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thedrifter
10-11-05, 06:54 PM
October 17, 2005
U.S. has overstayed its welcome in Iraq, report says
By Vince Crawley
Times staff writer

The Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank, says the United States should withdraw troops from Iraq in 2006 and 2007, then get back to focusing on the long-term war against terrorists.

The center — run by John Podesta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton — issued a report Oct. 1 that said the United States has overstayed its welcome in Iraq and a continued U.S. presence there only fuels extreme anti-Americanism.

“There are a lot of people in Iraq who joined the insurgents because they don’t believe we’re going to leave,” Lawrence Korb, co-author of the report, told reporters Oct. 1.

Korb, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, has long advocated reductions in long-term overseas operations. In 2000, he recommended large-scale cuts in U.S. forces in Europe and lesser reductions in Asia, views the Bush administration reached independently several years later.

Korb acknowledged that U.S. commanders in Iraq are concerned that a withdrawal timetable could allow insurgents to “wait out” an American departure. But he said an open-ended commitment is worse and a strict deadline could force Iraqi authorities to more quickly handle their own security.

He said a withdrawal plan would undermine one of the insurgency’s most compelling goals — to prevent a long-term U.S. presence from taking hold.

The center offered the report as an alternative to the Bush administration’s long-held Iraq strategy of “staying the course.”

In mid-September, retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, a former chief of U.S. Central Command, also suggested a U.S. troop reduction next year. He made that suggestion at a media round table sponsored by the Center for American Progress.

“This was the wrong war at the wrong time, fought with incredible incompetence on the part of the civilian leadership,” Hoar told reporters Sept. 13.

The mission, Hoar said, has devolved into killing growing numbers of Iraqi insurgents. “You cannot win this war by killing Iraqis,” he said.

Instead, U.S. forces must scale back and focus on training local Iraqi forces while keeping enough advisers and support personnel in the country to assure the Iraqi government that the United States remains committed to Iraq’s future.

“We could reasonably expect to draw down sometime next year if you have Iraqis [who] can handle areas in the Kurdish [north] and in the south,” Hoar said.

In his Oct. 1 report, Korb put a more definitive timetable on recommended U.S. force cuts. He also advocated a near-total U.S. military withdrawal by the end of 2007.

Report recommends drawdown

Calling the proposal a “strategic redeployment,” Korb said the plan offers a middle ground between “staying the course” and a “cut-and-run” idea the White House has strongly criticized.

Korb recommended keeping full strength in Iraq through the December national elections. Early in 2006, according to the report, the United States “should begin a slow and irreversible drawdown of military forces to make us safer by preserving our all-volunteer Army and refocusing all elements of American power on the real threats our country faces.”

The report recommended two phases of force reductions. About 80,000 American troops would depart Iraq by December 2006, leaving 60,000 still in country. The second phase would withdraw most of those 60,000 by the end of 2007. Afterward, the report recommended that the only U.S. military presence be embassy guards, “a small group of military advisers to the Iraqi government” and counterterrorist units that work closely with Iraqi forces. The 80,000 troops withdrawn in 2006 should be dedicated to other vital missions, Korb said.

Ellie