‘US may be in Iraq 10 years’

SBS Australia | Jun 18, 2007
 
US forces could be needed in Iraq for a decade to battle insurgents, the top coalition commander says.

Speaking on Fox News, General David Petraeus vowed a “forthright” review in September on whether the recent troop surge is working.

General Petraeus said there was broad recognition in Washington that Iraq’s daunting challenges would not be resolved “in a year or even two years.”

“In fact, typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years,” he said.

President George W. Bush and other US officials have taken to invoking
South Korea as an example of a protracted US presence in a country long after formal hostilities ended.

General Petraeus said that any long-term deployment will depend on whether Iraq’s sovereign authorities want to extend the US military presence.

Strategy questioned

But in Congress, Democrats agitating for an early withdrawal of US forces have fastened on General Petraeus’s appraisal report due in September as a make-or-break moment for President Bush’s war campaign.

The top Republican in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, said the September report would be “the critical point” for the future of US strategy in Iraq.

“I think everybody anticipates that there’s going to be a new strategy in the fall. I don’t think we’ll have the same level of troops, in all likelihood, that we have now,” he said on the CBS network.

“The Iraqis will have to step up, not only on the political side, but on the military side, to a greater extent.”

Iraq violence continues

A Pentagon report last week said that overall levels of violence in Iraq have not gone down, even if unrest has eased in Baghdad and the long-restive province of Anbar, where the US military surge is focused.

In fresh violence Sunday, assailants killed at least eight people while a Sunni mosque south of Baghdad was bombed in the latest in a spate of tit-for-tat attacks on shrines.

The White House has sought to diminish expectations about General Petraeus’s report on the impact of the deployment of 30,000 extra troops to Iraq, which reached a climax last week.

The general insisted that he would present a “forthright assessment” in September, and said that early results showed a marked improvement to security in parts of Baghdad and Anbar.

But in any case, the surge will need longer than September to restore security throughout Iraq, he said.

‘Government failure’

However, US critics say that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government has failed to enact pivotal measures such as a law to distribute Iraq’s oil earnings fairly, or to reconcile warring Shiite and Sunni factions.

General Petraeus also conceded that there were valid doubts about a new US tactic in Iraq of arming Sunni insurgents against Al-Qaeda extremists, following criticism of the move by Mr Maliki.

Asked if the US-supplied weapons could later be turned on US forces or Shiite Muslims, the general said: “Well, those are legitimate concerns, and we have the same concerns.”

But he said that US military commanders were vetting their new local allies “as best we can” through compiling biometric data and keeping track of weapons serial numbers.

In comments published by Newsweek magazine, Mr Maliki warned that the new US tactic was “dangerous because this will create new militias” and demanded that the Iraqi government take the lead in vetting former insurgents.