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thedrifter
09-03-07, 07:14 AM
Sep 3, 7:55 AM EDT
Bush Makes Surprise Visit to Iraq

By DEB RIECHMANN
Associated Press Writer

AL-ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq (AP) -- President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday, using the war zone as a backdrop to argue his case that the buildup of U.S. troops is helping stabilizing the nation.

The president secretly flew 11 hours to Iraq as a showdown nears with Congress over whether his decision in January to order 30,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq is working. He landed at an air base in Anbar province west of Baghdad.

Next week, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, testify before Congress. Their assessment of the conflict, along with a progress report the White House must give lawmakers by Sept. 15, will determine the next chapter of the war.

The United States cannot sustain the troop buildup indefinitely. And with Democrats calling for withdrawals and a rising U.S. death toll that has topped 3,700, the president is hardpressed to give Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's much more time to find a political solution to the fighting.

Bush stopped in Iraq ahead of his visit to Australia for an economic summit with Asia-Pacific leaders. The trip was a closely held secret for obvious security reasons, although speculation about the trip arose late last month when first lady Laura Bush said she was staying home to tend to a pinched nerve in her neck.

The president, who also went to Iraq at Thanksgiving 2003 and in June 2006, was scheduled to leave for Australia on Monday, but Air Force One took off from Andrews Air Force Base Sunday evening instead.

He was joined by his top advisers, including National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was traveling there separately. The mission to shore up support for the war was shared with only a small circle of White House staffers and members of the media, who were told that if news of his trip leaked early, it would be scrapped.

The White House arranged Bush's trip at a pivotal juncture in the Iraq debate. Some prominent Republican lawmakers have broken with Bush on his war strategy, but so far, most Republicans have stood with Bush. In exchange for their loyalty, they want to see substantial progress in Iraq soon.

Making his case before the Sept. 15 report deadline, Bush recently delivered a series of speeches to highlight how the temporary military buildup has routed out insurgents and foreign fighters.

Bush has described what he calls "bottom-up" progress in Iraq and often cites a drop in violence in Anbar Province, once a hotbed of insurgency. The turnaround occurred when Sunni Arab leaders joined forces with U.S. troops to hunt down members of al-Qaida, although it's unclear whether they'll back a unified Iraqi government as well.

Critics of the war argue that while the troop buildup may have tamped down violence, the Iraqis are making almost no headway toward political reconciliation. They cite a handful of gloomy progress reports trickling out of Washington that show some success in curbing violence, but little progress toward political power-sharing agreements.

There are now 162,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, including 30,000 that arrived since February as part of Bush's revised strategy to provide security so Iraqi leaders could build a unity government.

Bush met on Friday with his top military chiefs at the Pentagon who expressed concern about a growing strain on American troops and their families from long and often multiple combat tours.

Still, early indications are that the president intends to stick with his current approach - at least into 2008 - despite pressure from the Democratic-led Congress and some prominent Republicans. Right now, the White House is working to keep Republican members of Congress in the president's fold to prevent Democrats from amassing the strength to slash war funds or mandate immediate troop withdrawals.

Ellie

thedrifter
09-03-07, 03:34 PM
AP ANALYSIS: Bush-Anbar is a success

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
12 minutes ago

By assembling his war advisers and Iraq's political leaders far from Baghdad on Monday, President Bush symbolically underscored U.S. impatience with the central government's political paralysis.

And he highlighted his hope that progress at the local level — most notably here in Anbar province where the insurgency once held sway — can provide the spark for political reconciliation at the national level.

Bush flew to this remote desert air base and met with top politicians from Baghdad as well as leading Sunni Arab sheiks who have led a local movement opposing al-Qaida in Iraq. He was joined by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other key advisers, including the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and Gen. David Petraeus, the top American commander in the country.

The setting was the message: Bringing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, to the heart of the overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province was intended to show the administration's war critics that the beleaguered Iraqi leader is capable of reaching out to Sunnis, who ran the country for three decades under Saddam Hussein.

"In Anbar you're seeing firsthand the dramatic differences that can come when the Iraqis are more secure," Bush told U.S. troops, a friendly sea of soldiers and Marines dressed in camouflage uniforms. "You see Sunnis who once fought side by side with al-Qaida against coalition troops now fighting side by side with coalition troops against al-Qaida."

Anbar, a desert province that starts at the western gates of Baghdad, "was once written off as lost. It is now one of the safest places in Iraq," the president said to loud cheers.

That assertion is part of Bush's push to sell Anbar as a success story and to hold it up to his congressional critics as a reason why the troop buildup should not be cut short.

In truth, the progress in Anbar was initiated by the Iraqis themselves, a point Gates himself made, saying the Sunni tribes decided to fight and retake control from al-Qaida many months before Bush decided to send an extra 4,000 Marines to Anbar as part of his troop buildup.

"We have seen the fruit of that effort become more apparent in the last few months," Gates said. In their meeting with Bush here, the local Sunni sheiks were explicit, however, he added, "that it was the presence of the additional U.S. forces — the Marines that came in — that helped cement the gains they felt they had made but were at risk."

Amid growing war fatigue in the United States, time is running short for Bush to show that his revised strategy for stabilizing Iraq, announced last January, is making progress that can be translated into sustainable security and some tangible steps toward reconciling the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Iraqi leaders in Baghdad have fallen far short of the security and political progress that many in Congress are demanding as justification to continue a U.S. combat effort that now involves 160,000 troops and already had taken more than 3,730 U.S. lives.

In an Iraq assessment released last month, the major U.S. intelligence agencies said "bottom-up" security initiatives, like those occurring in Anbar, represent the best prospect for security improvements over the next six to 12 months.

But the intelligence assessment also said these moves will translate into widespread political accommodation and enduring stability only if Baghdad's central government accepts and supports them.

That was a main motivation for bringing al-Maliki to Monday's meeting at Al-Asad Air Base, which is the primary U.S. military base in Anbar province.

"Such initiatives, if not fully exploited by the Iraqi government, could over time also shift greater power to the regions, undermine efforts to impose central authority, and reinvigorate armed opposition to the Baghdad government," the intelligence assessment said.

The worry for al-Maliki and his Shiite supporters is that localized movements in which former Sunni insurgent groups are teaming up with U.S. forces against Sunni extremists could later target Shiite dominance.

Gates, normally taciturn, said this visit to Anbar left him with great hope because he felt there was a "sense of shared purpose" displayed at Bush's meeting with the local sheiks from Anbar and Iraqi national leaders. Although, he added, there was "good-natured jousting" among them about the national government's sharing of resources with Anbar.

"I am more optimistic than I have been at any time since I took this job," said Gates, a former CIA chief who in December replaced Donald H. Rumsfeld, who resigned under fire.

Still, Gates said, it will take the administration several months to assess whether security improvements across the country are sufficient to enable Bush to start withdrawing troops.

It's far from clear, however, that Anbar will prove to be a model for other parts of Iraq — mostly because Sunnis dominate and tribes are strong and there's less of a sectarian factor.

Administration officials are fond of recalling that one year ago the Marine Corps intelligence chief in Anbar concluded that, in essence, the region was a lost cause in the absence of real support by the central government. At the time administration officials downplayed that assessment by Col. Pete Devlin, but now they cite it as a measure of how far Anbar has come in reducing violence and creating hope.

The provincial capital of Ramadi was, as recently as last year, a main stronghold of the insurgency. Today it is relatively peaceful but in need of reconstruction aid and economic revitalization.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Robert Burns has been covering military and national security affairs for The Associated Press since 1990.

Ellie

thedrifter
09-04-07, 07:24 AM
Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible
By DAVID S. CLOUD and STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times

AL ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq, Sept. 3 - President Bush made a surprise eight-hour visit to Iraq on Monday, emphasizing security gains, sectarian reconciliation and the possibility of a troop withdrawal, thus embracing and pre-empting this month's crucial Congressional hearings on his Iraq strategy.

His visit, with his commanders and senior Iraqi officials, had a clear political goal: to try to head off opponents' pressure for a withdrawal by hailing what he called recent successes in Iraq and by contending that only making Iraq stable would allow American forces to pull back.

Mr. Bush's visit to Iraq - his third - was spent at this remote desert base in the restive Sunni province of Anbar, where he had summoned Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and others to demonstrate that reconciliation among Iraq's warring sectarian factions was at least conceivable, if not yet a fact.

After talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said that they "tell me that if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces."

Mr. Bush did not say how large a troop withdrawal was possible. Nor did he say whether he envisioned any forces being withdrawn sooner than next spring, when the first of the additional 30,000 troops Mr. Bush sent to Iraq this year are scheduled to come home anyway.

Still, his remarks were the clearest indication yet that a reduction would begin sometime in the months ahead, answering the growing opposition in Washington to an unpopular war while at the same time trying to argue that any change in strategy was not a failure.

"Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground - not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media," Mr. Bush told a gathering of American troops, who responded with a rousing cheer. "In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home."

To ensure security, the White House shrouded Mr. Bush's visit in secrecy, issuing a misleading schedule that said he would leave the White House on Monday and Air Force One would refuel in Hawaii. Instead, the president left the White House on Sunday night, traveled to Andrews Air Force Base without the usual motorcade and after an overnight flight arrived in Iraq on a sweltering summer afternoon when temperatures reached 110 degrees.

Mr. Bush flew with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, an extraordinary gathering of top leaders in a war zone. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Iraq separately and joined them.

The Anbar region is a Sunni stronghold where in recent months there have been significant improvements in security. Administration officials have been touting the gains as evidence that the increase in American troops has proved a success - a word Mr. Bush used eight times in his public remarks on Monday.

Mr. Hadley, briefing reporters, recalled a military intelligence officer's dire warning a year ago that Al Qaeda controlled the provincial capital, Ramadi, and other towns in the region. "Anbar Province is lost," he quoted the analyst as saying then. Mr. Hadley was apparently referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign led. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden's network is not clear.

On Monday, after meeting with some of the local Sunni leaders who only months ago led the struggle against the American presence in the region, Mr. Bush held up Anbar as a model of the progress that was possible.

"When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like," he said, night having fallen at the base.

During his visit, Mr. Bush did not leave the base, a heavily fortified home to about 10,000 American troops about 120 miles west of Baghdad. Mr. Hadley said planning for the trip had started five or six weeks ago.

Administration officials rejected the notion that the trip was a publicity stunt. They said Mr. Bush wanted to meet face-to-face with General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker, who are to testify before Congress about progress in Iraq next week, and with Iraqi leaders he has been pressing from afar to take steps toward political reconciliation.

By summoning Mr. Maliki and other top officials to the Sunni heartland, a region the Shiite prime minister has rarely visited, Mr. Bush succeeded in forcing a public display of unity. Meeting with the Iraqi leaders in a buff-colored one-story building near the runway, Mr. Bush effusively greeted President Jalal Talabani, the last of the five officials to enter the small conference room. "Mr. President, Mr. President, the president of the whole Iraq," Mr. Bush said, kissing Mr. Talabani three times on the cheeks.

The other Iraqi officials there were Vice President Adel Abdul-Mehdi, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region.

"The government they represent, of course, is based in Baghdad," Mr. Bush said, appearing with Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates in front of two parked Humvees at the base, "but they're here because they know the success of a free Iraq depends on the national government's support from the bottom up."

Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who was visiting neighboring Iran when Mr. Bush and the other top administration officials arrived, was conspicuously absent. Mr. Zebari, a Kurd, said he had been aware that high-level visitors from the United States were coming but that his trip to Iran had been planned long in advance and that the timing was strictly a coincidence.

In Washington, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said the president's visit and his assertions about progress would do little to persuade skeptics. "Despite this massive P.R. operation, the American people are still demanding a new strategy," the spokesman, Jim Manley, said in a telephone interview.

Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the reversal in Anbar had less do with American strategy than with local frustration over the extremism of Al Qaeda fighters trying to impose their doctrine. Mr. Cordesman suggested it was more of an anomaly than a model that could be applied elsewhere in Iraq, where sectarian divisions and strife appear to be worsening.

"We are spinning events that don't really reflect the reality on the ground," he said.

While some administration officials have recently described the Sunni shift in Anbar as serendipitous, they portrayed the improvements as an outgrowth, at least in part, of the decision to send nearly 4,000 additional marines to the province as part of the White House strategy to increase troops. "This is not serendipity," Mr. Hadley told reporters.

Distrust remains deep between Sunnis in Anbar and the Maliki government - and it is clear that Mr. Maliki sees effort by the American military to organize armed groups of Sunnis to assist American troops as a policy that amounts to assisting his enemies. Nor is it clear that the same model can be made to work in areas of Iraq where Sunnis and Shiites live together.

Sunnis, for their part, complain that the Maliki government has long failed to deliver services and to share oil revenue with Anbar. Describing the meeting Monday between the tribal sheiks and Iraqi officials from Baghdad, Mr. Gates said, "There was a sense of shared purpose among them and some good-natured jousting over resources."

It remained unclear whether Mr. Bush planned to announce any specific troop withdrawals when he delivers the congressionally mandated report later this month.

Several administration officials say Mr. Bush and his commanders and military advisers have neared a consensus on beginning a reduction in American forces. Speaking to reporters traveling with him, Mr. Gates said Monday that he had formulated his opinion, though he declined to disclose it.

Asked about Mr. Bush's comments on possible troop reductions, Mr. Gates added, "Clearly that is one of the central issues that everyone has been examining - what is the security situation, what do we expect the security situation to be in the months ahead?" He went on to say, "What opportunities does that provide in terms of maintaining the security situation while perhaps beginning to bring the troop level down?"

As he did in Washington late last week, Mr. Bush urged lawmakers to withhold judgment on the situation in Iraq until hearing first-hand reports next week from General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker. At the same time, though, he has used the White House's considerable platform to assert his own views.

"The strategy we put into place earlier this year was designed to help the Iraqis improve their security so that political and economic progress could follow," Mr. Bush said after meeting with Mr. Maliki and the other Iraqi leaders. "And that is exactly the effect it is having in places like Anbar."

Ellie