Talk is growing about an American withdrawal from Iraq, but ironically the election on Jan. 30—which is likely to intensify strife in the country—will make it harder, not easier, to stage a U.S. exit.
The New York Times reports on page one today that “conversation has started bubbling up in Congress, in the Pentagon and some days even in the White House about when and how American forces might begin to disengage in Iraq.”
Today’s Financial Times reports that the second incident in two days in which U.S. forces killed innocent Iraqi civilians has created new pressure in Iraq for a pullout:
U.S. soldiers mistakenly opened fire on Iraqi police and civilians after an ambush south of Baghdad yesterday, killing five people.
The incident came less than 24 hours after a mis-aimed U.S. bomb was dropped on a home in the north of the country, killing another five Iraqis. Combined, the incidents will feed calls that U.S. forces set a date for their withdrawal, a demand made by several Iraqi political factions during the run-up to the January 30 elections.
The Association of Muslim Scholars, the rightwing Islamic group of Sunnis that has said it will boycott the election, now says it will participate if the United States announces a withdrawal plan. Of course, the United States isn’t going to announce a sudden change in its Iraq policy, certainly not before Jan. 20. But the signs are mounting that any idea of staying the course in Iraq indefinitely isn’t going to happen.
It’s been rumored for a while that Rumsfeld is looking for a way out. (Is that why some neocons are turning against him?) Last week it was reported that Rummy was sending General Gary Luck to Iraq to figure out what to do next, and a new UPI analysis in the Washington Times presents it as an explicitly anti-neoconservative decision:
Gen. Gary Luck's new Army policy review on Iraq is a stinging humiliation for Pentagon neo-conservatives already suffering from their failure to oust Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and replace him with his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
Rumsfeld's decision to order a broad review of Iraqi policy is at sharp odds with the gung-ho, relentlessly optimistic public stance he has taken on dealing with the insurrection there over the past year and a half. It is also a stinging humiliation for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and his favored analysts, almost all of whose assessments on Iraq have proven disastrously wrong over the past two years.
