Tag: troop withdrawal
Danziger: Long Way Home

Danziger: Long Way Home

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

Iraq Cleric To Followers: Stop Attacking US Troops

BAGHDAD (AP) — An anti-American cleric is urging his followers to stop attacking U.S. troops in Iraq so that their withdrawal from the country isn’t slowed down, a call meant to ramp up pressure on Baghdad’s political leaders who are considering asking some American forces to stay.

In a statement posted on his website, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr told his militias to halt attacks against U.S. forces till the withdrawal is finished at the end of the year as required under a security agreement between Washington and Baghdad.

“Out of my desire to complete Iraq’s independence and to finish the withdrawal of the occupation forces from our holy lands, I am obliged to halt military operations of the honest Iraqi resistance until the withdrawal of the occupation forces is complete,” al-Sadr said in the statement, posted late Saturday. Sadrist lawmaker Mushraq Naji confirmed the statement on Sunday.

However, al-Sadr warned that “if the withdrawal doesn’t happen … the military operations will be resumed in a new and tougher way.”

The statement followed last week’s notice by U.S. officials in Baghdad, announcing the start of the withdrawal.

There are currently about 45,000 U.S. forces in Iraq.

However, U.S. and Iraqi leaders are currently weighing whether some American troops should remain past the Dec. 31 deadline as Baghdad continues to struggle with instability and burgeoning influence from neighboring Iran. Last month, Iraqi leaders began negotiating with U.S. officials in Baghdad to keep at least several thousand troops in Iraq to continue training the nation’s shaky security forces.

Officials in Washington say President Barack Obama is willing to keep between 3,000 and 10,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. But with fewer than four months before the final deadline, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and parliament still have not indicated how many U.S. troops Iraq might need, how long they would stay, or exactly what they would be doing.

After more than eight years of war, many weary Iraqis are ready to see U.S. troops go, and staunchly defend their national sovereignty against an American force they see as occupiers. Al-Sadr’s followers vehemently oppose a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq, and walked out of last month’s meeting where political leaders decided to open the talks on having American troops stay.

“Our goal has been always to fight the occupiers because they are still in our country,” Naji said Sunday.

Still, other Iraqi officials privately say they want American troops to continue training the nation’s security forces for months, if not years, to come. The president of Iraq’s northern Kurdish region this week pleaded for U.S. forces to stay to ward off threats of renewed sectarian violence.

Many Iraqis — both Sunnis and Shiites — share that fear.

“As for me, and the sheiks of Nasiriyah, we want the U.S. Army to stay,” Sheik Manshad al-Ghezi of the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah said in a recent interview. “We are afraid of civil war. All the parties and groups in Iraq are armed and the Iraqi Army cannot manage to bring security to Iraq and stop the fighting among these parties.”

In another statement posted Sunday, a Shiite militia controlled by Iran jeered calls for U.S. troops to stay. The group ridiculed a warning last week by Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani that raised the specter of civil war if American forces leave Iraq. Kurds have long depended on U.S. troops to protect them, going back to Saddam Hussein’s rule.

“When the (U.S.) occupation gets out of the country with his agents, the Iraqi nation will be unified,” an unidentified leader for Kataib Hezbollah, which operates in Iraq, wrote on the militia’s website. “Whoever calls for keeping the occupation is linking his destiny with the occupation and has sold himself as cheap, and he should leave the country with his masters.”

Violence has dropped dramatically across Iraq from just a few years ago, but deadly bombings and shootings still happen every day.

Late Sunday, police said a roadside bomb targeting a security patrol killed a passer-by and two police in Baghdad’s eastern Shiite Shamaayah area. Three more police were among eight others who were wounded, officials said.

The casualties were confirmed by a medic at Imam Ali hospital. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Obama, Iraqis Face Difficult Decisions As Troop Withdrawal Deadline Nears

The deadline for troop withdrawal in Iraq is approaching at the end of the year, but calls from military leaders and people within Iraq have minimized the chances that all U.S. soldiers will actually leave.

According to a 2008 security agreement between the United States and Iraq, all of the current 45,000 U.S. troops should be out of the country by Dec. 31, 2011. But even though no U.S. troops were killed in Iraq in August, the country remains plagued by internal violence. Last month, at least 70 Iraqis were killed in a single day, as suicide bombings, roadside explosions, and shootings swept across the country. Many have said that such strife is evidence of the work to still be done in Iraq before the America ends its presence there.

The prospect of a full withdrawal is particularly daunting for Kurds in the north, who fear that the ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence of the past will be intensified if American forces leave. Recent tensions with Turkey and subsequent attacks have made Kurds even less confident in their political future and skeptical that peace will come quickly. Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq, made a televised appeal Tuesday, urging U.S. troops to stay past the Dec. 31 deadline because the Iraqi military is still not powerful or cohesive enough. “If the American forces withdraw, there will be a possibility of civil war,” he said.

The Iraqi government must formally request for the United States to stay beyond the deadline, according to the 2008 agreement. Despite the Kurdish worries, an extension of U.S. troop presence is unpopular among most Iraqis, so leaders have so far been reluctant to make a firm decision.

The question is also eliciting strong reactions here at home, where millions of Americans believe the war was unnecessary and unjust. While Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said that discussions are ongoing, rumors about decreasing troop levels have already elicited strong reactions. Fox News cited anonymous sources in saying that Obama will reduce the presence to 3,000 troops at the end of the year. According to the report, generals on the ground believe such a low number will pose significant challenges to maintaining peace in Iraq.

The extent of Iraq troop withdrawals this year is critical to Obama’s reelection hopes. Back in 2008, he set himself apart from the other Democratic presidential hopefuls by highlighting his opposition to the Iraq War and his commitment, if elected, to complete troop withdrawal. The president officially ended combat operations in Iraq last year, and he reasserted his commitment to bringing all troops home by the end of 2011.

Now Obama must decide whether to maintain a military presence in Iraq and jeopardize his already-waning support from anti-war progressives. If the 3,000 troops number is true, it reflects how torn the administration is about keeping American forces there: The number is basically as close to zero as Obama could get without fully pulling out and risking the potential chaos of which generals and Kurds have warned. The Iraq troop withdrawal debate might end up as another one of the president’s efforts to please both sides with a compromise that, in the end, leaves everyone dissatisfied.

Panetta: Al Qaeda On The Ropes

Perhaps laying the groundwork for a more aggressive withdrawal scheme from Afghanistan, newly-installed Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says Al Qaeda is nearly defeated:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing the group’s 10 to 20 remaining leaders.

Arriving in Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa.

“If we can be successful at going after them, I think we can really undermine their ability to do any kind of planning to be able to conduct any kinds of attack on this country,” Panetta told reporters on his way to Afghanistan aboard a U.S. Air Force jet. “That’s why I think” that defeat of Al Qaeda is “within reach,” he added.

Panetta, having overseen the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, finds himself the only Democrat in recent memory with impeccable national security credentials; he even cleared the Senate unanimously, an incredible feat these days. This may provide him–and Obama–the political cover needed to ramp-up the drawdown from Afghanistan, which his predecessor, Bob Gates, declined to do. The defense secretary’s trip continued in Iraq yesterday where he said Iranian weapons were contributing to the escalating campaign of violence against U.S. troops, scheduled to depart in their entirety by the end of the year unless the Iraqi government requests otherwise.