U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT and STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - As American deaths in Iraq operations reached the 1,000 mark, top Pentagon officials said Tuesday that insurgents controlled important parts of central Iraq and that it was unclear when American and Iraqi forces would be able to secure those areas.
As of late Tuesday night, the Pentagon's accounting showed that 997 service members and three Defense Department civilians had been killed in Iraq operations.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that the American strategy in retaking rebel-held strongholds hinged on training Iraqi forces to take the lead.
Mr. Rumsfeld said Iraqi officials understood they must regain control of these areas. "They get it, and will find a way over time to deal with it,'' he said.
But General Myers said the Iraqi forces would not be ready to confront insurgents until the end of this year.
Their comments, which came after a two-day spike in violence in Iraq led to a surge in American military deaths, represented an acknowledgement that the Americans had failed to end the insurgency in important Sunni-dominated areas and in certain Shiite enclaves. Fighting raged on Tuesday in Sadr City, in Baghdad, as Shiite militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr ended a self-declared cease-fire. [Page A12.]
The officials' assessment also underscored the difficulty of pacifying Iraq in time for elections, which are scheduled for January. The cities of greatest rebel control are Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra, in the so-called Sunni triangle, west of Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein remains popular and many forces loyal to him have gathered strength.
There is increasing concern in the administration over plans for the election, with some officials saying that if significant parts of the Sunni areas cannot be secured by January, it may be impossible to hold a nationwide balloting that would be seen as legitimate. Putting off the elections, though, would infuriate Iraq's Shiite majority. The elections are for an assembly that is to write a new Constitution next year.
Mr. Rumsfeld said that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi recognized that his government cannot continue to allow rebel control in key areas of the country, but that it would take time for him to figure out how to proceed.
"The prime minister and his team fully understand that it is important that there not be areas in that country that are controlled by terrorists," he said, adding that Mr. Allawi would deal with the problem by "negotiation and discussion" in some cases and by force in others.
Other administration officials, amplifying the secretary's comments, said the administration had decided to let Mr. Allawi try to persuade rebel leaders to join the process of reconstructing Iraq, or suffer the consequences if they did not.
"Allawi's strategy is to try to find people on the sidelines and wean the moderates away, to give them courage and a hope of reward for themselves," said an administration official. "He's telling them: 'I'm giving you an opportunity to meet your local concerns. You're going to be my guy, and together we'll try to isolate the extremists.' "
Administration officials say no decision has been made yet for American forces to attack these strongholds. The preference is for Iraqi forces to do the job, as Iraqi forces were said to have been poised to do last month in Najaf, the Shiite holy city.
But the record of the Iraqi security forces has not been inspiring. While 95,000 soldiers have been trained and equipped up to American commanders' satisfaction, General Myers said, they will not be ready until the end of the year to join American forces in any assault against insurgent strongholds and then keep the peace afterward, allowing United States troops to withdraw.
"While U.S. forces or coalition forces can do just about anything we want to do, it makes a lot more sense that it be a sustained operation, one that can be sustained by Iraqi security forces," General Myers said. "By December, we're going to have a substantial number of Iraqi security forces equipped, trained and led to conduct the kind of operations I was talking about.''
A senior American official said force would be tried by the Iraqi government only after a couple of months' discussions with rebels.
"Force is the ultimate sanction, but let's exhaust the other ones first," he added.
A two-month hiatus before major force is applied to rebel areas would also mean a delay until after the American presidential election, but senior officials insist there is no domestic political calculus in the decision to wait - only a conviction that time is needed for negotiation and for Iraqi forces to gain strength.
"This is ultimately about building an Iraqi government which works for all of Iraq," said the official. "To the degree that we can wait a couple months and let Iraqi politics work, so much the better."
In describing the Iraqi security forces, one American general in Iraq said an e-mail message that the Iraqis' "capabilities are still uneven, but they're improving as we arm and equip them better, improve their infrastructure, give them additional training, and help them weed out the weak leaders."
To buy time, General Myers said, Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, is working with the Iraqi government to develop a multi-pronged strategy to retake the cities.
General Myers said that strategy included trying to "isolate certain communities," hampering the insurgents' ability to rearm and resupply, and curtailing their attacks against American forces. He said the strategy would attempt "to set the conditions for the successful use of force later,'' military wording for preparing the battlefield by bombing safe houses and weapons caches, and encouraging residents to provide fresh intelligence on the location of insurgents.
Over the weekend, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the land commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press that an American assault is likely in the next four months. "I do have about four months where I want to get to local control,'' General Metz said. "And then I've got the rest of January to help the Iraqis to put the mechanisms in place."
Maj. Gen. John Batiste, the commander of the Army's First Infantry Division, whose area north of Baghdad includes Tikrit and Samarra, disputed reports that the United States had given up in Samarra.
"Samarra is a city where Iraqis are taking charge to throw out anti-Iraqi forces," General Batiste said in an e-mail message on Tuesday. "No one has ceded the city to insurgents and there is no cordon. What we have in Samarra is the good people of Iraq, led by far-sighted provincial and city leadership, senior sheiks, and clerics, standing up to the enemy."
Residents of Samarra, however, say insurgents effectively control the area.
General Batiste and other commanders painted an upbeat assessment, noting that "the messages at Friday Prayer are becoming more and more moderate" and that American forces "keep continuous pressure on the enemy" while they help Iraqis with reconstruction.
But other American officials are more pessimistic about the prospects for regaining control of these areas. One noted, for example, that attacks on American forces rose to 2,700 in August, from 700 in March. Casualties have also gone up, and Mr. Rumsfeld noted at the news conference that the number of American service members killed in the Iraq conflict would soon pass 1,000.
Opening U.S. to Iraqi Goods
By The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - In a proclamation on Tuesday, President Bush gave Iraq the right to export thousands of goods duty free to the United States.
But because of the continued poor state of its economy, Iraq will be unable to take immediate advantage of its new designation as a beneficiary of the Generalized System of Preferences, which grants preferential treatment to certain products from more than 140 developing countries and territories.
Petroleum, Iraq's only major export commodity, is not given duty free status under the system. |
