Baghdad, Iraq – Iraq’s leaders and military will be unable to lead the fight against insurgents until next summer at the earliest, a top U.S. military official said Wednesday, trying to temper hopes that a full-scale American troop withdrawal was imminent as Iraq moves toward elections scheduled for December.
Americans and Iraqis need “to start thinking about and talking about what it’s really going to be like in Iraq after elections,” said the military official, who spoke in an interview on the condition he not be named. “I think the important point is there’s not going to be a fundamental change.”
The official stressed that “it’s important to calibrate expectations post-elections. I’ve been saying to folks: You’re still going to have an insurgency, you’re still going to have a dilapidated infrastructure, you’re still going to have decades of developmental problems both on the economic and the political side.”
U.S. military officials in Iraq said last month that it might be possible to withdraw 20,000 to 30,000 of the 138,000 American troops by spring if Iraqi civilian leaders managed to meet deadlines for drafting a new constitution and holding elections.
On Wednesday, the military official said a significant spring withdrawal was “still possible.”
But while primary military responsibility for some parts of Iraq likely could be handed over even before the elections, the official said, U.S. forces would have to play a lead role in fighting the insurgency for as long as a year.
Even if a new government is elected on time in December, “the earliest they’re going to be capable of running a counterinsurgency campaign is … next summer,” the official said.
The warnings came on a day when the U.S. military reported five American service members killed in action. In addition, a U.S. citizen in Iraq was kidnapped and released, a U.S. official confirmed, and a car bomb in Baghdad killed four Iraqi civilians and three police officers.
Meeting in Baghdad, leaders of Iraq’s factions reported no immediate progress on the key issues – such as how much autonomy regions should have – blocking agreement on a new constitution for the country, with the deadline for the draft’s approval five days away.
“The constitution should be written in time. It is in our benefit to have one word to agree on,” urged Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whose government faces possible dissolution under current accords if drafters miss the Monday deadline.
The existing timeline calls for a national vote on the constitution Oct. 15, to be followed by elections for a full-term government Dec. 15. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed Iraqis again this week to finish the draft constitution on time, after citing ongoing U.S. deaths in combat.
