Doug Lorimer
In a study for the Pentagon, Andrew Krepinevich, a retired US Army officer, concluded that the US Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to defeat the anti-occupation insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the size of its occupation force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realisation that the military was overextended.
Associated Press reported on January 24 that Krepinevich's "136-page report represents a more sobering picture of the army's condition than military officials offer in public. While not released publicly, a copy of the report was provided in response to an Associated Press inquiry."
"You really begin to wonder just how much stress and strain there is on the Army, how much longer it can continue", Krepinevich told AP. He said that even US Army leaders are not sure how much longer they can keep up the unusually high pace of combat tours in Iraq before they trigger an institutional crisis. Some major army divisions are serving their second year-long tours in Iraq, and some smaller units have served three times.
Krepinevich pointed to the army's 2005 recruiting slump — it didn't reach its recruiting goal for the first time since 1999 — and its decision to offer much bigger enlistment bonuses and other incentives.
AP reported that in his study for the Pentagon, Krepinevich wrote that the US Army is "in a race against time" to adjust to the demands of the war in Iraq "or risk 'breaking' the force in the form of a catastrophic decline" in recruitment and re-enlistment.
Confirming Krepinevich's study, General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad on January 26: "The forces are stretched ... and I don't think there's any question of that." However, he also claimed that the US Army could "accomplish its mission" in Iraq.
In Washington, US President George Bush brushed aside talk that the US military could not defeat the Iraqi resistance fighters. "If the question is whether or not we can win victory in Iraq, our commanders will have the troops necessary to do that", he told reporters.
Krepinevich did not conclude that the US military should end its occupation of Iraq, but said it may be possible to reduce troop levels below 100,000 by the end of the year. There are now about 136,000 soldiers in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.
The Pentagon, echoing the White House, claims it has to keep large numbers of US troops in Iraq in order to fight "foreign terrorists" linked to Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda global terrorist network. However, in a public speech given at the US Naval Academy last November 30, Bush acknowledged that "ordinary Iraqis" made up the majority of those fighting the US-led occupation forces.
The January 26 USA Today reported that Major-General Richard Zahner, deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the US-led occupation forces, said that there were 1000 fighters "loyal to al Qaeda in Iraq, of which about 10% are foreign".
Zahner also said that there has been a growing number of clashes between the mainstream Iraqi resistance, which he estimated had 12,000-15,000 full-time guerrilla fighters, and the "al Qaeda in Iraq" fighters. Among the incidents cited were:
- At least six ranking members of al Qaeda in Iraq had been assassinated by nationalist Iraqi fighters in separate incidents since September. The killings were in retaliation for al Qaeda's role in the killing of police recruits, Zahner said.
- In Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's western Anbar province, armed clashes have erupted between local Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda operatives in recent months. At least one high-ranking al Qaeda member, Abu Khatab, was recently run out of Ramadi by local insurgents.
The January 29 Los Angeles Times reported that there were no signs that the conflict in Ramadi between the local resistance fighters and the al-Qaeda-inspired groups had reduced the insurgents' fighting capability. "During a recent 10-day stretch", the LA Times noted, "insurgents staged 113 attacks on US troops here. Mortar rounds rain down almost daily on their base. Marine snipers sit atop the governor's office, dueling with masked men in black who shoot through broken windows of abandoned buildings across the street."
The January 26 Al Hayat reported that a leader of the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution resistance group in Anbar province told the London-based Arabic daily that the "patriotic Iraqi resistance" had set its aim as targeting the US soldiers and other foreign occupation troops. Yet this did not mean that the puppet Iraqi army and police "will be immune from our attacks in case they targeted" the resistance fighters or "treated people badly or assaulted them".
He added that the resistance had "resorted to a new kind of operation reducing the risk for civilians, such as putting explosive charges on roads outside the cities and practising sniping inside the cities". He also said that "the rift between the patriotic resistance and the extremists has worsened progressively", but that "the last straw was the extremists' attack on police recruits in Ramadi, at a time when most resistance fractions in Anbar had met and agreed unanimously on not hurting them as there is a need for police, especially in the city of Ramadi".
From Green Left Weekly, February 8, 2006.
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