East Carolinian

Issue date: 9/11/08 Section: News

Media Credit: staff photo

President Bush's announcement Tuesday that he'll maintain troop levels in Iraq through the end of his presidency suggests that despite his claim that the surge of additional U.S. troops in Iraq has succeeded, the security gains could be temporary, defense officials and experts said.

"Here is the bottom line: While the enemy in Iraq is still dangerous, we have seized the offensive, and the Iraqi forces are becoming increasingly capable of leading and winning the fight," Bush said Tuesday in a speech before the National Defense University.

Bush, however, announced that he'll order only 8,000 more combat troops to leave Iraq by February, the month after his presidency ends, reducing the number there to about 138,000.

A Marine battalion and an Army brigade combat team from the Army's 10th Mountain Division that had been scheduled to deploy to Iraq will go to Afghanistan instead, Bush said.

U.S. defense officials said the president's decision to withdraw only 8,000 soldiers from Iraq reflects a persistent concern among top commanders that improvements in security could be temporary and renewed violence could erupt. Officials fear that Iran might reactivate the Shiite Muslim militias it has armed and trained and that the Sunni group al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to re-establish itself in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.

Ret. Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, who helped craft the military's new counterinsurgency doctrine with Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus, said that while the drawdown is small, the U.S. is winning--but withdrawing too soon could undermine that success.

"The security gains are real and tangible but fragile," said Nagl, who visited Iraq last month. "If you declare victory too soon, whether in a province or the whole country, al-Qaeda can come back. And it is a whole lot less work and a whole lot less blood spilled keeping them out once you have cleared an area than it is pulling out prematurely and then having to go back and clear them out again."

Bush's plan appears to fall short of demands by the Iraqi government for a withdrawal timetable. Mohammed al-Askari, an Iraqi defense ministry spokesman, said Tuesday that Iraq is "moving in the right direction" and because of that the administration is "obliged to reduce its forces in Iraq within an acceptable time frame that ends in complete withdrawal."

The Iraqi government's inability to schedule provincial elections has raised concerns in other parts of the U.S. military leadership, defense officials told McClatchy Newspapers. The elections were supposed to be held next month; they could be postponed until summer.

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