WASHINGTON, Sept 4: The United States indicated on Tuesday that it may begin withdrawing some troops from Iraq after Ramazan if the country remained peaceful during the fasting month.
The indication followed President George W. Bush’s surprise visit on Monday to Iraq where he also hinted at the possibility of reducing troops if the security situation remains stable. The Bush administration currently maintains 155,000 troops in Iraq but faces tremendous pressure from US lawmakers and others to begin a gradual withdrawal as soon as possible.
Lieutenant-General Ray Odierno, the deputy commander of US-led forces in Iraq, told reporters that the violence in Iraq has already decreased and they are hoping that this Ramazan will be better than previous fasting month.
“Ramadan is big,” Odierno said, adding that what happens in the next 45 days would be important. “So far in the 30 days before Ramazan violence has been going down,” he said. “This year it has been going down. We think this is a trend,” he said.
“So all we have to do is carry this out and see its impact as a whole over time,” before taking a final decision on whether and how to reduce the troops. Monday’s visit was Mr Bush’s first trip to Iraq not involving a stop in the capital, Baghdad. Instead he visited the former insurgent stronghold of Anbar province. His visit indicates a new US approach to the war, which focuses less on Baghdad and more on various provinces where the United States hopes to create local pockets of support. Mr Bush referred to this new US approach when he told reporters in Anbar: “You see Sunnis who once fought side by side with Al Qaeda against coalition troops now fighting side by side with coalition troops against al Qaeda.”
Washington believes that it has succeeded in convincing Anbar’s tribal leaders, who once supported Al Qaeda, in switching over to their side and hopes to emulate this in other places. But observers warned that the success in Anbar may be an isolated case, the result of a split between an Al Qaeda umbrella organisation called the Islamic State of Iraq and the rest of the Sunni guerrilla movement. It would be difficult to replicate this approach in other places.
US policy makers describe their new approach as the “soft partition” strategy or simply as the “regional approach”. Advocates of “soft partition,” including some in the US Congress, argue that the United States should take advantage of the mass exodus of Sunnis and Shias who are trying to save their lives by fleeing from each other.
The new strategy calls for deploying US troops between hostile groups fleeing from each other to prevent more fighting but critics say that this approach could further disintegrate the Iraqi society, which is already partitioned on ethnic and sectarian lines.
In an article published on Monday, Washington Post pointed out that some in the Iraq government were not happy with the US decision to help Sunni militants fight the Al Qaeda.
“There are those inside the (Iraqi) government that might want to characterise this as arming a Sunni opposition to the Shia-based (Iraqi) government,” a senior US defence official told the Post.
The Los Angeles Times noted that the Bush administration’s ‘surge’ policy is only able to keep a lid on violence as long as the US troops are there. “Once the military surge peters out, which it will if there is no progress on the political front,” Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group told the paper, “these groups will pop right back up and start going at each other’s, and civilians’, throats again”.