Last year, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Iraq was deteriorating, said the war was going “very, very well.” It was a telling reminder that Pace was towing the Bush administration line, no matter how foolish it appeared.
Now, Pace is on his way out, and he’s no longer reading from the White House’s talking points.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is expected to advise President Bush to reduce the U.S. force in Iraq next year by almost half, potentially creating a rift with top White House officials and other military commanders over the course of the war.
Administration and military officials say Marine Gen. Peter Pace is likely to convey concerns by the Joint Chiefs that keeping well in excess of 100,000 troops in Iraq through 2008 will severely strain the military. This assessment could collide with one being prepared by the U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, calling for the U.S. to maintain higher troop levels for 2008 and beyond.
Petraeus is expected to support a White House view that the absence of widespread political progress in Iraq requires several more months of the U.S. troop buildup before force levels are decreased to their pre-buildup numbers sometime next year.
Now, James Joyner argues, accurately, that this talk is, in general, not entirely new. Indeed, Defense Secretary Bob Gates talked this week about the “possibility” of a troop drawdown.
But I think Pace’s comments are more significant than James makes them out to be.
For one thing, the entire Bush administration-led establishment is rallying right now behind the notion that the status quo is not only effective, but practically sacrosanct. Freedom’s Watch’s ads, for example, characterize troop withdrawal — any troop withdrawal — as practically inviting another 9/11. We’re this close to seeing our dreams come true in Iraq, they say, so there’s no reason to change anything.
And since those ads were unveiled, we have the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff both calling for a reduction in troop deployments, the latter, by quite a bit. These developments kind of step on Ari Fleischer’s message a bit.
Moreover, Spencer Ackerman notes the broader military dynamic.
Pace’s recommendations reflect the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who initially expressed private skepticism about the strategy ordered by Bush and directed by Petraeus, before publicly backing it.
Historians will have to sort out whether Pace always believed that troop levels needed to come down and kept silent or whether he changed his mind after being fired. The senior military leadership, as of late 2006, expressed great skepticism that a surge in troops could appreciably affect the war’s fortunes at an acceptable cost to military readiness. Pace, in public, supported the surge at every turn, telling a governors’ meeting at the White House earlier this year that “Marines don’t talk about failure. They talk about victory.”
The debate now inside the Pentagon is over what to do after the spring, when, as Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the ground forces commander in Iraq, acknowledged last week, a troop reduction is inevitable for readiness reasons. Odierno and others in Iraq believe only the nearly-30,000 surge forces should be withdrawn. Pace will tell President Bush — apparently reflecting the beliefs of the chiefs of the military services — that vastly more troops need to leave Iraq if the U.S. is to be prepared for other military threats.
As a practical matter, I don’t doubt that Bush would be willing to ignore the generals; he’s already done so before. For that matter, Petraeus may not have any qualms at all at distancing himself from the Joint Chiefs.
But as far as the politics is concerned, Pace’s perspective is not at all what the White House wanted to hear.