WASHINGTON, Dec 9: The Bush administration plans to send additional troops to Baghdad, contrary to the suggestion of a bipartisan panel which advised it to begin a gradual withdrawal by 2008, US media reported on Saturday.
But in his weekly radio address on Saturday, President George W. Bush promised to seriously consider every recommendation in the Iraq Study Group’s report submitted to him on Wednesday.
“My administration is reviewing the report, and we will seriously consider every recommendation,” said Mr Bush.
A front-page report in the Washington Post, however, gave a different perspective of the administration’s thinking. The report said that the administration was focusing on three main options in its search for a new strategy for Iraq, all three different from those recommended by the bipartisan commission.
Under the new strategy, Washington intends to send 15,000 to 30,000 additional troops to secure Baghdad and accelerate the training of Iraqi forces. The United States already has more than 140,000 troops in Iraq.
The second option is to redirect the US military away from the internal strife to focus mainly on hunting insurgents.
The third option requires Washington to refocus its efforts on consolidating its ties with the majority Shias and abandon its attempts to reach out to Sunni insurgents.
In its weekly radio address, President Bush also gave a new interpretation of the Iraq Study Group’s report. He said that, like him, the Iraq Study Group was against “a precipitous withdrawal” from Iraq. His interpretation differs greatly from that of the report’s authors who focused mainly on the need to disengage US troops from Iraq.
Mr Bush, however, believed that the group opposed an immediate withdrawal because it felt that “such a withdrawal would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and lead to a significant power vacuum.”
Mr Bush said the group also warned that if the US were to "leave and Iraq descends into chaos, the long-range consequences could eventually require the United States to return”.
The president recalled that the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council were finishing their own reviews of America’s strategy in Iraq and he wanted to hear `all advice’ before charting a new course.
Meanwhile, several Democratic leaders, who met Mr Bush on Friday, said they believe the president was not yet ready to accept a substantially different approach.
“Someone has to get the message to this man that there has to be significant changes,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Democratic majority leader. He said Mr Bush also indicated that he was not receptive to the study group report, which Mr Reid said was written by “Democrats and Republicans with wide-ranging experience”.
