division, told reporters on Tuesday by telephone that the Iraqi security forces still suffered from largely untested leaders, unproven loyalty to the government and fledgling ministries that were struggling to build the institutional support to sustain the troops in the field.
"Without an effective ministry that can keep track of soldiers and police, pay those soldiers and police, apply those soldiers and police and essentially provide the foundation, then you're going to have some tactically trained units, but they're not going to be a coherent or effective force," said Mr. Reed.
Echoing the complaints of many American commanders in Iraq who say the administration has relied too heavily on the military to restore security and stability in Iraq, Mr. Reed said Mr. Bush have to offer a more comprehensive approach.
"The president has to lay out in his speech how we're doing on the other aspects of progress, not just security forces, but creating a stable political structure and a stable environment, stable economy," he said.
Some of Mr. Bush's former and current advisers on Iraq say the president is entering new territory, perhaps even redefining what would constitute victory in Iraq.
"People have assumed that when he says 'stay the course' that means the tactics don't change," a senior aide said. "That's not the case. If you are suggesting that we have not had a dynamic, adaptive approach, you're wrong."
Mr. Bush will be careful not to describe what Mr. Rumsfeld called "metrics" of progress. Instead, the president will talk about the progress made in the past year by relying more on Iraqi troops.
"One of the points we are trying to convey is that you can't measure success by the number of boots on the ground," the official said. "We can probably work more effectively with a smaller footprint."
Senator Reed warned that reducing troop strength carried considerable risks. "To assume that our departure would stop the violence, I think, assumes too much, because there are still huge tensions within the country between sectarian groups," he said. "There will be a struggle for power. And that struggle might be even exacerbated if we were to pull out too quickly." |
Some kind of plan! Wohooo, that's great! Only took him how long? Two and half years? This guy is a genious!
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