We’ve been hearing more and more lately about internal divisions among top U.S. military officials over Iraq policy. The Joint Chiefs of Staff want troop numbers cut in half over the next year, whereas Petraeus sees a massive force staying in Iraq indefinitely. Adm. William J. Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command and Petraeus’ superior, began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops just over a week ago. (The conflict between Petraeus and Fallon was compared by one senior civilian official to “Armageddon.”)
Indeed, McClatchy reported two weeks ago, “In a sign that top commanders are divided over what course to pursue in Iraq, the Pentagon said Wednesday that it won’t make a single, unified recommendation to President Bush during next month’s strategy assessment, but instead will allow top commanders to make individual presentations.”
Apparently, at least one major contingent at the Defense Department is planning to push back against Petraeus’ conclusions — and recommend a very different course.
NEWSWEEK has learned that a separate internal report being prepared by a Pentagon working group will “differ substantially” from Petraeus’s recommendations, according to an official who is privy to the ongoing discussions but would speak about them only on condition of anonymity. An early version of the report, which is currently being drafted and is expected to be completed by the beginning of next year, will “recommend a very rapid reduction in American forces: as much as two-thirds of the existing force very quickly, while keeping the remainder there.”
The strategy will involve unwinding the still large U.S. presence in big forward operation bases and putting smaller teams in outposts. “There is interest at senior levels [of the Pentagon] in getting alternative views” to Petraeus, the official said. Among others, Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon is known to want to draw down faster than Petraeus.
This is not only interesting on its face, but it also has political implications — congressional Democrats and Republicans who are tired of backing a policy that doesn’t work can embrace the recommendations of senior military leaders at the Pentagon who want to see a very rapid reduction to U.S. troop numbers.
Petraeus’s draw-down recommendations have outraged critics of the war who accuse him of merely doing Bush’s bidding and adjusting his recommendations to the politics of the Hill. (“General Betray Us,” the leftwing group MoveOn.org called him in a series of newspaper ads on Monday.) Even some supporters of the surge effort wonder whether Petraeus isn’t thinking as much about selling the war as winning it. “It depends on how this recommendation is framed,” said Dan Senor, a former top official with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq who is now working part-time as an adviser to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. “If it’s framed as a recommendation out of a position of strength, that things are going well and therefore we can afford to reduce our troop levels, that’s fine. If, however, it is interpreted as throwing a bone to Congress, in order to placate Congress at expense of our operational capacity, then that’s not good.”
John Arquilla, an intelligence and counterinsurgency expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, is even harsher in his assessment of Petraeus. “I think Colin Powell used dodgy information to get us into the war, and Petraeus is using dodgy information to keep us there,” he said. “His political talking points are all very clear: the continued references he made to the danger of Al Qaeda in Iraq, for example, even though it represents only somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the total insurgency. The continued references to Iran, when in fact the Iranians have had a lot to do with stability in the Shiite portion of the country. And it’s not at all clear why things are a little better now. Is it because there are more troops, or is it because we’re negotiating with the insurgents and have moved to small operating outposts? On any given day we don’t have more than 20,000 troops operating. The glacial pace of reductions beggars the imagination.”
Bush is going to officially embrace Petraeus’ recommendations this week, and I don’t doubt that Bush’s allies will call on Congress to do the same — or risk being labeled “anti-military.”
But therein lies the rub: military officials don’t agree, and many would side with congressional Dems in shaping the policy.
Stay tuned.