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Iraq

Report: Iraq assessment bleaker

By wire services
Published May 19, 2005

BAGHDAD - U.S. military commanders in Baghdad and Washington gave a sobering new assessment of the war in Iraq on Wednesday, pulling back from recent suggestions - including by some of the same officers - that there were positive trends in Iraq that could allow a reduction in the 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq late this year or early in 2006.

The New York Times quoted one unnamed senior officer as suggesting that U.S. military involvement could last many years.

At the same time, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed senior U.S. military official as telling reporters that the recent surge in violence in Iraq followed a meeting in Syria last month of associates of Jordanian insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. officer in the Middle East, said in a briefing in Washington that one problem was the disappointing progress in developing Iraqi paramilitary police units cohesive enough to mount an effective challenge to the insurgents and allow U.S. forces to reduce their role in fighting.

A senior officer in Baghdad said recent polls conducted for the U.S. military by Baghdad University have shown confidence flagging sharply, down from an 85 percent rating immediately after the elections to 45 percent now.

To raise the level of public confidence, the officer said, the new government would need success in cutting insurgent attacks and addressing popular impatience for improvements in public services like electricity that are worse, for many Iraqis, than they were last year.

But the U.S. officer emphasized the need for caution, and the time it may take to complete the U.S. mission.

Only weeks ago, in the aftermath of the elections, U.S. generals offered a more upbeat view, one that was tied to a surge of Iraqi confidence.

But on Wednesday, the New York Times reported that five unnamed high-ranking officers, speaking separately at the Pentagon and in Baghdad, and through an e-mail exchange from Baghdad with a reporter in Washington, talked of problems confronting the war effort.

A senior officer in Baghdad said in a background briefing that despite U.S. troops' recent successes in disrupting insurgent cells that have resulted in the arrest of 1,100 suspected insurgents in Baghdad alone in the past 80 days, the U.S. plans for Iraq could prove unsuccessful.

By insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad were following a Pentagon policy requiring U.S. commanders in Baghdad to put "an Iraqi face" on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the ones talking to reporters.

Abizaid, whose Central Command headquarters in Tampa exercises oversight of the war, said that Iraqi police - accounting for 65,000 of the 160,000 Iraqis now trained and equipped in the $5.7-billion U.S. effort to build up the country's security forces - are "behind" in their ability to shoulder a major part of the war effort. He blamed a tendency among Iraqi policemen to operate as individuals rather than in cohesive, military-style units and said that this made them more vulnerable to insurgent intimidation.

The rash of bombings and assassinations across the country this month has killed more than 450 people and shattered a period of relative calm after Iraq's Jan. 30 parliamentary elections.

Before the meeting in Syria, Zarqawi was unhappy with the insurgency, as the government was getting stronger and coalition forces weren't being defeated, news services quoted an unnamed senior U.S. official as saying.

Zarqawi leads al-Qaida in Iraq, which has asserted responsibility for many of the insurgency's deadliest attacks. The U.S. military has put a $25-million bounty on his head.

The U.S. official who briefed reporters Wednesday said that it was unclear whether Zarqawi attended the Syria meeting but that his lieutenants were encouraged to step up attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces, particularly with car bombings. Insurgents have carried out 21 car bombings in Baghdad this month, compared with 25 in all of 2004, the official said.

In a further sign of friction between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites, religious leaders traded charges Wednesday over who was responsible for a recent wave of execution-style killings. Two Sunni clerics were found dead in Baghdad Tuesday, and a Shiite cleric was shot to death. The bodies of more than 60 Iraqis who were apparently executed have been discovered across the country in recent days, many with hands bound and bullets in their skulls.

"We know who is killing the imams and preachers of the mosques. We know who is killing people going to prayers. The ones responsible for these killings are the Badr Brigades," Harith Dhari, the head of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni religious organization, said on TV.

The Badr organization is affiliated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a major Shiite political party that is part of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's Shiite-led ruling coalition. While the Badr group has recast itself as a political organization in recent years, it is still widely believed to operate as a militia.

Hadi Amiri, secretary general of the Badr group and a member of Iraq's National Assembly, placed the blame for recent killings on followers of former President Saddam Hussein.

Information from the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press was used in this report.

[Last modified May 19, 2005, 00:44:07]