Moment Of Truth in Iraq

(3 of 3)

Will troops start coming home?
Petraeus is likely to recommend that troop levels remain constant at around 160,000 soldiers and Marines until April 2008, when a gradual redeployment will begin. The drawdown process will seem agonizingly slow, and that's because it will be — one 3,500-strong brigade and its supporting personnel a month. The timing is strategic and political. Pentagon personnel predict a massive drop in recruiting and retention in April if troops overseas aren't given long-promised breaks to go home. The political clock is ticking too. A partial springtime withdrawal would permit the White House to signal six months before the 2008 election that it is bringing the war to an end.

But what a smaller U.S. troop presence can accomplish is less certain and much less discussed. Some lawmakers want the U.S. to pull out of Baghdad to Kuwait or Kurdistan. Others have called for the military to concentrate on training the Iraqi army — a project that has already cost the U.S. billions, to little effect. American soldiers complain that their nominal allies in the Iraqi police and army are more loyal to Shi'ite militias than to the national government. An American intelligence officer in a western Baghdad suburb reports that the Iraqi police there are so thoroughly infiltrated by insurgents that the entire force is useless. Bush has recently returned to the mantra that as the Iraqis stand up, the U.S. will stand down. But it is an open question whether — or for how long — the Iraqi army can survive after the U.S. leaves.

Whenever they begin, then, the withdrawals are unlikely to last very long. Many experts believe the threat of a wider civil war — and the regional instability that would follow — means that the U.S. cannot afford to reduce its presence in Iraq much below 130,000 troops for the next year and probably beyond that. And so it could turn out that just six months after the long-awaited drawdowns begin, they stop again. The remaining forces, Pentagon officials report, will give the Army some badly needed margin to rest and retrain its brigades, but only a little. Some officers at the Pentagon want deeper cuts — and want them sooner — believing that the surge will keep the Army stretched too thin for too long. Virginia Senator John Warner, who is as close to the admirals and generals as anyone on Capitol Hill, cast his lot with this faction when he called recently for a reduction of 5,000 troops this year. Such a move would be more symbolic than real, changing little on the ground. And it would still leave a key question unanswered: What U.S. strategy could avert the wider bloodshed that looks inevitable in the wake of a smaller force? One small advantage of extending the surge is that it postpones having to find an answer to that question.

Are the Iraqis to blame?
Everyone is to blame. The U.S. marched blindly into Iraq, dreaming of Arab democracy, only to create a sinkhole of regional instability. In a pair of epic fiascos, Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary at the time, okayed an invasion force that was probably too small by half — and then agreed with U.S. envoy L. Paul Bremer to cashier the entire Iraqi army two months later. But it's also true that for four years, the Iraqi government has had literally more money than it could spend and yet has produced little to show for it. Basic supplies — oil, electricity, water — are chronically short. Inflation and unemployment are rampant.

Nor are the political prospects in Iraq encouraging. Washington has blown hot and cold this summer about the wisdom of sticking with what the Government Accountability Office called the "dysfunctional" al-Maliki's government. The current wind is marginally positive, but it was hard to miss the way Bush summoned the entire Iraqi A-team to Anbar during his surprise visit to press them to move faster. Iraqis tell Time, however, that it doesn't really matter if al-Maliki stays or leaves. As long as the current cast of dubious and discredited characters continues to dominate Iraqi politics, reconciliation is not going to happen. None of the likely replacements have shown particular inclination, much less ability, to rise above petty politics. "Some days, I think our problems are so big that we need a parliament full of Nelson Mandelas to solve our problems," says Iyad Jamaluddin, a legislator in former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's multiethnic Iraqi National List bloc. "But the truth is, we don't even have one."

Blame has its uses, no matter how much there is to go around. In recent days, some Republicans have begun to argue that the U.S. did everything it promised militarily in Iraq and that the Iraqis and their government are the ones dropping the ball. It's an appealing story line designed primarily to help Republicans deflect the heat for a mission that did not turn out as planned. That has always been an advantage of the surge, after all: when it was unveiled last winter, it was difficult to tell if the new tactic was really a blueprint for the final victory or just a holding action to signal to Americans that the U.S. had done its damnedest before quietly pulling the plug on the enterprise. Bush isn't yet ready to blame anyone else. Instead, he has been waiting for months for this showdown with his war critics and now intends to prevail. He told journalist Robert Draper, author of the new book Dead Certain, that he was counting on Congress to continue a sustained military presence in Iraq through this year and into the presidency of whoever succeeds him. As early as May, Bush told Draper that the moment of truth would come in the fall. And now it has arrived.