Petraeus: 13th MEU to leave Iraq this month - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Petraeus: 13th MEU to leave Iraq this month

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, said Monday he has recommended to President Bush that the drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq begin this month with the departure of a California-based Marine unit.

Petraeus told a joint session of the House armed services and foreign affairs committees that the security situation in Iraq has improved to the point where he has recommended drawing down the 28,500 U.S. troops deployed in Iraq earlier this year.

The U.S. should be able to reduce troop levels to the pre-surge total of roughly 130,000 troops by mid-July 2008, Petraeus told a packed House hearing Monday during the presentation of his long-awaited assessment of the war and the way forward.

The departure of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, from Camp Pendleton, Calif., would be followed in December by the redeployment of an unspecified Army brigade, which would number about 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers, Petraeus told the House Foreign Affairs and House Armed Services committees.

The 13th MEU deployed April 10 with the Bonhomme Richard Expeditionary Strike Group. The MEU includes Battalion Landing Team 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, and Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 163.

And if Petraeus’ recommendations are approved, a brigade combat team will be removed in December, “without replacement,” and four other BCTs and two Marine battalions that were part of the surge will be redeployed without replacement during the first seven months of 2008.

At that point, without adding additional forces, the U.S. would have 15 brigade combat teams deployed in Iraq.

Petraeus said that additional force reductions “will continue” beyond that point. “However, in my professional judgment, it would be premature to make recommendations on the pace of such reductions at this time,” he said.

Petraeus added that he didn’t feel he would be at the point where he could make such a recommendation “until about mid-March next year,” and acknowledged that “there are no easy answers or quick solutions” in Iraq.

“The situation in Iraq remains complex, difficult, and sometimes frustrating,” Petraeus said. “I also believe that it is possible to achieve our objectives in Iraq over time, though doing so will be neither quick nor easy.”

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker agreed. “A secure, stable, democratic Iraq, at peace with its neighbors is, in my view, attainable,” said Crocker, whose assessment of the political situation in Iraq followed Petraeus’ presentation.

“The cumulative trajectory of political, economic, and diplomatic developments in Iraq is upwards, although the slope of that line is not steep,” Crocker said. “This process will not be quick. It will be uneven and punctuated by setbacks, as well as achievements, and it will require substantial U.S. resolve and commitment.”

Pulling out of Iraq too early, Crocker said, would create “massive human suffering” and invite “the intervention of regional states.”

Iran “would be a winner in this scenario,” he said. And premature withdrawal would allow al-Qaida in Iraq and other extremist groups to “establish strongholds to be used as safe havens for regional and international operations.”

The top Republican on the foreign affairs committee said that leaving Iraq too soon would be akin to the acquiescence of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 to Adolph Hitler in agreeing that the Nazi dictator could take over the Sudeten region of neighboring Czechoslovakia, which Hitler said was persecuting Germans living there.

“Chamberlain genuinely believed that he had bought peace in our time, washing his hands of what he believed to be an isolated dispute in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla. “Chamberlain only ensured that an immensely larger threat was thereby unleashed.”

But Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the armed services committee, said Iraqi leaders have failed to take political advantage of the time and space U.S. forces have provided, “and sadly, I don’t think there is any likelihood they will in the near future.”

In addition, he said, the conundrum in Iraq is that while the U.S. involvement there must be ended in a way “that best preserves the national security of the United States,” the war has spread the military too thin to “prevail anywhere our interests are threatened.”

“These troops in Iraq are not available for other missions,” said Skelton. “They are not available to go to Afghanistan to pursue Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders who ordered an attack on us one day short of six years ago.”

At the outset of the hearing, Petraeus defended the independence of his assessment, an answer to critics who accused him of colluding with the administration to present a rosier picture of the war.

“I would like to note that this is my testimony,” he said. “Although I have briefed my assessment and recommendations to my chain of command, I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by, nor shared with, anyone in the Pentagon, the White House, or Congress.”

One such critic was Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “We cannot take any of this administration’s assertions on Iraq at face value anymore,” Lantos said during his opening statement. “And no amount of charts or statistics will improve its credibility.”

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., former armed services committee chairman and now senior republican on that panel, quickly came to Petraeus’s defense. “We’ve asked you for an independent assessment,” said Hunter. “And, frankly ... the idea that we have spent the last week prepping the battlefield by attacking the credibility of the messenger is something that I think goes against the tradition of this great House.”

Following their opening statements, Petraeus and Crocker spent the next several hours facing questions from the 107 House members gathered before them in a crowded Cannon Office Building caucus room.

Petraeus’s testimony was bookended by periodic shouts from protestors from the anti-war women’s group Code Pink. “Tell the truth, general!” one woman shouted at the back of the room as Petraeus and Crocker sat down amidst a phalanx of cameras and microphones. Another later stood to shout, “War criminal! War criminal!”

Both were forcibly removed by U.S. Capitol Police officers, who later pulled two other women out of the hearing room when they stood to shout out angrily as Petraeus finished his presentation. Four protestors, including Cindy Sheehan, the renowned anti-war activist, were arrested, the police said.

A wide-ranging examination

The hearing raised enough relevant issues to fill a book. During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week on a Government Accountability Office report on Iraq — which found that the Iraqi government has fully met only three of its 18 political, economic and security benchmarks for progress — some senators questioned the accuracy of the U.S. Iraq command’s statistics on incidents of violence.

Petraeus denied those suggestions, or outright accusations in published reports, that his command was “cherry-picking” the numbers of violent acts or used a suspect methodology.

According to Petraeus, “security incidents” have decreased significantly since the surge was fully in place in mid-June, declining in eight of the past 12 weeks, and with the level the past two weeks at the lowest point since June 2006. Civilian deaths in all categories except for natural causes have declined by more than 45 percent, Iraq-wide, since what he called the height of sectarian violence last December, he said.

Petraeus provided statistics showing that overall weekly Iraq attacks were down from a peak of more than 1,700 on June 16 to just over 1,000 a week as of Sept. 7. And in Anbar province, where U.S. troops are forging an unlikely alliance with tribal Sunni sheiks aimed at driving out al-Qaida in Iraq, weekly attacks are down significantly, from nearly 250 in August 2006 to 50 per week through Sept. 7.

But Petraeus admitted that the much-acknowledged success in predominantly Sunni Anbar province “cannot be replicated everywhere in Iraq.” And other numbers he provided seemed to underline that contention. Violence is down everywhere from the peaks, but in three other provinces, the totals were unchanged or higher than they were a year ago.

In Salah ad Din province, for instance, up-and-down numbers over the past year topped out at about 240 attacks per week. But the U.S. recorded about 110 weekly attacks in August 2006, and slightly more through Sept. 7. In Baghdad, the numbers were identical over the same time span — 150 per week. And in Ninewah province, the nearly 70 attacks recorded in August 2006 had climbed to nearly 100 per week through Sept. 7.

Petraeus said the Iraqi Security Forces — heavily criticized in the GAO report — have “continued to grow, to develop their capabilities and to shoulder more of the burdens” in Iraq. Specifically, he said that 140 Iraqi army, national police and special operations forces battalions are “in the fight,” with about 95 of those capable of taking the lead in operations, albeit with some coalition support.

“There is an unevenness still about the Iraqi army — although, they are certainly the force that is seen by the Iraqi people as the more professional force and as one that is less sectarian, certainly than say certain national police elements, about which a lot of action has been taken by the Ministry of Interior and more as needed,” Petraeus said. But, he added, “The Iraqi army is standing and fighting and taking casualties.”

Crocker said some political progress is being made. He admitted that 2006 “was a bad year in Iraq, when the country came close to unraveling politically, economically and in security terms. 2007 has brought improvement, he said, but enormous challenges remain.

“Iraqis are facing some of the most profound political, economic and security challenges imaginable,” Crocker said. “They’re not simply grappling with the issue of who rules Iraq, but they’re asking what kind of country Iraq will be, how it will be governed, and how Iraqis will share power and resources among each other.”

He said the relatively new “bottom-up” strategy of working with tribal leaders in an effort to stabilize Iraq may be equally important to Iraq’s central government achieving political reconciliation, passing meaningful oil revenue-sharing legislation and building a fully operable utilities infrastructure.

“No longer is an all-powerful Baghdad seen as the panacea to Iraq’s problems,” Crocker said. Those centralized problems must be repaired and can be, he said, but only with a significant additional investment of time and money.

“Many neighborhoods in the city receive only two hours a day or less from the national grid, although power supplies for essential services such as water pumping stations or hospitals are much better,” Crocker said. “The minister of electricity said last week that it would take $25 billion through 2016 to meet demand requirements, but that by investing the $2 billion a year the ministry is now receiving from the government’s budget, as well as private investment in power generation now permitted by law, that goal could be met.”

But the bottom-up strategy is not an easy process, Petraeus said.

“Some of this is a little bit distasteful,” he said. “It is not easy sitting across the table, let’s say, or drinking tea with someone whose tribal members may have shot at our forces or, in fact, drawn the blood — killed our forces.” But, as a British commander reminded him, Petraeus said, “You reconcile with your enemies, not with your friends.

“We are not going to kill our way out of all these problems in Iraq,” Petraeus said.

Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., said he thought Petraeus’s assessment was wildly optimistic.

“The surge has failed, under most parameters,” he said “War-related deaths have doubled in Iraq in 2007 compared to last year.” He compared Petraeus’s testimony to that of Gen. William Westmoreland, who in April 1967 testified, he said, that “America was making progress in Vietnam.”

Wexler invoked the names of that war’s dead listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and said, “How many more names will be added to the wall before we admit it is time to leave?”

“No one is more conscious of the loss of life than the commander of the forces,” Petraeus replied. “That is something I take and feel very deeply. And if I didn’t think that this was a hugely important endeavor, and if I did not think this was an endeavor in which we could succeed, I wouldn’t have testified as I did to you all here today.”

Two DoD press releases that arrived via e-mail during the hearing provided sobering reminders of the U.S. sacrifice during the 4½-year war. One announced that an improvised explosive device killed three soldiers from the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment in Mosul on Sept. 6. The other said that same day, four Marines assigned to the 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion, 1st Marine Division were killed during combat operations in Anbar province.

DISCUSS: Petraeus' recommendations