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The White House confirmed Monday that Pentagon planners are preparing a plan for a phased pullout of US troops from Iraq in case the current “surge” strategy fails or is undercut by Congress.
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe cited Secretary of Defense Robert Gates saying it would be irresponsible for the United States to not have considered a fallback plan if the current escalation in troop levels fails to achieve the goal of quelling violence in the country.
“Gates addressed this last week, that it would be negligent not to be thinking about various possible outcomes for the future,” he said.
Gates and the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, “have addressed this repeatedly. We're focused on the current plan that is just getting started. It will take several months before we are able to assess results,” he said.
Speaking from Guatemala, where President George W. Bush was on the latest stop of his Latin America tour, Johndroe was addressing a report in the Los Angeles Times that the US had developed an alternative pullout strategy based in part on the US experience in El Salvador in the 1980s.
During the 1981-1992 El Salvador civil war, the United States deployed a small contingent of 55 Special Forces Green Berets to aid the Salvadoran military in its fight against leftist rebels.
The report said that some historians believed that their presence had helped the United States to gradually professionalize the Salvadoran army and curb its abuses while avoiding a large-scale US military involvement.
A drawdown of forces in Iraq, the LA Times said, would be in line with comments made last month by Gates, who told Congress that if the surge of 21,500 combat soldiers failed, the backup plan would include moving troops “out of harm's way.”
Such a plan would also be close to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, of which Gates was a member before his appointment to the Pentagon, the paper said.
“This part of the world has an allergy against foreign presence,” the report quotes a senior Pentagon official as saying of Iraq.
“You have a window of opportunity that is relatively short. Your ability to influence this with a large US force eventually gets to the point that it is self-defeating.”
But Johndroe minimized the significance of the report. “This story appears to focus on one study, one area people are looking into,” he said.
The new round of planning is taking place in an atmosphere of extraordinary tension within the Pentagon, the LA Times said, citing unnamed military officials and Pentagon consultants.
Some support the new commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who advocates using more US forces. Others back General John Abizaid, the retiring Central Command chief, who favored handing over security responsibilities to Iraqis.
Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Peter Pace, has made several references to El Salvador in recent congressional hearings and private Pentagon meetings, the newspaper said.
The senior Pentagon official said Pace's repeated references were a signal that in the chairman's view, success in Iraq might not depend on more combat troops, according to the report.
The “surge” announced in January by President George W. Bush calls for sending 21,500 additional combat troops and several thousand more support forces in order to pacify Baghdad and other key parts of the country.
