WASHINGTON — President Bush plans to keep U.S. troop levels in Iraq near their current level through the end of the year and will pull home about 8,000 U.S. troops by February when the next president will be in charge of wartime decision-making.
If security in Iraq keeps improving, Bush says, “additional reductions will be possible in the first half of 2009.”
The president’s decisions amount to perhaps his last major troop strategy in a war that has come to define his presidency.
He was to announce the details in a speech today, the text of which was released in advance by the White House.
One Marine battalion, numbering about 1,000 troops, will go home on schedule in November and not be replaced. An Army brigade of between 3,500 and 4,000 troops will leave in February. Accompanying that combat drawdown will be the withdrawal of about 3,400 support forces.
The measured reduction — slower in scope and pace than many Democrats in Congress would like — gives the military some flexibility to shift forces into Afghanistan.
“Here is the bottom line: While the enemy in Iraq is still dangerous, we have seized the offensive, and Iraqi forces are becoming increasingly capable of leading and winning the fight,” Bush said in remarks prepared for delivery to the National Defense University in Washington.
In Iraq, meanwhile, the Shiite-led government promised Monday to continue paying salaries of thousands of mostly Sunni fighters who have turned against al-Qaeda but said the U.S. figure on their numbers was too high.
The emergence of those groups, which include former insurgents and ex-Saddam Hussein loyalists, was a key factor behind the decline in violence, especially in areas where al-Qaeda and other Sunni militants once ruled. But the Shiite-led government remains suspicious of the Awakening Councils, believing they are little more than armed Sunni militias that could someday turn their guns on the Shiites.
In an order issued Monday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pledged to integrate about 20 percent of the Awakening Council volunteers into the army or police and find government jobs for the rest as vacancies appear.
The U.S. military believes there are about 99,000 Awakening Council members, based on a head count this year. The U.S. gathered iris scans and other information on each volunteer fighter to make sure the list was accurate, U.S. military officials say.
“We think the publicly announced figure is incorrect and there are bogus lists of members who get salaries from the Americans,” chief government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told al-Arabiya television late Sunday.
He said the government believed the real figure was no more than 50,000 — or about half the American count. He also suggested some members may be purged.
“We need to separate the bad elements inside the Awakening Councils,” al-Dabbagh said. “There are groups that work in the name of Awakening Councils, but they attack other council members.”
