Michael Smith Reports That Bush and Blair Are Ready to Pull (Some) Troops Out of Iraq

"Mentoring" the "Transition" in Iraq
By Michael Smith

As predicted last week on this blog, the withdrawal from Iraq is about to begin. Tony Blair and George Bush will announce that they are to start withdrawing troops from Iraq at a summit in Washington as early as this week. The process appears to have been carefully choreographed in an attempt to bolster the popularity of Bush and Blair, both of whom are desperate to boost their poll ratings which have plummeted to record levels with Iraq seen as a major factor in both cases.

The scope of the phased withdrawal, which will see British troop numbers cut by several thousand and US forces by up to 30,000 over the next six months, has already been agreed, one source told the Sunday Times this week. The actual announcement will come in response to a statement from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that his government believes coalition forces are no longer needed in a number of provinces.

As I reported on this blog a week ago, Lt-Gen Sir Rob Fry, the British deputy coalition commander, pointed towards the phased withdrawal starting immediately the Maliki government was in place, telling Pentagon correspondents, who strangely failed to pick up on the message, that a phased withdrawal, province by province would begin “in the pretty near future” and that the new government would be “extremely keen” to see coalition forces start withdrawing “in order that it can demonstrate its own sovereignty”.

The timing of the announcement has been on hold waiting for the new government to be sworn in, with officials ready to prepare the Bush-Blair summit within 48 hours of al-Maliki signalling the withdrawal should begin. It will be described as a “transition” to Iraqi security forces taking control of the country rather than a withdrawal to avoid it looking as though the allies are being forced out by rising levels of attacks on their forces. The Americans have already lost more than 120 servicemen in the past six weeks, making it one of the worst periods for casualties since last autumn. The British have lost eight in the same period, including five personnel killed when a Lynx helicopter was shot down two weeks ago and two soldiers killed by a roadside bomb last Saturday.

The concept of transition was "very simple", one senior source said. "It can mean moving out completely, but it could mean leaving mentoring staff behind to look after the Iraqi forces." The mentoring idea is key to the withdrawal. Gen Peter Pace, the Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate this week that US troops could not completely pull out of any of its provinces this year. But defence sources said the crucial word in that statement was “completely”. Coalition commanders remain concerned that the Iraqi armed forces command and control system is not good enough to allow the Iraqis to maintain security, Pace said. So small numbers of coalition forces will remain in some of the provinces, integrated within the Iraqi forces to “mentor” them and ease the command and control problems, allowing coalition commanders to withdraw the bulk of their troops.

Lt-Gen Peter Chiarelli, the US operational commander, said on Friday that three-quarters of the Iraqi army would be in control of its own sectors by the end of the summer. The new government taking charge was “absolutely critical, because once the economy gets going and revenues are realized, it will allow the Iraqis to support their forces in a way that to date they've been unable to do and I know that they're all committed to doing that.”

The British will pull out of Meysan province in the north of the UK region, a province where British troops have had difficulty winning over the local population, and Muthanna on the border with Saudi Arabia. US troops are expected to start withdrawing from some of the more peaceful provinces in their area of operations, with the Kurdish provinces of Dahuk, Irbil, Tamim and Sulaymaniyah first on the list.

British officials say UK troops have fully trained nine out of the ten Iraqi army battalions they are training with the tenth said to be virtually ready to deploy operationally. They no longer provide basic training for the Iraqi police and a military spokesman in Basra told me that in the British sector security was now entirely in the hands of the Iraqi police with British troops only intervening if they were themselves attacked. Paradoxically, it looks as if the fallout from the recent rows with the provincial governments in Meysan and Basra has forced the Iraqis to take over security thereby hastening the withdrawal process. The provincial governments in the south are all up and running their own patches - another key requirement for a withdrawal to begin - with the swearing in of the al-Maliki government over the weekend the final piece of the jigsaw.

The British are of course desperate to ease the pressure on the overstretched infantry, with artillery troops originally due to provide fire support to troops in Afghanistan now forced to act in an infantry role in the face of the increased Taliban threat. The deployment to southern Afghanistan where scores of people have been killed in fighting over the past few days was predicated on the belief that most of the 7,200 British troops still in Iraq would have been withdrawn by now.

Although British involvement in the recent fighting was limited to SAS soldiers directing fire from two RAF Harrier aircraft in support of Afghan forces, senior commanders are concerned that keeping troops in Iraq will damage their ability to fully man the Afghan deployment. “There is no longer any point in us having large numbers of troops in Iraq,” one defence source told me. “All we are doing there is providing targets for the Mahdi army. We are going to need as many troops as we can for Afghanistan. That is going to be a much more demanding task than was originally thought. We will need all the infantry we free up from Iraq to keep that going.”

The British garrison in Basra, a city riven with turf wars between different political parties and militias, is not expected to withdraw entirely for some time to come with the “transition” phase expected to be drawn out over some 18 months in the south and around two years throughout the country. This is going to be the big story of the next few weeks, but remember you read it first here a week ago!