Iraq panel to recommend U.S. pull back from combat
Source: Reuters
By Arshad Mohammed WASHINGTON, Nov 30 (Reuters) - The Iraq Study Group has decided to recommend the U.S. military transition from a combat to a support role in Iraq roughly over the next year, a source familiar with the panel's deliberations said. The recommendation by the independent, bipartisan panel would be to pull U.S. fighting forces back to bases inside Iraq, and in the region, as the U.S. military sought to begin to withdraw from combat, the source said on Wednesday. "The main thing is (the group is) calling for a transition from a combat role to a support role," said the source, who asked not to be named because the recommendations are not due to be released until Dec. 6. "It's basically a redeployment." Many in Washington have held out hope that the group's report would provide a way for the United States to extricate itself from an increasingly deadly and unpopular war or, at least, a set of recommendations on how to move forward that could attract support from both Democrats and Republicans. Their conclusions are likely to carry significant political weight even if U.S. President George W. Bush chooses to ignore them, especially after his fellow Republicans lost control of the U.S. Congress in Nov. 7 elections largely because of deep public discontent with the Iraq war. The New York Times earlier reported that there was no hard timetable for the proposed U.S. pullback, but the source said: "There is a kind of indication in the report as to when that ought to be completed ... sometime within the next year." The newspaper said the pullback of the 15 U.S. combat brigades in Iraq could still leave more than 70,000 American trainers, logistics experts and members of a rapid reaction force in the country. The source declined to say whether the report recommended the withdrawal of specific numbers of U.S. troops. REGIONAL CONFERENCE He said the group's recommendations would include a call for a regional conference that could lead to direct U.S. talks with Iran and Syria, both accused by the United States of fomenting violence in Iraq. The 10-member panel is led by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican and close Bush family friend, and by former Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat. Bush, who has ordered up his own parallel reviews by the Pentagon and the White House National Security Council, has said he is willing to make adjustments and listen to the suggestions of others, including the Iraq Study Group. But he has shown little appetite for a major change in strategy such as pulling out U.S. forces. Some Democrats have urged a phased withdrawal beginning in four to six months. There are now roughly 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and more than 2,800 have been killed since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. "We'll continue to be flexible, and we'll make the changes necessary to succeed," Bush said in Latvia on Tuesday. "But there's one thing I'm not going to do: I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete." Bush and White House aides also have so far spurned the idea of Washington negotiating directly with Syria and Iran to stabilize Iraq. Their message has been that such talks should be left to the sovereign government of Iraq and that the United States, as an outsider, should not interfere. As expectations for the Iraq Study Group soared and bloodshed in Iraq reached new heights in November, analysts and experts said there was no magic bullet to resolve the crisis and that the panel was facing a virtually impossible task. "I think the odds that it will get much worse, that we can't contain it, are considerably better than even," Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters on Wednesday. He also offered a deeply pessimistic assessment of Iraqi forces' ability to provide security in the short term, saying: "The reality is that out of the supposed Iraqi battalions, which are formed, and in the lead, only a small fraction actually exist and have combat capability."
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