Bush announces plan to send 20,000 new troops to Iraq

In a televised speech on Jan. 10, President Bush outlined the administration's plan for a major escalation in the war in Iraq and declared that over 20,000 new troops will be deployed there in the coming months. In the long-awaited, 20-minute prime-time address from the White House library, Bush echoed earlier rhetoric about the war being the "decisive ideological struggle of our time" and warned of the dangers of al-Qaida's influence in Iraq. Bush spoke of an alleged al-Qaida document that mapped out the group's plans to seize the restive Anbar province, which would "bring al-Qaida closer to its goals of taking down Iraq's democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad." The White House will seek an extra $6.8 billion from Congress for the new initiative, including $5.6 billion for the new troop deployment, and the rest, $1.2 billion, for economic assistance. Under the plan, the president is sending 17,500 more troops to Baghdad, with the first units arriving in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, 4,000 Marines will be deployed in Anbar province. The increase in US troop levels, which will take the number of US forces in Iraq to almost 154,000, is designed to secure Baghdad, where 80 percent of the sectarian violence takes place. The military's strategy envisions creating "gated communities" in Baghdad–sealing off discrete areas and forcibly removing insurgents, then stationing US forces in the neighborhood to keep the peace and working to create jobs for residents. A plan based on the successful pacification of the northern town of Tal Afar will be carried out, with "safe zones" being created, surrounded by checkpoints, sandbags and barbed wire. Residents would be issued with ID badges, and have their entry and exit logged. The eventual aim is to "join up the dots" and create a large "sanitized" area, from which both Shia militias and Sunni insurgents will be kept out. It is not clear which Baghdad neighborhoods will become gated communities, or how many of the enclaves will be created. So far, the Iraqi government has largely restricted US operations in Shiite neighborhoods, and Defense officials say it is crucial that the new plan allow US forces to operate in Sunni as well as Shiite areas. Critics of the troop increase have said the sheer size of Baghdad, with nearly six million people, makes it impossible to replicate the Tal Afar strategy. Current and former military officials have also warned that US plans to confront Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias is likely to touch off a more dangerous phase of the war, featuring months of fighting in the streets of the Iraqi capital. The prospect of a more intense battle in Baghdad could put US military commanders in exactly the sort of tough urban fight that war planners strove to avoid during the spring 2003 invasion of the country. The administration plan also hinges on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's pledge to crackdown on militia groups. A spokesman for Maliki said the government would crack down on militias and US troops would follow the lead of the Iraqi army. But many argue that the Iraqi army has become disproportionately Shiite since the purging of Sunni officers loyal to former leader Saddam Hussein. Critics have accused Maliki, a Shiite, of protecting the Madhi Army militia and its leader Moqtada al-Sadr in exchange for political support. Bush's plan will require Maliki to take a different approach and allow US troops to secure Sadr City and other militia strongholds. Although Maliki has officially announced a new security crackdown in Baghdad, there appears to be little appetite within his government for a full-scale assault on the Mahdi Army. Leaders of the militia have, nonetheless, ordered all men aged 15 to 45 in the largest Shia neighborhood in Baghdad, Sadr City, to register for "mandatory service." Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, at a news conference the same day of Bush's speech, said that US and Iraqi troops would be free to go into "all parts of Baghdad, including Sadr City" and that one benchmark in the plan was that there would be no "political interference" with military operations or attempts to protect death squad leaders. (Ironically, US forces trained Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out "irregular missions" in 2004. Some of the most persistent death squad allegations have been made against the Wolf Brigade, an Iraqi Interior Ministry unit, whose main adviser was James Steele, commander of the US military group in El Salvador during the height of that country's "dirty war.") On at least one occasion, Maliki intervened to secure the release of a man captured by US troops and identified by US commanders as a death squad leader with links to Sadr. Maliki's argument has been that the solution to the problem of militias, including Sadr's, must be political, not military, but he has simultaneously postponed any action on a new law to disarm and demobilize the militias. The White House's insistence on confronting all insurgents and militias, both Sunni and Shiite, may mean that the US military will wind up fighting the Mahdi Army. The militia is estimated by some US intelligence officials to have grown over the past year to about 60,000 fighters, and some in the Pentagon consider it more militarily effective than the Iraqi army. "There will be more violence than usual because of the surge, and a surge with more casualties plays up on the international stage," said a senior Army official. Sadr "is going to have to make a choice, and if he decides on a confrontation, it will be pretty significant," added a senior Pentagon official. The last time the US military fought both Sunni and Shiite elements in Iraq was the spring of 2004, which became one of the most difficult times in the war. US commanders were stunned to face a two-front conflict against Sunni insurgents in Anbar province and Shiites in Baghdad and across a broad swath of south-central Iraq. Troops from the Army's 1st Cavalry Division fighting in Sadr's stronghold of about two million Shiites in eastern Baghdad became enmeshed in a series of clashes. Sadr's militias besieged isolated US patrols and took over police stations, schools and municipal buildings. Sadr is one of the most powerful figures in the Iraqi government, and he has forced it and the US military to back down in the past. Yet if the Mahdi Army is not confronted, the entire offensive may falter and the sectarian conflict may intensify, because Sunnis will feel it is just one more way of attacking them while letting Shiite death squads go free, military experts said. "If our troops do not enter Sadr City, they belittle the notion of a surge because they would leave a leading militia unscathed," said Patrick Cronin of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a defense think tank. Those who monitor the ongoing violence in Iraq say the civilians who are dying in unprecedented numbers in the traumatized country will receive little or no benefit from the troop-boosting exercise–it may even increase their suffering. Allan Rock, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, said, "civilians are being treated as though they are entirely expendable in Bush's war, and by the warring factions bent on destroying each other. It is civilians that pay the ultimate price for this failed war." "We have to presume that the extra troops will engage in activities that soldiers do–namely, killing people," said John Sloboda, a founder of the Iraq Body Count Project. "Their targets will be insurgents. And in Baghdad, insurgents are deeply embedded in populated areas," he said. "For every insurgent you kill, using such highly lethal weaponry," Sloboda said, "you will probably kill two to three civilians and injure others. This is not a strategy that will stop violence."