The New York Times - Iraq Study Group to Recommend Troop Pullback

The New York Times

 

 Iraq Study Group to Recommend Troop Pullback
Panel Will Not Call for Setting a Firm Timetable for Withdrawal of 
Combat Forces

By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID S. CLOUD, The New York Times

WASHINGTON (Nov. 30) - The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a 
consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual 
pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop 
short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to 
people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.

The report, unanimously approved by the 10-member panel, led by James 
A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, is to be delivered to President 
Bush next week. It is a compromise between distinct paths that the 
group has debated since March, avoiding a specific timetable, which 
has been opposed by Mr. Bush, but making it clear that the American 
troop commitment should not be open-ended. The recommendations of the 
group, formed at the request of members of Congress, are nonbinding.

A person who participated in the commission’s debate said that unless 
the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki believed that 
Mr. Bush was under pressure to pull back troops in the near future, 
“there will be zero sense of urgency to reach the political 
settlement that needs to be reached.”

The report recommends that Mr. Bush make it clear that he intends to 
start the withdrawal relatively soon, and people familiar with the 
debate over the final language said the implicit message was that the 
process should begin sometime next year.

The report leaves unstated whether the 15 combat brigades that are 
the bulk of American fighting forces in Iraq would be brought home, 
or simply pulled back to bases in Iraq or in neighboring countries. 
(A brigade typically consists of 3,000 to 5,000 troops.) From those 
bases, they would still be responsible for protecting a substantial 
number of American troops who would remain in Iraq, including 70,000 
or more American trainers, logistics experts and members of a rapid 
reaction force.

As the commission wound up two and a half days of deliberation in 
Washington, the group said in a public statement only that a 
consensus had been reached and that the report would be delivered on 
Dec. 6 to President Bush, Congress and the American public. Members 
of the commission were warned by Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton not to 
discuss the contents of the report.

But four people involved in the debate, representing different points 
of view, agreed to outline its conclusions in broad terms to address 
what they said might otherwise be misperceptions about the findings. 
Some said their major concern was that the report might be too late.

“I think we’ve played a constructive role,” one person involved in 
the committee’s deliberations said, “but from the beginning, we’ve 
worried that this entire agenda could be swept away by events.”

Even as word of the study group’s conclusions began to leak out, Gen. 
Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said two or three 
battalions of American troops were being sent to Baghdad from 
elsewhere in Iraq to assist in shoring up security in the capital. 
Another Pentagon official said the additional troops for Baghdad 
would be drawn from an American brigade now in Mosul that was 
equipped with fast-moving, armored Stryker vehicles.

As described by the people involved in the deliberations, the bulk of 
the report by the Baker-Hamilton group focused on a recommendation 
that the United States devise a far more aggressive diplomatic 
initiative in the Middle East than Mr. Bush has been willing to try 
so far, including direct engagement with Iran and Syria. Initially, 
those contacts might take place as part of a regional conference on 
Iraq or broader Middle East peace issues like the Israeli-Palestinian 
situation, but they would ultimately involve direct, high-level talks 
with Tehran and Damascus.

Mr. Bush has rejected such contacts until now, and he has also 
rejected withdrawal, declaring in Riga, Latvia, on Tuesday that while 
he will show flexibility, “there’s one thing I’m not going to do: I’m 
not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission 
is complete.”

Commission members have said in recent days that they had to navigate 
around such declarations, or, as one said, “We had to move the 
national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start 
down the path out.”

Their report, as described by those familiar with the compromise, may 
give Republicans political cover to back away from parts of the 
president’s current strategy, even if Democrats claim that the report 
is short on specific deadlines.

While the White House reviews its strategy options, Pentagon planners 
are also looking beyond the immediate reinforcements for Baghdad to 
the question of whether they will need to draw more heavily on 
reserve units to meet troop requirements in the Iraqi capital, 
military officials said. In particular, the Army is considering 
sending about 3,000 combat engineers from reserve units to Baghdad.

The proposal would not increase the overall number of troops in 
Baghdad, but it is controversial because it would require sending 
units that had already been deployed to Iraq in recent years, a step 
National Guard officials have been trying to avoid.

The move has not been approved by the Bush administration, but the 
decision could be made in the coming weeks, and the first of the 
additional troops may begin arriving in Iraq by next spring, 
officials said.

American military officials said that the forces in Iraq that were 
being shifted to Baghdad were to take the place of the 172nd Stryker 
Brigade, which is returning to its base in Alaska, and that there 
would be no increase in American forces in the Iraqi capital. In 
fact, one officer said there might be a brief decrease until the 
adjustments were completed.

As the Iraq Study Group finished its meetings in Washington, it heard 
final testimony from Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Democrat 
who has urged a specific timeline for withdrawal, and Senator John 
McCain of Arizona, who has called for a significant bolstering of 
troops to gain control of the Iraqi capital. Two former secretaries 
of state, Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, also spoke to the 
group as it debated its final conclusions.

Although the diplomatic strategy takes up the majority of report, it 
was the military recommendations that prompted the most debate, 
people familiar with the deliberations said. They said a draft report 
put together under the direction of Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton had 
collided with another, circulated by other Democrats on the 
commission, that included an explicit timeline calling for withdrawal 
of the combat brigades to be completed by the end of next year. In 
the end, the two proposals were blended.

If President Bush adopts the recommendations, far more American 
training teams would be embedded with Iraqi forces, a last-ditch 
effort to make the Iraqi Army more capable of fighting alone. That is 
a step already embraced in a memorandum that Stephen J. Hadley, the 
national security adviser, wrote to President Bush this month.

“I think everyone felt good about where we ended up,” one person 
involved in the commission’s debates said after the group ended its 
meeting. “It is neither ‘cut and run’ nor ‘stay the course.’ ”

“Those who favor immediate withdrawal will not like it,” the 
commission member said, but it also “deviates significantly from the 
president’s strategy.”

Throughout the debates, Mr. Baker, who served as secretary of state 
under Mr. Bush’s father and was the central figure in developing the 
strategy to win the 2000 Florida recount for Mr. Bush, was highly 
reluctant to allow a timetable for withdrawal to be included in the 
report, participants said.

Mr. Baker cited what Mr. Bush had also called a danger: that any firm 
deadline would be an invitation to insurgents and sectarian groups to 
bide their time until the last American troops were withdrawn, then 
seek to overthrow the government. But Democrats on the commission 
also suspected that Mr. Baker was reluctant to embarrass the 
president by embracing a strategy Mr. Bush had repeatedly rejected.

Committee members struggled with ways, short of a deadline, to signal 
to the Iraqis that Washington would not prop up the government with 
military forces endlessly, and that if sectarian warfare continued in 
Iraq the pressure to withdraw American forces would become 
overwhelming. What they ended up with appears to be a classic 
Washington compromise: a report that sets no explicit timetable but, 
between the lines, appears to have one built in.

As one senior American military officer involved in Iraq strategy 
said, “The question is whether it doesn’t look like a timeline to 
Bush, and does to Maliki.”

In addition to Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, the 
group included two Democrats who are veterans of the Clinton 
administration, Leon E. Panetta and William J. Perry, and a Clinton 
adviser, Vernon E. Jordan Jr. Charles S. Robb, former Democratic 
governor of Virginia, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican 
senator from Wyoming, were also on the panel, along with Sandra Day 
O’Connor, a former Supreme Court justice who was nominated by 
President Ronald Reagan.

Other members included Edwin Meese III, who served as attorney 
general under Mr. Reagan, and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a former 
secretary of state under Mr. Bush’s father. Mr. Eagleburger replaced 
Robert M. Gates, who resigned when he was nominated to be the next 
secretary of defense. If confirmed he will have to carry out whatever 
change of military strategy, if any, Mr. Bush embraces.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.


11-29-06 23:18 EST


Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company

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