Bush embraces pause in Iraq troop cutbacks
Foreign Desk Report

WASHINGTON—Taking the advice of his top commander in Iraq, President Bush will not order additional troop drawdowns beyond July, leaving open the possibility that about 140,000 U.S. servicemen and women will still be in the war zone when the next president takes office.
In a 12- to 15-minute progress report, Bush on Thursday will announce shorter combat tours, but troops already in Iraq won’t be going home any earlier, at least for now. Senior defense officials said Bush would order Army units heading to Iraq after Aug. 1 to serve 12-month tours rather than their current 15-month deployment — a move that war critics say the president had to make to ease strain on the Army.
Bush will deliver his speech in the Cross Hall of the White House, five years after the U.S. capture of Baghdad. His words will echo the congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, and U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker.
Petraeus told Congress that it’s too early to talk about future drawdowns because the situation in Iraq remains fragile, and that while security has improved and Iraqi forces are shouldering more of the fight against extremists, Iraq still could descend again into chaos.
After Petraeus’ earlier war update in September, Bush said that the additional troops he ordered to Iraq had improved security enough that they could be pulled out by the end of July. That would bring the current level of 160,000 troops in Iraq now to about 140,000 in July. Beyond that, Petraeus wants a 45-day period of “consolidation and evaluation,” to be followed by an indefinite period of assessment before he would recommend any further pullouts.
“The president will accept Gen. Petraeus’ recommendation that we continue to bring troops home as planned, going down from 20 to 15 brigades, and then there will be a very brief period of assessment and consolidation before more recommendations on drawdowns — based on conditions on the ground — are announced,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday.
Bobby Muller, president of Veterans for America, said waiting until after the summer to return to 12-month tours will do nothing to relieve the burden on troops currently on 15-month stints, including some who are not scheduled to return home until the summer of 2009.
“Almost half of the active-duty Army’s frontline units are currently deployed for 15 months. Three of these units are on their fourth tour. Almost all have served at least twice,” he said. “This is the group of soldiers that has borne an immense, disproportionate burden from our wars. This is the group of soldiers that desperately needs a break — now.”
Bush had breakfast with Petraeus and Crocker in his private dining room, capping two days of televised exchanges on Capitol Hill that the two had with lawmakers, including the three senators vying to become next occupant of the Oval Office: Republican John McCain and Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
By embracing Petraeus’ advice, Bush will refrain from ordering any more troop cutbacks before mid- to late-September at the earliest. Even then, flare-ups in violence and a need to keep Iraq’s provincial elections safe this fall could mean the president will not be able to withdraw any more troops until late this year, if at all.
In his speech, Bush will make the case that his troop buildup has succeeded in reducing violence in Iraq, despite recent increases in Baghdad and Basra. He’ll have a harder time arguing that political reconciliation — his rationale for sending 30,000 more troops to Iraq last year — has been achieved.
Even before Bush made his announcement, war critics went on the attack. “We are six years into a war that has claimed more than 4,000 American lives ... cost nearly a trillion dollars that could have been used to meet urgent needs at home and damaged the reputation of the United States in the eyes of the world,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote to Bush in a letter she released late Wednesday. “General Petraeus admitted on Tuesday that `we haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel’ in Iraq.