Calculated guesses about Iraq await next U.S. president

WASHINGTON -- In little-noticed testimony last week, top military and diplomatic experts painted a vivid picture of how tight a bind the United States now finds itself in, how precarious is the position of U.S. soldiers and how difficult are the decisions the next president will face.

Gen. David Petraeus is widely applauded for rescuing U.S. policy in Iraq from catastrophe last year. Yet stalemates in Iraq and in Washington leave an unspoken objective: Keep a lid on the violence through the U.S. election.

If that can be achieved, the next president's options are more limited than implied by the debate between Republican Sen. John McCain, who wants to continue the current course to victory, and Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who promise to withdraw at least a combat brigade a month. There are 18 such brigades now there.

The strain on U.S. ground forces is near a breaking point, Pentagon officials warn, which would present a President McCain with excruciating trade-offs between preserving order in Iraq and the military he cherishes. Much as presumptive GOP nominee McCain talks about victory versus defeat, there is universal agreement that current troop levels are unsustainable.

But a President Obama or a President Clinton would face at best a calculated guess about what would happen as U.S. troops leave: Would the retreat open space for Iraqis to reconcile and allow the Iraqi army to fill the breach, or would Americans find themselves in a dangerous race for the border?

And where is that tipping point? Is it 120,000 U.S. troops, or 100,000 or 50,000? Would they find themselves fighting down 400 miles of hostile terrain with refugees behind them, battling Iranian Quds forces in civilian dress, as some experts say might happen?

"It's a hell of a mess," retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. "The Iraqi government is dysfunctional, the Iraqi security forces are inadequate, ill-equipped, and we've got very little time. By the way, I'm not recommending we come out of Iraq in a year or three. That's what's going to happen. This thing is over."

McCaffrey said the question is how to stage the withdrawal. "We're going to see some Iraqi two-star general in charge of Iraq three years from today," he predicted, some "hot-shot division commander" who seizes control. The best hope is that it is not another Saddam Hussein.

"People have got to look at starting the war and ending the war as separate problems," said Conrad Crane, director the U.S. Army Military History Institute. "The fact that the war should not have been launched is a separate question from how you pull out."

Obama and Clinton, for their part, call for a steady withdrawal but do not stress the difficulties of a retreat of 150,000 troops with billions of dollars of equipment that cannot be left behind. Add to that well over 100,000 contractors and other civilians that support them. Commanders said a retreat is among the most dangerous military operations.

"I have for sometime wondered if Baghdad would end up looking like Dien Bien Phu one of these days," said retired Gen. William Odom, recalling the massacre of the French army in Vietnam. Urging a total withdrawal, Odom said keeping training troops in Iraq is dangerous. "Talk to some NCOs (noncommissioned officers) and officers who've actually trained them out there," he said. "They fear for their life when they're living and working close with Iraqi forces."

What if an Iraqi tank battalion wheels around and aims its U.S. guns on its contingent of U.S. trainers, experts asked. Are they to call for help from forces in Kuwait?

Once U.S. combat forces drop below seven brigades, "Get out of there," McCaffrey warned. "Leave the Green Zone protected with a Marine battalion, and come out, because I don't want to see us end up ... where we lose 5,000 U.S. trainers some night, when a division announces it's no longer part of the Iraqi army, it's now a Shia militia unit. ... The only reality in Iraq is raw military power."

This is why some experts predict Obama or Clinton would renege on their promise to withdraw.

"Don't think either Democratic candidate can possibly deliver what voters expect them to," said Timothy Lomperis, a former intelligence officer now at St. Louis University.

"You remove the steadying hand, and you've got the Shiite Badr Brigade versus the Mahdi Army trying to get rid of the occupiers, and if the Mahdi Army sees us leaving and pulling out firepower, they'll go after the remaining American units there. When the Sunnis see us pull out and withdraw support from the government, the insurgents are going to go after the Shiites. ...

Differences of opinion among knowledgeable people about what might follow a withdrawal are startling, even among those who advocate one.

Some dismiss McCain's alarms about a terrorist safe haven in Iraq as grossly overstated, saying nearly all Iraqi groups hate and will kill al Qaeda in Iraq if U.S. forces leave.

Scales, the former Army War College commandant, said Iraqis are closely following the U.S. election and "understand that they now have responsibility for what happens in the future" and can do so with a trained army.

Odom sees no such prospect. Iraq has less cohesion, not more, since the United States began arming various factions. "We do not own these people," he said. "We rent them."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)