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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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November 18th,
2006 - U.S. Generals Say Civil War, Not Insurgency, Is Greatest Threat |
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A Shifting Enemy: U.S.
Generals Say Civil War, Not Insurgency, Is Greatest Threat By Mark Mazzetti New York Times November 18, 2006 Washington, Nov. 17 - In the
fall of 2005, the generals running the Iraq war told the Senate Armed
Services Committee that a gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq was
imperative. The American troop presence,
Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey Jr. said at the time, was
stoking the insurgency, fostering dependency among the Iraqi security forces
and proving counterproductive for what General Abizaid has called “The Long
War” against Islamic radicalism. This week, General Abizaid,
chief of the United States Central Command, told the same committee that
American forces may be all that is preventing full-scale civil war in Iraq,
so a phased troop withdrawal would be a mistake. What has changed, military experts
and intelligence officials say, is that the insurgency of Baathists and
foreign jihadists is no longer the greatest enemy the United States faces in
Iraq. The biggest danger now, they say, is that violence between Shiites and
Sunnis could destroy Iraq’s government and spill across the Middle East. General Abizaid and other
American commanders may continue to worry about the long-term consequences of
keeping an American occupation force of more than 100,000 troops in an Arab
country indefinitely. But in his testimony to
Congress on Wednesday, General Abizaid made it clear that he thought he had
no option but to focus on the most immediate threat, the sectarian violence
threatening to split Iraq apart. The Pentagon, which long ago
discarded the idea that it would be American troops that would defeat the
Iraqi insurgency, has made the training of Iraqi security forces its primary
mission in Iraq. But Iraqi forces are still far from capable of quashing
sectarian violence, and that is the principal reason that American commanders
say they believe that a substantial American troop presence is still needed. On Wednesday, General
Abizaid announced a plan to bulk up the number of trainers embedded with
Iraqi troops, but few military experts believe that the capacity of Iraqi
troops is likely to improve so much that a significant American troop
reduction would be prudent in the short run. “While it would make a great
deal of sense to progressively turn things over to the Iraqis and reduce our
presence, it is no more practical in the fall of 2006 than it was in the fall
of 2005, and that’s the worrisome part,” said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a
counterinsurgency expert and the executive director of the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Last fall, General Casey
told the Senate that it was essential to cut the American presence in Iraq as
a way of pushing more Iraqi troops onto the frontlines and reducing
“dependency.” As late as this summer, he had been drawing up plans for a
troop drawdown that would drastically cut the American presence in Iraq by
the end of next year. But these days, troop levels
in Iraq are going up, rather than down. A unit of about 2,200
marines that had been aboard naval warships in the Persian Gulf has begun
moving into Anbar Province, the restive Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad.
Some in the Pentagon have worried that Anbar Province - which includes the
violent cities of Falluja and Ramadi - is particularly vulnerable with the
American military currently focused on an offensive to secure the most
violent neighborhoods of Baghdad, the capital. On Friday, the Pentagon also
announced a new set of deployment orders for troops that will enter Iraq
early in 2007, most for yearlong combat tours. American commanders had
hoped by this point to be deploying fewer combat brigades into Iraq than the
number rotating out, but the Pentagon is now planning to keep a base level of
about 141,000 troops in the country, with the possibility of “surging” more
troops as needed. In his own testimony before
the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, described how the spiraling violence would
create new difficulties for American forces, whether in Baghdad or Falluja. “The longer this goes on,
the less controlled the violence is, the more the violence devolves down to
the neighborhood level,” he said. “The center disappears, and normal people
acting not irrationally end up acting like extremists.” For his part, General
Abizaid insisted that every commander running the Iraq war believed that the
mission could ultimately succeed. “It’s not a matter of
personal pride,” he said. “It’s a matter of seeing that the enemy can’t win.” General Abizaid, who has
spoken eloquently in the past about what could be a decades long fight
against Islamic radicalism, is also well aware that keeping such high troop
levels in Iraq could also be the catalyst for a new generation of radicals
committed to jihad. Appearing shortly after
General Abizaid, General Hayden said that the American presence in Iraq
“gives life to Al Qaeda propaganda that they misuse and misrepresent to the
larger Arab world.” Pointedly, General Hayden
declined repeatedly to characterize Iraq as “the central battlefront in the
war on terror,” as senior Bush administration officials have described it. Under questioning from
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, he referred to Iraq
instead as an “absolutely critical battlefront.” Thom Shanker contributed
reporting. External link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/18/world/middleeast/18military.html |