[Mb-civic] Diminishing the U.S. Footprint - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Diminishing the U.S. Footprint

By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 19, 2006; B07

Two important and related changes in the Bush administration's strategy 
for the long war on global terrorism emerged here last week. One tiptoed 
in quietly. The other came with trumpets blaring for political effect. 
It might have worked better the other way around.

The quiet change was suggested in classified briefings for friendly 
diplomats and visiting foreign officials: U.S. troops will be moving out 
of Iraq's streets and then out of Iraq's cities by the end of this year 
as part of a coordinated drawing down and concentration of all foreign 
forces. Troops from Italy and other nations will leave the country, and 
a reduced British force will redeploy into a smaller area of operational 
responsibility.

This is part of a new internal exit strategy that President Bush hinted 
at in Monday's Iraq speech. U.S. forces will stay in Iraq beyond 2006 to 
fight al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists who are using Iraq as a 
platform for terrorism. Iraqi units -- operating with U.S. logistical 
assistance from remote locations and embedded command help -- are to be 
given primary responsibility for containing the domestic insurgency. 
This is what Bush calls Iraqis standing up to allow Americans to stand down.

Drawing lines between global and local terrorists will be a difficult 
task, as U.S. officials privately acknowledge. And Iraqi security forces 
and their political leaders, deadlocked in an intensifying power 
struggle, still must demonstrate they can carry out their part of the 
internal exit strategy.

But on its face, that strategy is a coherent way of reducing the foreign 
occupation footprint that fuels much of the conflict in Iraq. It 
realistically scales down what Iraqi units can be expected to 
accomplish: a long-term containment of terrorist attacks to a level that 
does not destroy the country's fraying ethnic and sectarian balances, 
rather than a quick final victory over the rebels. Finally, an internal 
exit is consistent with the administration's newest National Security 
Strategy white paper, released with fanfare Thursday.

The White House has struggled since Sept. 11, 2001, to define with 
precision both the enemy that Americans confront and the path to victory 
they must take in the war on terrorism. The Bush team gets closer with 
this exercise, which portrays the long war as a global ideological 
struggle that hinges on a battle of ideas within and about Islam.

That is change: The words "ideology" and "Islam" were each mentioned 
only twice, and in passing, in the 12,629-word version of the strategy 
document issued in 2002. They are at the conceptual heart of this year's 
paper (longer by one-third), which argues that Washington and its allies 
must "counter the lies behind the terrorists' ideology" by empowering 
"the very people the terrorists most want to exploit: the faithful 
followers of Islam. . . . Responsible Islamic leaders need to denounce 
an ideology that distorts and exploits Islam for destructive ends and 
defiles a proud religion."

Bush himself steered drafters away from any discussion of Islam in the 
earlier paper, I am told, and his concern about attacking another 
religion is reflected in a caveat this year that "the War on Terror is a 
battle of ideas . . . not a battle of religions." But this year's 
realistic acknowledgment of the decisive role of moderate Muslims in 
defeating al-Qaeda and its allies is a welcome adjustment.

The heavy emphasis on ideology -- explicitly al-Qaeda's and implicitly 
Bush's -- is less useful. By proposing democracy as a cure-all for the 
vast frustrations and delusions of al-Qaeda's target audience, the White 
House skips over a lot of the hard work that must still be done to shape 
the military and political battlefields of the long war, trying instead 
to rally U.S. and foreign support for Iraq and Afghanistan.

A new tone of realism about those conflicts has taken hold in internal 
administration discussions of the way forward. Nothing could reassure 
Americans more than publicizing that change.

·

The intensity of the power struggle in Baghdad was brought home to me 
when my phone rang shortly after a column reporting that Prime Minister 
Ibrahim al-Jafari is fighting to keep his job was published last week. 
The president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, was calling to say that he, too, 
is dug in: The Shiite alliance that backs Jafari should present an 
alternative candidate so a "national unity" government can be formed "in 
the next two weeks."

Talabani, an acquaintance of 30 years, would not discuss his reasons for 
opposing Jafari now. But speaking in English, he emphasized that the 
presidency needs new powers to block "extreme demands from the other side."

As they say, stay tuned.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701794.html
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