Bush Undecided On Iraq Troop Levels

President Bush said Monday that he hasn't decided yet on whether to send more U.S. troops to Iraq or to begin bringing them home, saying he is awaiting recommendations from the military.

The post-election debate over Iraq is intensifying as members of Congress from both parties pose remedies and the Bush administration hunts for answers.

"I haven't made any decisions about troop increases or troop decreases, and won't until I hear from a variety of sources," Mr. Bush replied during a joint press conference with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Sen. John McCain, a 2008 presidential hopeful, wants to send more troops to Iraq in an effort to stabilize the country. The Arizona Republican Sunday called for sending in 20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq in addition to the roughly 140,000 there now to help curb rising sectarian violence.

McCain said more troops should be sent in and that the soldiers there now are "fighting and dying for a failed policy."

The president noted that Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was at work on a thorough review of options for Iraq.

The Iraq review has come up with three options — injecting more troops into Iraq, shrinking the force but staying longer or pulling out, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The newspaper quoted senior defense officials as dubbing the three alternatives "Go big, go long and go home."

The group's actions are so secret, the Post reported, that officials asked to help the review have not been told its title or mandate.

According to Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, the Pentagon is fixated on one option: "Increase now, decrease later."

The military could increase its presence in Iraq by 25,000 or 30,000 in the short term, O'Hanlon told CBS' The Early Show. "You ramp up in 2007 and then ramp it down to below 100,000 to maybe 60,000 or 70,000 in 2008, but we cannot go higher. We don't have a big enough military."

Also Sunday, Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York proposed a military draft, which the administration has repeatedly said it does not need.

Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said troop withdrawals must begin within four to six months.

"I believe the consequences of failure are catastrophic," said McCain. "It will spread to the region. You will see Iran more emboldened. Eventually, you could see Iran pose a greater threat to the state of Israel."

Taking the opposite tack, newly empowered Democrats pressed their case for a phased withdrawal of American forces.

They hope a blue-ribbon advisory panel led by Bush family friend and former Secretary of State James Baker and former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, would propose a way ahead for Iraq, while making clear the U.S. military mission shouldn't last indefinitely.

Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would like to see the commission assert that U.S. troop commitments are not open-ended; propose a clear political road map for Iraq; and recommend engaging Iraq's neighbors in a political and diplomatic solution.

The United States should "begin to let the Iraqi leadership know we're not going to be staying," he said Monday on NBC's "Today" program.

"Over the next four months let them know we're going to start to phase out, force them to have to address the central issue. That is not how to stand up Iraqis, but how to get Iraqis to stand together," Biden said.

"The idea that we're going to have 140,000 troops in Iraq this time next year is just not reasonable," he said.

McCain said the U.S. must send an overwhelming number of troops to stabilize Iraq or face more attacks — in the region and possibly on American soil.

"The consequences of failure are so severe that I will exhaust every possibility to try to fix this situation. Because it's not the end when American troops leave. The battleground shifts, and we'll be fighting them again," McCain said. "You read Zarqawi, and you read bin Laden. ... It's not just Iraq that they're interested in. It's the region, and then us." He was referring to Osama bin-Laden and the late al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

With about 141,000 U.S. troops in Iraq more than 3 1/2 years into the war, the American military has strained to provide enough forces while allowing for adequate rest and retraining between deployments.

Rangel, the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said Sunday on CBS' Face The Nation "there's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft."

O'Hanlon said the chances of a draft ever being reinstated still remain low. "The military would never want a draft unless things got a lot worse," he said.

Rangel says he will introduce a bill next year requiring Americans to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18. He has said the all-volunteer military disproportionately puts the burden of war on minorities and lower-income families.

"We must tell the Iraqis that we would begin, starting in four to six months, a phased reduction of our troops," said Levin, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In the absence of a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, he said, Iraqis are "going to continue to have the false assumption that we are there in some kind of an open-ended way. And it is that assumption on their part that takes them off the hook."

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq Sunday, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors — including Iran — if any progress is to be made in the region.

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi Government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," Kisinger said on the BBC's Sunday AM breakfast show.

McCain appeared on ABC's "This Week," Levin on CNN's "Late Edition," and Biden wrote in Sunday's Washington Post.