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With violence spiking in Iraq and no end in sight, the United States is uneasily adjusting for a longer, more difficult fight that could tie down US ground forces for four more years.
General George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, served notice in Washington this week that levels of violence there have never been higher and are likely to stay high for some time.
Gunmen massacred nine staff members of a Baghdad satellite television firm Thursday, another day of car bombings and killings that have intensified during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
“We assume it will still get worse before its get better,” said Major General William Caldwell, the US military spokesman in Baghdad. “We expect violence to continue to increase over the next two weeks, until the end of Ramadan.”
Bringing the violence under control, Casey said here Wednesday, “is going to be a long-term process. It's not going to be something that we're going to get done quickly.”
The bleak outlook is fueling intense election year pressures in the united States for a change in course in Iraq.
With an increasingly bipartisan clamor for an exit strategy, President George W. Bush said at a press conference Wednesday that he agreed completely with a top Republican senator that “if the plan is now not working … America needs to adjust.”
Bush said he told Casey he strongly supported his plan to pacify Baghdad.
“But if you come into this office and say we need to do something differently, I support you. If you need more troops, I support you. If you're going to devise a new strategy, we're with you,” Bush said.
Casey told reporters the current strategy of gradually shifting the security burden from US troops to Iraqi forces, which now number some 300,000, was still a “valid framework.”
But he acknowledged that he has had to shelve plans to draw down US troops from Iraq and instead keep a larger-than-expected 142,000-member force to restore order in Baghdad.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the military “is looking at these various sensitivities. And we're looking around corners up ahead and asking ourselves how we would do things.”
A key question now facing General Casey is whether to bring in more US troops amid fears that the sectarian violence is getting worse, not better, with dozens of bodies showing signs of torture turning up on the streets Baghdad every day.
“It's a tough nut, whether or not bringing in more troops, more US troops, will have a significant long term impact on the violence,” Casey said.
Boosting up troops in Baghdad has dampened the violence there somewhat.
“But whether more US troops for a sustained period will get us where we're going faster is an open question, and that's part of the calculations that I make as I go through this,” Casey said.
But another unstated part of the calculation is that extra troops are not readily available.
After a military intelligence assessment leaked last month warning that the situation in Iraq's western Al-Anbar province was dire, military commanders said the main effort was Baghdad and they had no more troops to spare.
“Where would you like to get them from?” General John Abizaid, the commander of US forces, said to reporters here.
The army's chief of staff, General Peter Schoomaker, said the army has drawn up plans for troop rotations to Iraq that would maintain the force at its current size through 2010.
If conditions improve, US force levels in Iraq could come down. But Schoomaker said “I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot.”
If more combat troops are needed, either because of a further deterioration of the security situation in Iraq or an emergency elsewhere, the army will be squeezed.
Schoomaker said the army can surge to meet any foreseeable contingency, but the cost will be freezing deployed units in place.
With 23 of the army's 36 combat brigades deployed worldwide, the army is having to rotate them with only about a year and a half between combat tours to rest, re-equip and train.
Schoomaker, who is seeking a huge boost in the army's budget, is calling for an acceleration of the service's efforts to re-organize and equip itself for what he sees as an increasingly dangerous world.
Even so, he said, it would take a decade to increase the army's size by 100,000 troops.
