posted on April 29, 2007 08:21:06 AM new
"STEADFAST" & "More of the Same". Into the 5th year of the Bush Iraq Civil War. America will have more dead and wounded American Troops and Billions more will be spent WITH NO END IN SIGHT.
International Herald Tribune
U.S. expects limited gains in Iraq
By David E. Sanger Published: April 29, 2007
WASHINGTON: The Bush administration will not try to assess whether a planned troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of President George W. Bush's top advisers anticipate that any gains by then will be limited, according to senior administration officials.
In interviews last week, the officials made clear that the White House is gradually scaling back its expectations for the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The timelines they are now discussing suggest that the White House may maintain the increased numbers of American troops in Iraq well into next year.
That prospect would entail a dramatically longer commitment of frontline troops, patrolling the most dangerous neighborhoods of Baghdad, than the one envisioned in legislation that passed the House of Representatives and Senate last week. That vote, largely symbolic because Democrats do not have the votes to override a promised presidential veto, set deadlines that would lead to the withdrawal of combat troops by the end of March 2008.
Bush said Friday that he would invite congressional leaders to the White House on Wednesday, immediately after his expected veto, to talk about a "way forward."
Several U.S. officials who have spoken recently with Maliki say they believe he would like to achieve the kind of political reconciliation that Bush outlined in January as the ultimate goal of the troop increase. But they say the Iraqi prime minister appears to have little ability to manage the required legislation, including bills requiring fair distribution of oil revenues among Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and reversing the American-led de-Baathification that barred many Sunnis from participation in the new government.
Even as White House officials have been telling Congress that Bush would accept no time limits on success, they have been pushing Maliki to move faster.
"He is trying to fight fires coming from every direction," Ryan Crocker, the newly arrived U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said of Maliki last week, speaking by telephone. "We have to be clear to him on where our priorities are, so that we can buy him the time he needs. And we have to buy the time now because he is going to need it in the future."
Crocker said that he had told Maliki that evidence of progress "is important in American terms" because "to sustain American support we have to be able to see that Iraqis are stepping up to hard challenges."
But the new view of Maliki's limitations was put bluntly by General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, who spent last week pressing Congress not to put limits on either the timing or conduct of his operations, as he described what he discovered upon returning to Iraq after a two-year hiatus.
"He's not the Prime Minister Tony Blair of Iraq," Petraeus said of Maliki on Thursday. "He does not have a parliamentary majority.
He does not have his ministers in all of the different ministries" and they "sometimes sound a bit discordant in their statements to the press and their statements to other countries. It's a very, very challenging situation in which to lead."
Bush was careful when he announced his new strategy in January to avoid public estimates of how quickly Maliki might take steps toward political reconciliation. Even now, White House officials are being careful not to describe with any precision the mix of benchmarks they expect Maliki to deliver.
By the time Crocker and Petraeus complete a comprehensive assessment of progress in September, three months after the troop increase has been fully in place, U.S. officials are hoping that some of the pieces of key legislation will have passed.
The U.S. defense secretary, Robert Gates, has pressed Maliki to keep the Iraqi Parliament from taking a two-monthlong summer break. If they remain in Baghdad, said one senior American official who did not want to be identified because he was discussing internal White House deliberations, "we'll have some outputs then."
He added, "That's different from having outcomes," drawing a distinction between a sign of activity and a sign of success, which could take considerably longer.
In public, Bush has remained enthusiastic about Maliki, with whom he talks over a secure video link every few weeks. But Bush was also publicly supportive of several of Maliki's predecessors, even though White House officials now dismiss many of them as ill-suited for the job.
In January, Bush characterized Maliki as an architect of the troop increase plan, even while telling visiting congressional leaders that "I said to Maliki this has to work or you're out," according to two officials who were in the room. Pressed on why he thought the new strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, Bush shot back: "Because it has to."
That, in short, is the same position he is taking now with Congress. In interviews, his aides said Bush was convinced that once he vetoed the troop funding plan, because of its timetable for withdrawal, he would have the upper hand in negotiations.
