IRAQ - The Challenges Of Terrorism - Part 5D - Iraq & The US Protection.

The US administration has sent its strongest signals yet that it intends to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq next year. It is time the Iraqis stand on their own feet and "defend their free country", says a high-ranking US military officer in Baghdad. Any US military presence that will remain in Iraq in the coming years will be "to fight terrorism along with the Iraqi forces and to help rebuilding Iraq". As to who is a terrorist and who is a legitimate fighter will be determined by the Iraqi state in agreement with the US.

That Iraq, or any part of it, will not become a base for Neo-Salafi terrorism or any other form of terrorism will be a priority for both Baghdad and the US and its allies. Preventing Iraq from being partitioned is and will remain a US priority; but this will have to be matched by the priority of the Iraqi state in Baghdad, which will be elected on Dec. 15. Baghdad is where the American embassy is to be based. That this will be the biggest embassy for the Americans will depend on the elected state of Iraq.

If - in spite of all American efforts in 2006-07 - Iraq is to be partitioned, the US will remain to protect those whom it deems not responsible for the consequences. US protection will be guaranteed for those who do not take the Americans for fools. American fairness will be defined by no one other than the Americans themselves; and they seem to be willing to learn.

Reconciliation among the various communities in Iraq is a process started by an Arab League-sponsored conference held in Cairo on Nov. 19-21. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, behind an Arab initiative blessed by the US and its allies, will work on an Islamic dimension for this to be discussed by an extraordinary summit meeting of the Islamic Conference Organisation (ICO) scheduled to be held on Dec. 7-8 in Makkah. This, too, has the blessings of the US and its allies (see News Service in this week's APS Diplomat in news23cICOsummitDec5-05).

The Arab League, which with Saudi and Egyptian help produced the Ta'if Agreement in 1989 that ended a long civil war in Lebanon, has a golden opportunity to become a stronger organisation for peace in the Arab world. If it is to succeed in Iraq, it will need to develop a positive diplomacy towards Iran which, with ICO's help, should be matched by an equally positive diplomacy from Tehran. The alternative for Tehran would be international isolation, now that Syria is out of the way in a recovering Lebanese democracy (see the background of the Ta'if model and the implications for Syria in news21cIraqPull-OutNov21-05).

In spite of efforts over the past several weeks by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney to shore up US public resolve for a protracted conflict in Iraq, the American Defence Department is preparing plans for a significant reduction in US forces. Top US officials in Baghdad expect such a cutback in 2006. One US official tells APS: "We want to be part of a solution, a good solution for all concerned" - in response to comments that the US military presence in Iraq has begun to appear as being part of the problem.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told CNN on Nov. 22 that, while US troops were still needed in Iraq, "the number of coalition forces is clearly going to come down because Iraqis are making it possible now to do those functions themselves". Asked about proposals to bring home as many as 50,000 or 60,000 of the nearly 160,000 US troops in Iraq next year, Ms Rice said: "I suspect that the American forces are not going to be needed in the numbers that they are there for all that much longer, because Iraqis are continuing to make progress in function - not just in numbers but in their capabilities".

Ms Rice's comments followed similar statements made a few days earlier by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said it was appropriate for General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, to be planning for a significant reduction in US troops. He also said the US wanted to move back to a "baseline" number of 138,000 troops following the Dec. 15 elections in Iraq.

The Washington Post on Nov. 23 reported that the US could withdraw three of its 18 combat brigades from Iraq early next year, and said the Pentagon had developed a "moderately optimistic" scenario which called for reducing the number of US troops to fewer than 100,000 by the end of 2006. Some of those troops would remain in the region, most likely in Kuwait, in the event that they were needed quickly back in Iraq.

Senior US military officers say they are trying to find a balance between a precipitous US withdrawal which would leave Iraqi forces incapable of fighting the insurgents, and a prolonged US troop presence that would further inflame the rebellion. In fact, the steady and rapid growth of the Neo-Salafi insurgency in Iraq has been possible only because of a continuing stay of US military forces in the country (see the first three parts of this SBME Iraq survey).

The debate in the US Congress was escalated last month when Representative John Murtha, a Democrat of Pennsylvania and a Vietnam War veteran with close ties to the Pentagon, argued that the presence of US troops was impeding the ability of Iraqi forces to defend the country. He said the American troops in Iraq had become "a catalyst for violence", and therefore more part of the problem than the solution. He called for pulling out all US troops within six months.

US commanders in the region say such an abrupt pull-out would be damaging, and insist that progress is being made. A US military spokesman in Iraq on Nov. 23 said more than 700 suspected Neo-Salafi insurgents had been killed over two months in operations in the western Iraqi province of Anbar near the Syrian border, and another 1,500 had been captured.

Joseph Lieberman, a Democratic senator and supporter of the war, on Nov. 23 told Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja'fari the US would not leave Iraq until the country was secure. He said "the cost for America of failure in Iraq would be catastrophic for America, for the Iraqi people and I believe for the world".