Bush set to endorse plan for troop cuts
Conditions in Iraq must be favorable, aide says
WASHINGTON - President Bush will endorse the broad outlines of a plan to bring home 30,000 troops from Iraq by the middle of next year if conditions are favorable, a senior administration official said yesterday.
In a nationwide, prime-time television address tomorrow, the official said, Bush will accept the recommendations made by his top general in Iraq during two days of congressional testimony.
News of the president's decision came after General David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, the top US diplomat in Iraq, warned Congress that a quicker drawdown of troops would have catastrophic consequences for US interests in the region, allowing Iran to expand its influence and possibly seize territory in Iraq.
Testifying before two key Senate committees yesterday, Crocker and Petraeus portrayed Iran as a key reason to keep a sizable number of American forces in Iraq. Petraeus suggested that Iran's negative actions in Iraq are more significant than was previously understood, while Crocker warned that Iran "would be a winner" if the United States made a sweeping withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
"The Iranian president has already announced that Iran will fill any vacuum in Iraq," he said.
Lawmakers who support the war seized on the assessment as a reason to stay in Iraq. "No matter what you think about how we got into Iraq, the fact is that we are in a battle now to save that country from being taken over by Iran on the one hand and Al Qaeda on the other," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, told CNBC yesterday.
But both Democrats and Republicans expressed skepticism about the Petraeus and Crocker report. It was unclear whether the two respected officials have stiffened the resolve of Republican lawmakers who have begun to waver in their support for the war.
Some GOP committee members welcomed Petraeus's recommendation that the 30,000 extra surge troops return home by July, but many lawmakers seemed impatient with his unwillingness to anticipate any drawdown of the remaining 130,000 US troops.
"Americans want to see light at the end of the tunnel," said Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican.
"It is not enough to counsel patience," said Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee. "Some type of success in Iraq is possible, but as policymakers, we should acknowledge that we are facing extraordinarily narrow margins for achieving our goals."
In January, Bush announced that he would add 30,000 troops to Iraq to tamp down sectarian violence that threatened to tear the country apart. His announcement followed a bitter debate in Congress over whether the situation in Iraq was so dire that the United States should simply withdraw.
Most military analysts expected the surge to wind down next year because of the additional strain it has placed on an already stressed US military.
The surge was meant to reduce the violence enough to allow Iraqi politicians to broker political agreements that could lead to long-term peace. Yesterday, Democrats contended that Crocker had little political progress to report, and questioned why the Bush administration is not moving to enact a more complete withdrawal of forces.
Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said yesterday that Petraeus's plan puts the United States "back to the starting line."
"It's the military version of the movie 'Groundhog Day' to return to the troop levels before the president launched an ill-advised escalation," Kerry said.
But White House officials were upbeat, saying Petraeus's report of significant military progress in Iraq shows that US efforts there can succeed.
A senior administration official reached yesterday confirmed that the general's report had been assembled independently of the White House and that Bush, while accepting the outlines of Petraeus's plan, has not finalized the details for his own speech.
The Associated Press reported yesterday that Bush's speech will take a conciliatory tone toward Congress and will place more conditions on troop reductions than Petraeus did, tying troop levels to the situation on the ground.
Yesterday, Republicans and Democrats fired tough questions at Crocker and Petraeus about whether military gains credited to the surge can be sustained when the extra troops return home. Lawmakers wanted to know whether Americans have reason to hope that Iraqis will soon reach a political compromise that so far has been elusive.
Crocker and Petraeus acknowledged that progress in Iraq has been difficult, but suggested that failure would deal a major blow to American interests. They particularly focused on a potential setback it would cause in the decades-long US conflict with Iran.
Petraeus told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the recent arrest in Iraq of the deputy commander of a group called Lebanese Hezbollah Department 2800 had shed new light on how widespread Iranian involvement is in Iraq. Petraeus said US forces had been unaware of the group, but now have a much clearer picture of Iran's expansive support to Shi'ite extremists in Iraq.
He said Iran intends "to turn the Shi'ite militia extremists into a Hezbollah-like force" to fight a "proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq."
Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, opposes Israel and helped fuel Lebanon's devastating civil war in 2006.
Crocker, who recently met with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad to express concern about Iran's arming of sectarian militias in Iraq, told lawmakers yesterday the meetings have been fruitless.
At the hearings, Petraeus distributed a regional map illustrating what he said was Iranian "lethal aid, training, and funding" pushing across the Iran-Iraq border to a variety of insurgent groups. The arrows suggested a virtual Iranian invasion.
In the past, US officials described the Iranian government as simply meddling in Iraq, but now officials frequently say Iran has mounted a full-scale effort to control much of its neighbor. Two weeks ago, Bush himself cited an unchecked Iran as a primary reason why the United States must continue its mission in Iraq.
"I want our fellow citizens to consider what would happen if these forces of radicalism and extremism are allowed to drive us out of the Middle East," Bush told a convention of American Legion members. "The region would be dramatically transformed in a way that could imperil the civilized world." He added that extremists, especially in Iran, "would be emboldened by the knowledge that they forced America to retreat."
Key supporters of the war seized on the Iran threat yesterday. Senator John McCain of Arizona, a GOP presidential candidate, and Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, pointed to Crocker's warnings that Iran would fill a power vacuum after a hasty US withdrawal.
But Democrats instead renewed their calls for broader changes to Bush's policy in Iraq.
"The Bush-Petraeus plan of 130,000 Americans in Iraq for 10 more years is not a reduction in our footprint; it is an insult to the intelligence of the American people to call that a new direction," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said in a statement. 