SubscribeNYT: ISG Calls For 15 Brigades To Stand Down
From the "Paper Of Treason," the New York Times:
Lee H. Hamilton, left, one of the chairmen of the Iraq Study Group, and Tom Daschle, a former Democratic senator, talked about security, foreign policy and other issues at a forum in Washington.
15 Brigades Would Gradually Stand Down Under Plan
By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID S. CLOUD
November 30, 2006WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 — The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.
The report, unanimously approved by the 10-member panel, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, is to be delivered to President Bush next week. It is a compromise between distinct paths that the group has debated since March, avoiding a specific timetable, which has been opposed by Mr. Bush, but making it clear that the American troop commitment should not be open-ended. The recommendations of the group, formed at the request of members of Congress, are nonbinding.
A person who participated in the commission’s debate said that unless the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki believed that Mr. Bush was under pressure to pull back troops in the near future, “there will be zero sense of urgency to reach the political settlement that needs to be reached.”
The report recommends that Mr. Bush make it clear that he intends to start the withdrawal relatively soon, and people familiar with the debate over the final language said the implicit message was that the process should begin sometime next year.
The report leaves unstated whether the 15 combat brigades that are the bulk of American fighting forces in Iraq would be brought home, or simply pulled back to bases in Iraq or in neighboring countries. (A brigade typically consists of 3,000 to 5,000 troops.) From those bases, they would still be responsible for protecting a substantial number of American troops who would remain in Iraq, including 70,000 or more American trainers, logistics experts and members of a rapid reaction force.
As the commission wound up two and a half days of deliberation in Washington, the group said in a public statement only that a consensus had been reached and that the report would be delivered next Wednesday to President Bush, Congress and the American public. Members of the commission were warned by Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton not to discuss the contents of the report.
But four people involved in the debate, representing different points of view, agreed to outline its conclusions in broad terms to address what they said might otherwise be misperceptions about the findings. Some said their major concern was that the report might be too late.
“I think we’ve played a constructive role,” one person involved in the committee’s deliberations said, “but from the beginning, we’ve worried that this entire agenda could be swept away by events.”
Even as word of the study group’s conclusions began to leak out, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said two or three battalions of American troops were being sent to Baghdad from elsewhere in Iraq to assist in shoring up security there. Another Pentagon official said the additional troops for Baghdad would be drawn from a brigade in Mosul equipped with fast-moving, armored Stryker vehicles.
As described by the people involved in the deliberations, the bulk of the report by the Baker-Hamilton group focused on a recommendation that the United States devise a far more aggressive diplomatic initiative in the Middle East than Mr. Bush has been willing to try so far, including direct engagement with Iran and Syria. Initially, those contacts might be part of a regional conference on Iraq or broader Middle East peace issues, like the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but they would ultimately involve direct, high-level talks with Tehran and Damascus.
Mr. Bush has rejected such contacts until now, and he has also rejected withdrawal, declaring in Riga, Latvia, on Tuesday that while he will show flexibility, “there’s one thing I’m not going to do: I’m not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.”
Commission members have said in recent days that they had to navigate around such declarations, or, as one said, “We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out.”
Their report, as described by those familiar with the compromise, may give Republicans political cover to back away from parts of the president’s current strategy, even if Democrats claim that the report is short on specific deadlines.
While the White House reviews its strategy options, Pentagon planners are also looking beyond the immediate reinforcements for Baghdad to the question of whether they will need to draw more on reserve units to meet troop requirements in the Iraqi capital, military officials said. In particular, the Army is considering sending about 3,000 combat engineers from reserve units.
The proposal would not increase the overall number of troops in Baghdad, but it is controversial because it would require sending units that had already been deployed to Iraq in recent years, a step National Guard officials have been trying to avoid.
The move has not been approved by the Bush administration, but the decision could be made in the coming weeks, and the first of the additional troops may begin arriving in Iraq by next spring, officials said.
American military officials said that the forces in Iraq that were being shifted to Baghdad were to take the place of the 172nd Stryker Brigade, which is returning to its base in Alaska, and that there would be no increase in American forces in the Iraqi capital. In fact, one officer said there might be a brief decrease until the adjustments were completed.
As the Iraq Study Group finished its meetings in Washington, it heard final testimony from Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Democrat who has urged a specific timeline for withdrawal, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has called for a significant bolstering of troops to gain control of the Iraqi capital. Two former secretaries of state, Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, also spoke to the group as it debated its final conclusions.
Although the diplomatic strategy takes up the majority of the report, it was the military recommendations that prompted the most debate, people familiar with the deliberations said. They said a draft report put together under the direction of Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton had collided with another, circulated by other Democrats on the commission, that included an explicit timeline calling for withdrawal of the combat brigades to be completed by the end of next year. In the end, the two proposals were blended.
If Mr. Bush adopts the recommendations, far more American training teams will be embedded with Iraqi forces, a last-ditch effort to make the Iraqi Army more capable of fighting alone. That is a step already embraced in a memorandum that Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, wrote to the president this month.
“I think everyone felt good about where we ended up,” one person involved in the commission’s debates said after the group ended its meeting. “It is neither ‘cut and run’ nor ‘stay the course.’ ”
“Those who favor immediate withdrawal will not like it,” he said, but it also “deviates significantly from the president’s strategy.”
The report also would offer military commanders — and therefore the president — great flexibility to determine the timing and phasing of the pullback of the combat brigades.
Throughout the debates, Mr. Baker, who served as secretary of state under Mr. Bush’s father and was the central figure in developing the strategy to win the 2000 Florida recount for Mr. Bush, was highly reluctant to allow a timetable for withdrawal to be included in the report, participants said.
Mr. Baker cited what Mr. Bush had also called a danger: that any firm deadline would be an invitation to insurgents and sectarian groups to bide their time until the last American troops were withdrawn, then seek to overthrow the government. But Democrats on the commission also suspected that Mr. Baker was reluctant to embarrass the president by embracing a strategy Mr. Bush had repeatedly rejected.
Committee members struggled with ways, short of a deadline, to signal to the Iraqis that Washington would not prop up the government with military forces endlessly, and that if sectarian warfare continued the pressure to withdraw American forces would become overwhelming. What they ended up with appears to be a classic Washington compromise: a report that sets no explicit timetable but, between the lines, appears to have one built in.
As one senior American military officer involved in Iraq strategy said, “The question is whether it doesn’t look like a timeline to Bush, and does to Maliki.”
In addition to Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, the group includes two Democrats who are veterans of the Clinton administration, Leon E. Panetta and William J. Perry, and a Clinton adviser, Vernon E. Jordan Jr. Charles S. Robb, former Democratic governor of Virginia, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, are also on the panel, along with Sandra Day O’Connor, a former Supreme Court justice who was nominated by President Reagan.
Other members includes Edwin Meese III, who served as attorney general under Mr. Reagan, and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a former secretary of state under Mr. Bush’s father. Mr. Eagleburger replaced Robert M. Gates, who resigned when he was nominated to be the next secretary of defense.
If confirmed he will have to carry out whatever change of military strategy, if any, Mr. Bush embraces.
Well, that’s settles it then.
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13 Responses to “NYT: ISG Calls For 15 Brigades To Stand Down”
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November 30th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
I realise this was not the point of the article, but the President is referred to as “President Bush” just once in the beginning of the article, and “Mr. Bush” throughout the rest of it. Typical NY Slimes?
November 30th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
God so loved the world he did not send a committee.
November 30th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Can’t decide if the NYTimes are leaking to the enemy or the dnc - oh wait, same thing. My bad.
November 30th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
Vernon Jordan is a part of this commission? What the hell?
This panel will accomplish nothing but give the “surrender first” crowd the excuse they need to abandon the war. Maybe if we leave slowly and quietly, they won’t notice that we’re gone.
This is about politics, not strategy.
Euromerica.
November 30th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Just how much did we pay these professional grifters to sit around and count their toes?
November 30th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
This Commission is merely a committee with an oversized ego.
They are bound and determined to turn this into Vietnam. Win a war abroad, lose it at home.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
I am old enough to remember the result of civilians running the viet nam war. They were all for “peace with honor”, which was a thinly disguised phrase for “cut and run”. Now, civilians offer up “graceful exit” as the catch phrase for “cut and run”. Civilians, politicians, democrats, cowards, liberals, spineless cowards, leftists, cowards, and of course, journalists, which are all of the above…..have no business fighting a war. any war. They are hoping that the muslims will be like the North Vietnamese, and after a time we can all be buddies. They are horribly wrong. Islam has no friends. Not even amongst their own. Islam is death to all they can kill for whatever reason they come up with. Killing is Islam. Muslims are either killing, or sitting by watching the killing, or being killed because they are the wrong sect. Killing, violence, mayhem, destruction, murder, torture (the real kind), sadism, pain, suffering, slavery, total domination. That is the way of Islam, and everyone knows it. Regardless of the lies spouted by the pro Islamic media, there is nothing peaceful about Islam, and there never ever will be.
The proof? Just see the world scene, as it exists today, and that is all the proof one needs to see the folly of thinking Islam is anything but a cult of justifiable religious homicide in the name of a God that only will grant you access to paradise if you kill as many unbelievers as you possibly can. Killing, and facilitating the killing of infidels is the hallmark of Islam. Muslims, who believe in Islam, are killers, or they willingly aid and abett killers, or they allow killers to kill. They do nothing. They are muslim.
The Baker commission is viewing this conflict as a comfortable civil war that will be ended once we get out of the region, and Iran and Syria walk in to the vacumn created and restore peace. They dont have a clue that the only way peace will be restored is the massive application of death and torture to anyone doesnt adhere to their way of thinking. They will restore peace all right….peace is easy to create when your citizens are dead, or fear dying over anything else. Islam is on the march, Islam is coming to America…and that Minnesota prick that wont swear on the Bible is just another example of the eventual Islamization of this country.
Keep your eye on England….remember what England was. It is already on the fast track to being taken over and controlled by Islamic fundementalists, and by the time that population realizes they have been snookered by their own government, it will be too late. It is too late. They are on an irreversable immersion into an Islamic hell of their own making. Politically correct? Not any more. Enslaved by Islam…shaiira law will prevail, and millions of christians will die. Why? because jerks like the Baker Commission dont realize what they are up against. England will fall, western Europe will follow….and we are next. We are the prize for Islamists…we are going to have to fight for our lives. But, you knew that, didnt you? What have you done to stop it as of today? Yeah, I thought so.
November 30th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
You tell em, SJ! And that goes double for their PC running-dog lackeys in this country. You remember the old Norman Greenbaum classic, ‘Spirit in the Sky’? It might need to be modified and updated to fit the times.
‘Whorehouse in the Sky’ lyrics by Professor_Repulso
When I detonate my suicide vest
Gonna get blown to the place that’s the best
After I get blasted sky high
Goin’ on up to the whorehouse in the sky
Goin’ up to the whorehouse in the sky
That’s where the martyrs go when they die
After I slaughter infidels and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that’s the best
Prepare yourselves, all you Muslim lads
Got to have a friend in Muhammad
So you know that when you die
He’s gonna punch your ticket to the whorehouse in the sky
Gonna have big fun in the whorehouse in the sky
But only if you make many infidels die
Help bring down the degenerate, infidel west
You’re gonna go to the place that’s the best
Sorry, I didn’t have enough gas to finish the third stanza.
December 1st, 2006 at 3:50 am
I wonder why no one has stated that the expressed purpose of this war was to oust Saddam. He was enabling terrorists. He had known terrorists living fat and happy in Bagdad. He was paying suicide bombers families. They were training terrorists in Iraq. He either had or was getting ready to fire up a WMD program to make Iran and NoKo blush. He tortured, raped, genocidally killed his own people and to a man everyone on the planet except him and Uday and Qussay (or whaddever da hell their neames were) knew he needed to go. He flaunted his disdain for the UN and countless resolutions. So we went in and took his curry fart smelling ass out.
Now what we have is a situation nobody seems to talk about in terms of what I feel is really the true “nature of the beast” so to speak. The Iraqis are trying to form a government and a bunch of asshats, sh*tbags and others assorted scumsuckers are doing everything they can to stop them.(you can throw Iran and Syria into this stew of puss as well) And the officially elected government of Iraqi is asking us…..no make that begging us to stay and look out for them and help rebuild their sh*t. So because it is tough going and the bad guys won’t just walk out and say “just kidding, let’s all be buddies and have some lamb kabobs” we are going to tell these people to pound sand and bail? Forget about the importance of a democracy popping up in the middle of some of the mist disfunctional people on the freaking planet. Forget about their proximatey to a couple of known sh*tstains on the underoos of the world, Iran and Syria. Forget about the oil reserves they are sitting on that could help us out were they our friends instead of being run by some loon who lloks like he buys his clothes at the freaking Goodwill and just came off a 4 day drunk. How about we remember the simple fact of a little “milk of human kindness” and watch these people’s back until they get their collective sh*t together and can do it for themselves? How about not walking away from something that we know will make Saw I, II and III look like a day at the beach? How about that? How about not looking over our shoulders as we depart at a carnage unrivaled on an epic scale simple because we were too damn impatient, or it cost too much money?
People are clamoring now for somebody, anybody to do something about Darfur. Stop these poor people from being slaughtered. What the hell do they think is going to be going on 5 minutes after the last chopper flies out of Bagdad? What they hell was going on in Bosnia before we intervened? Dame damn thing. And you it wasn’t until just recently that we turned over autority to NATO forces there and freaking Clinton started that little conflict up. Wesley Clark hadn’t become a sniviling whimp yet. He was well on his way but hadn’t completed his metamorphasis just yet. Where was the hand wringing over how many lives and how much “treasure” was lost there? And do they think ANYONE can roll into Darfur and it’s going to be all beer and skittles? Not likely. African Muslims maniacs are just as bloodthirsty if not more than Arab Muslim maniacs. I don’t see Darfur ending and all singing kumbaya in short order. There is going to be major bloodletting there and because of the fact we don’t have “beach heads” near there like we do in Saudi Arabia and Turkey…the costs will probably be exponentially higher. Let Ben Affleck roll that up and hum and Jenny can puff on that for a minute or two.
The “war” in Iraq is over. Was over 3 weeks after it began. We won. We are now helping our new friends in Iraq get their sh*t together and work out the problems they are experiencing getting their government off the ground. Hell they haven’t been able to say boo for 35 years regarding the way they have been treated. Maybe 6 months is a little quick to expect them to be France.
The GWoT continues to this day all over the planet. We are seeing some of the lunatics we need to kill facilitating that endevour by rolling into Iraq and causing a rucus. Good. As hard as it has been to find that buttplug bin Laden, these guys are hooking us up by showing themselves. A good place to look for likely suspects to “terminate with extreme prejedice” would be Sadr City. Why that fat trouble making bastard is still drawing breath is a Mickey Spillane mystery to me.
Bottom line to me is…..Are the Iraqis less deserving of our care and compassion than those in Darfur or Bosnia?
Night,
VoR
December 1st, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Amen, Voice, I have been right with you for a couple of years, singing the same verses to your song.
I don’t even like calling this a war. This if a fight against an insurgency. The war was to topple Saddam. The WMDs he had or was developing was only a side-light, a supporting factor. It was not the reason, and the weight the Administration gave it in justifying the 3-week war was overstated, and became a PR blunder.
To add to your first para as to Saddam’s crimes and reasons it was finally time to dispose of him - our USAF personnel, materiel and aircraft were being run into the ground maintaining the northern and southern no-fly zones for 12 years. The number of unprogrammed hours that airframes flew, the engines that were used, and tempo of folks being stretched thin (and missions elsehwere around the world being negatively impacted) deploying back and forth….it was enough. If only to punish him for non-compliance with the UN resolution, thus forcing our forces into that situation, was enough if you ask me to validate the war to topple Baathist rape of Iraq and Iraqis.
The responsibility for the carnage, loss of life and interruption to lives at home and in Iraq since Saddam fled is solely on the heads of the terrorists, the ousted Baathists, and those who financially and logistically support them from within and from without.
December 2nd, 2006 at 7:54 am
Amen Wam. We rolled through the vaunted Republican Guard and Saffam’s Fedakin like sh*t through a goose. The rest is all basically police work and should be done by NATO or UN peace keepers along side Iraqi police and whatever they will have for an FBI. But they don’t have that mechanism in place right now so what do we do? Leave? I wonder what would be said if we were to go into Darfur, rout the Muslim knuckleheads there just like we did the Taliban and Saddam’s losers and then say aight….peace out. You are on your own. I saw an American general today talking about Bosnia and how we are just seeing them get it together and how we might want to let Iraq have more than 6 months to work out the bugs in their system before we bounce. I wonder what Bosnia and Herzegovina would look like today if we had applied the same faulty standards to prosecuting that conflict. Do you folks remember that war broke out there in April of 1990? The war raged on until the Dayton Accords were signed in November of 1995. With atrocities committed to rival some by Saddam, it was horribly fractuous to the area and its people. It is now 11 years later and the NATO IFOR teams were still there in 2004 making sure they didn’ t start killing each other again. We still have boots on the ground there TODAY hunting for war criminals.
So why does this “quagmire”(giggity giggity….I couldn’t resist) get a pass? Why don’t we hear the constant wailing from the left about “where is Radovan Karadžić or Ratko Mladić?” We hear plenty about the crap of you break it, you bought it…..well in for a penny in for a pound and we went in there and haven’t put the bag on these two yet and they have been at large for over 11 years and while yes, I want to get bin Laden, we should catch these two piles of dog squeeze as well. No my friends, this was Bubba’s war and that’s why no mention is ever made of it. Over 11 years and they haven’t worked all the kinks out of their governments and troops remain there to this day but not a peep out of the Iraq cut and runners. Such selective outrage is very enlightening.
And while the genocidal mayhem in Darfur begs for the WORLD to respond, if anything gets done…….it will be done by us. Throw the UK in there as well and probably Howard will send some Aussies to whoop ass too. Maybe Japan will send some guys too. France?? LMAO Germany??? You have got to be kidding. Russia or China???? Surely you jest. (No I’m serious and don’t call me Shirley…sorry about that one too…couldn’t help myself again) No, the bulk of the work will be shouldered by American fighting men and women or it won’t happen at all. This is a sad fact of reality and when the dust settles and the backbiting, sh*t stirring and political posturing starts it will more than likely be us standing there to suffer more indignities at the hands of the left and Euroweenies who aren’t fit to carry a bucket of our piss.
The more I see these people in their “natural environment”, the more I understand why they are ashamed to be Americans. Were I a Democrat and liberal, I too would be ashamed. I would be ashamed of how I let people be butchered for expediance sake and political correctness. I would be ashamed to see us doing a half-assed job and then bailing out when the going gets tough. But I see us sticking up for people who have nobody else to do it for them and that makes me proud to be an American and since it will always be the right and conservatives who are responsible for this type of response to tyranny and the truly noble and gallant behavior we exhibit, I am pround to call myself a Republican.
Have a good one,
VoR
December 2nd, 2006 at 11:02 am
I shudder to think that we are repeating the huge mistakes of the Viet Nam era. We are being duped again, by the same group of people that duped us before. It makes me sad to see our wonderful military wince as civilians remove their testicles, and then force them to eat them for lunch because they voted no more support for them. Civilians destroyed our military, remember, Carter was only a person elected president….he was never a President.
Now, we have old men, who reflect on the shames of their pasts, trying to atone for their ineptness by showing the world that they are now peaceful and remorseful about being American. They project shame and duplicity and expect the nation to follow. Baker’s team is apologists, appeasers, and tired rhetorical puppets of a liberal public too ignorant to understand the consequences of their actions.
We are capable of doing the job. Our military is the finest in the world, hands down. Look upon them quickly though, for you are about to witness the dismantling and destruction of this military by well meaning, but horribly misguided elected officials, or appointed “experts” to show the world that we are not the bully cowboys we are made out to be….and all we want is to be liked.
We will be liked, as we discover we are no longer able to be economically viable, nor able to defend ourselves, and the defacto civil war that has been so carefully crafted for the past decade breaks out in ernest. Oh yes, they will all like us, because then we will be a weak, diseased, depressed morass of chaos like them….with various factions fighting over the scraps of what was the greatest Nation on earth…..eviscerated and dismembered by it’s own people….ignorant of what utopia is….a dream. Ignorant of what reality is…..hard facts of life. Ignorant of the misery and death they brought upon us all….cant we all just get along? No. We cannot.
December 2nd, 2006 at 11:14 pm
This “study group”, well who’s the members? I counted less than 2 with conservative backgrounds. The majority is DNC and most of the rest were RINO. Formed at the behest of George H. Bush the 41st to bring the country together by finding any common ground or any semblance of a plan in the DNC cadre. What an idiotic idea.
George W. Bush should have a national address to the nation and in conclusion resign over the DNC’s lack of a plan to lead the nation in wartime and the DNC’s refusal to conduct the war.
The DNC lies, we will die.