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thedrifter
12-01-05, 10:43 AM
December 1, 2005
Baghdad Memo
For Once, President and His Generals See the Same War
By JOHN F. BURNS and DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 30 - For anyone who has spent time in the field with American officers here, President Bush's speech on Wednesday was a watershed: for the first time in the two years since the conflict here turned brutal, the war Mr. Bush described sounded much like the one his generals grapple with every day.

The president acknowledged problems that have hobbled the American enterprise since the 2003 invasion: An American effort to build up Iraqi forces that went through a top-to-bottom makeover after early deployments of Iraqi troops saw them "running from the fight." Iraqi units that are "still uneven," despite the new American effort to train and equip them that has cost more than $10 billion. A Sunni Arab community that remains largely unyielding, despite months of efforts by Americans seeking to draw them back into the corridors of power.

Mr. Bush closed with a vow to "settle for nothing less than complete victory," without saying how that squared with the plan to hand over the main burden of the war to the newly trained Iraqi troops who, American field commanders say, have done well in some recent battles but much less impressively in others. Nor did the president say how his rejection of "artificial timetables" would be sustained politically if the plan for American troops to step back decisively in 2006, and for Iraqi units to step forward, falters in the face of the unrelenting insurgency.

But for all that, Mr. Bush, in some passages of his speech, came much closer than he has before to matching the hard-nosed assessments of the war that have long been made by American commanders here, at least among themselves. While maintaining a stoic confidence in public, many of these commanders, over the past 18 months, have pressed behind the scenes for the Pentagon to move toward a more realistic appraisal of the war than has been common among major administration figures in Washington.

These generals contend the war is winnable, though they do not says so with the tone of certainty that Mr. Bush mustered Wednesday at Annapolis. But they recognize, privately, that for winning to be an achievable goal within the time frame that American politics is likely to allow, things that have rarely gone America's way so far will have to improve steadily over the next 6 to 12 months.

The war strategy that Mr. Bush outlined is one that the current group of top generals here developed in the wake of crisis in the spring of 2004. At that time, the abrupt halting of a Marine offensive in Falluja, ordered by Washington after heavy Iraqi civilian casualties, left the city in the control of Islamic militants who promptly began an orgy of kidnapping and beheading. The failure in Falluja, just 25 miles west of Baghdad, became a hallmark of what many saw as the muddled American handling of the war.

Shortly after formal Iraqi sovereignty was restored in June last year, a new American commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., joined with a new American ambassador, John D. Negroponte, to order a complete review of the way the Iraq war was being fought.

At that point, officers involved in the review have acknowledged, the war on the ground, with insurgents running rampant in Falluja and elsewhere, bore little relationship to what one senior commander called the "illusionist" version put out by the American occupation authority, or by Mr. Bush and other top officials in Washington.

Now, American commanders say they believe they have a strategy that can win the war, if anything can. They have concentrated American forces for a series of offensives aimed at regaining control of strategic cities like Falluja - recaptured from the insurgents in a bloody offensive last November - and denying insurgent infiltrators safe havens in towns along the Syrian border. In Baghdad and other major cities, they have mounted a relentless campaign to track down, kill and capture Islamic militants whose bombing campaigns were killing as many as 600 Iraqis a month - and making headlines in the United States that eroded public support for the war.

Most important, the American commanders have poured resources into building up the Iraqi forces, with results Mr. Bush laid out Wednesday. From the single Iraqi battalion trained in the summer of 2004, there are nearly 120 army and police combat battalions deployed now. All major American-led offensives involve Iraqi troops, and more than 20 American bases, including Saddam Hussein's 1,000-acre palace complex in Tikrit, have been handed back to the Iraqis. The process of withdrawing American troops from the cities to more remote bases where they are less visible to Iraqis, but still available for rapid deployment when needed, has begun.

American generals have been telling field commanders to hasten the process of transferring the main burden of the war to Iraqi troops by withholding American firepower, forcing Iraqi commanders to get accustomed to the idea that they will ultimately have to win the war. "It's our nature as Americans to tell others to step aside, let us do the job," one of the most senior American generals told brigade-level officers of the 101st Airborne Division earlier this month at a camp near Bayji, a strategic city 150 miles north of Baghdad. "We need a conscious effort here to do less, so the Iraqis do more."

Encoded in this formula is something Mr. Bush did not say: that turning the war over to the Iraqis carries large risks.

The scope of the problem was evident on Wednesday at the border town of Husayba, where General Casey joined Iraq's defense minister, Saadoun al-Dulaimi, for a ceremony that handed responsibility for controlling 350 miles of Iraq's border with Syria to a force of 700 Iraqi border police officers. They will staff a string of 30 forts, each about 10 miles apart, in the effort to halt insurgent infiltrators. Troops of the Second Marine Division will remain in the area until May, bolstering the border patrols, before they rotate back to the United States.

Mr. Dulaimi described the handover as hastening the day when American troops can withdraw from Iraq. But the Marine officer who has led the Iraqi border units' training, Col. Mike Pannell, told reporters at the ceremony that the Iraqis, while "very aggressive," still had much to do to reach American standards.

In its tentativeness, his estimate of the Iraqis' success could stand for the wider goal of handing the war over to the Iraqis.

"If they keep progressing as they have, they should be able to operate independently by the time we leave," he said.

Ellie