Deals quietly setting stage for ‘enduring’ stay in Iraq

Published 2:44 pm Monday, December 3, 2007

By Staff
President George W. Bush last Monday, Nov. 26, signed a deal laying the foundation for what the Associated Press termed a "potential long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq."
Guardsmen at the Dowagiac Armory are mobilizing for deployment in January.
Details are to be negotiated over matters that have defined the war debate at home – how many U.S. forces will stay in the country, and for how long.
The agreement between Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki confirms the United States and Iraq will hash out an "enduring" relationship in military, economic and political terms.
Details of that relationship will be negotiated in 2008, with a July completion goal.
That's when the U.S. intends to finish withdrawing five combat brigades sent in 2007 as part of the troop "surge" that helped quell sectarian violence.
"What U.S. troops are doing, how many troops are required to do that, are bases required, which partners will join them – all these things are on the negotiating table," said Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, Bush's adviser on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The AP said, "The proposal underlines how the United States and Iraq are exploring what their relationship might look like once the U.S. significantly draws down its troop presence."
In 2006, voters handed Democrats control of the House and Senate because they promised to bring troops home.
A poll Tuesday found 54 percent still favor bringing troops home as soon as possible – unbudged from February.
Forty-three percent said the U.S. is making gains against insurgents, up 13 percentage points from February.
The percentage of people seeing progress reducing civilian casualties has more than doubled to 43 percent, while the number seeing results in preventing civil war is 32 percent – almost double the February level.
A Pew poll last month detected a shift in public perception, as nearly half of the public now believes the U.S. military effort is going well "for the first time in a long time," up from a third in June.
If the troop surge in iraq is working, the battleground at home shifts in ways unthinkable a few months ago, with President Bush off the ropes and Republicans back on offense.
Jeb Bush said as much in Berrien County last week when asked to assess the impact the war would have on 2008 GOP electoral prospects.
Besides Democratic Congress and presidential candidates losing their biggest issue, troop commitments and war funding "could be set on a higher, more permanent trajectory," as the San Francisco Chronicle put it Sunday.
The strategic aim of the surge last January was to politically reconcile Iraqi factions, which hasn't happened. Some analysts say the violence lull is merely a rearming that will explode again once the troop buildup subsides next summer – about the time of the national party conventions.
Others see Iraq on the brink of a cease-fire that will lead to the U.S. military serving as a classic peacekeeping force to stabilize the region.
The surge reached full strength in June with about 162,000 troops.
Even Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chair of the House subcommittee that controls defense spending and a harsh critic of the war, recently returned from Iraq saying, "I think the surge is working."
Violence has receded to pre-civil war levels. Sunni tribes, many of them former insurgents, turned against Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Many former Sunni insurgents in western Iraq and, increasingly, Shiite groups in the south, allied with American forces.
We are aiding militias we once condemned.
Other Iraq experts see something else happening, contending that Gen. David Petraeus traded the goal of a united Iraq for short-term calm that will end if U.S. forces start to leave because it remains a dysfunctional country with unresolved fundamental political issues.
Clearly, one question that needs to be answered is what we are doing in Iraq?
The administration claimed it was to create a unified, stable, democratic, non-sectarian Iraq.
Is that still the mission or has it changed, since bringing violence down does not necessarily equate to an opportunity to bring our troops home?