Washington – President Bush on Tuesday announced plans to shift more U.S. troops to Baghdad to deal with a surge of violence that threatens to drag Iraq into a full-scale civil war.
Bush outlined the latest security plan during a White House visit with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which had been planned to highlight Iraq’s emergence as a free nation.
The intended message was overshadowed by the continuing chaos in Iraq’s capital and al-Maliki’s sharp differences with Bush over U.S. policy in Lebanon.
Bush and his advisers were uncharacteristically blunt in acknowledging that al-Maliki’s plan to end sectarian violence in Baghdad had failed.
Al-Maliki did little to counter downbeat assessments, saying, “God willing, there will be no civil war in Iraq.”
Six weeks after al-Maliki launched an effort to bring Baghdad under control, the violence is worse than ever.
Despite the addition of almost 100,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi troops to the region over the past year, the city’s morgue is receiving nearly twice as many bodies daily as it did a year ago, and bombings of U.S. and Iraqi troops last month were up 44 percent over June 2005, according to reports by Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers.
Sectarian violence has increased dramatically, adding to fears of an all-out conflict between Iraq’s Shiite majority and minority Sunni Muslims.
The rising death toll has tamped down talk of U.S. troop withdrawals and called into question the strategy of shifting security duties to Iraqi forces.
“Obviously, the violence in Baghdad is still terrible, and therefore, there needs to be more troops,” Bush said. He said additional units would be shifted from other parts of Iraq to join Iraqi reinforcements in the capital.
White House officials said commanders in Iraq hadn’t decided how many troops would be needed, but unofficial estimates were as high as a few thousand.
One defense official said one component of the beefed-up force would be four companies of military policemen – about 440 – who would be shifted to Baghdad. The official, who asked not to be named because the plan hadn’t yet been announced, said it was unclear whether the military policemen would be used to patrol Baghdad’s streets or train Iraqi security forces.
Another group of about 400 soldiers, mostly engineers, communications specialists and other support personnel, would shift from Kuwait to Iraq to replace the soldiers moving into Baghdad.
“We don’t think a civil war has begun. Is there a problem? Yes,” national-security adviser Stephen Hadley said. “Death squads and armed gangs are going around murdering people, kidnapping people, sometimes in broad daylight.”
The problems in Iraq dominated al-Maliki’s discussions at the White House, but some members of Congress said they also were troubled by al-Maliki’s failure to denounce Hezbollah, the Islamic group that uses Lebanon as a base for attacks on Israel.
Some Democrats threatened to boycott al-Maliki’s speech to a joint session of Congress today if he fails to first denounce Hezbollah – a step he pointedly declined to take during Tuesday’s White House visit. The United States considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization and blames it for the crisis in Lebanon.
