DRAW DOWN IN 2008?

I've written before about how the Iraq War is hurting our ground forces and I expected there to be severe problems this year but instead we got the Bush Surge. Today, the NY Times reported a possible shift on troop deployments:

White House Is Said to Debate ’08 Cut in Iraq Troops by 50%

By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID S. CLOUD

Published: May 26, 2007

WASHINGTON, May 25 — The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.

The mission would instead focus on the training of Iraqi troops and fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, while removing Americans from many of the counterinsurgency efforts inside Baghdad.

Officials say proponents of reducing the troops and scaling back their mission next year appear to include Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They have been joined by generals at the Pentagon and elsewhere who have long been skeptical that the Iraqi government would use the opportunity created by the troop increase to reach genuine political accommodations.

“It stems from a recognition that the current level of forces aren’t sustainable in Iraq, they aren’t sustainable in the region, and they will be increasingly unsustainable here at home,” said one administration official who has taken part in the closed-door discussions.

Missing from much of the current discussion is talk about the success of democracy in Iraq, officials say, or even of the passage of reconciliation measures that Mr. Bush said in January that the troop increase would allow to take place. In interviews, many senior administration and military officials said they now doubted that those political gains, even if achieved, would significantly reduce the violence.

A rapid transfer of responsibility to Iraqi forces and withdrawal to large bases was attempted in 2005 and 2006, with disastrous results when the Iraqi units proved incapable of halting major attacks, and sectarian violence worsened.


The White House quickly downplayed this idea:

White House plays down report of Iraq troop cut
Sat May 26, 2007 2:21PM EDT
By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Saturday played down a newspaper report that the Bush administration was weighing a scenario for possibly sharp cuts in U.S. troop levels in Iraq next year.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino noted that..."We, of course, would like to be in a position to bring down troop levels, but certain conditions, as assessed by senior military advisers and commanders on the ground, need to be met to warrant that," she said in an e-mail in response to a Reuters query.

The LA Times reported back in March that military planners were working on a fallback plan that would reduce the number of troops in Iraq, so it seems this debate has been going on for a while.