Troops To Gates: Send Reinforcements
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the rest of the Bush administration may be undecided on whether to send more troops to Iraq, but several soldiers he met with at Camp Victory on Thursday morning said extra forces would help.
"Sir, I think we need to just keep doing what we're doing," Spc. Jason T. Green, with the 101st Military Intelligence Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, told Gates during a breakfast session with about 15 U.S. soldiers.
"I really think we need more troops here. With more presence on the ground, more troops might hold them off long enough to where we can get the Iraqi Army trained up."
The troops may be somewhat at odds with military commanders, who worry that rushing thousands more Americans to the battlefront could prompt Iraqis to slow their effort to take control of their country.
Those concerns are "clearly a consideration" in mapping out future strategy, Gates said.
Just days into his new job as defense chief, Gates planned meetings in Baghdad with Iraqi government officials Thursday, after a day of talks with his military commanders on Wednesday.
His hour-long question-and-answer session with troops over scrambled eggs was largely spent gathering insights from those closest to the action.
When he asked them whether adding forces would help, he got a roomful of nods.
"More troops would help us integrate the Iraq Army into patrols more," said Pfc. Cassandra Wallace, from the 10th Mountain Division.
The soldiers also told him they think the Iraqi Army is getting better, but that it should be bigger and that many of the Iraqis are still not showing up for duty.
Gates said U.S. logistics and support troops are likely to be in Iraq for a lot longer than the combat forces — as efforts continue to stabilize the country. And saying Iran and Syria are playing a very negative role in the violence in Iraq, he emphasized that "figuring out the regional context is very important."
"We need to make damned sure that the neighbors understand that we're going to be here for a long time — here being the Persian Gulf," said Gates.
The new defense chief is visiting Iraq with a high-level entourage to assess options for calming violence in the country as President Bush considers sending thousands more troops. Bush is expected to unveil his new policy next month.
"Secretary Gates is going to be an important voice in the Iraq strategy review that's under way," Bush told reporters at a White House news conference Wednesday.
But CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod reports Mr. Bush also said Wednesday, for the first time, that his military commanders would be only some of the voices he turns to for guidance on troop levels in Iraq.
In other developments:
After meeting with top U.S. generals at Camp Victory, Gates said Wednesday that he had only begun to determine how to reshape U.S. war policy. "We discussed the possibility of a surge and the potential for what it might accomplish," he told reporters.
Some senior U.S. commanders have worried, however, that even a short-term troop increase might bring only a temporary respite to the violence — or none at all — while creating shortages of fresh troops for future missions.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said "there is no doubt; at the tactical level we have never had enough troops. In other words we can't go and clear a neighborhood and hold it, because we clear it and then don't have forces for other parts of the country."
"But we may not want to send the Iraqis the message they can depend on us. So at the strategic level there's an argument against increasing troops. How you reconcile these two is the hardest decision right," he told CBS Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.
O'Hanlon cautions against lumping the opinions of all the top U.S. brass together into one.
"The generals are disagreeing amongst themselves. That hasn't come through in all the recent media reporting," he said.
One option being weighed by the Pentagon would add five or more additional combat brigades, or roughly 20,000 troops, to the 140,000 already there.
Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq and one of several generals who met with Gates, said he supports boosting troop levels only when there is a specific purpose for their deployment.
"I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea, but what I want to see happen is when, if we do bring more American troops here, they help us progress to our strategic objectives," Casey told reporters during a news conference with Gates and military leaders.
Gen. John Abizaid, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said the military is "looking at every possible thing that might influence the situation to make Baghdad in particular more secure."
In addition to a possible short-term troop increase aimed at bringing violence in Baghdad and Anbar province under control, Bush is considering removing U.S. combat forces and accelerating the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces. Military leaders are also considering an increase in the number of American advisers for Iraqi security forces.
Gates spoke later Thursday with Iraqi officials about possible additional military assistance for the embattled government and assured them of steadfast U.S. support.
He said the focus of the discussions was "mainly on the overall approach, including the possibility of some additional assistance." But he was vague about the type of assistance discussed, and said no specific numbers of extra troops were discussed.
Gates said he discussed with the Iraqis how their government could take the lead in addressing the country's deteriorating security problems.
"One of the strong messages I received today was the desire of the Iraqi government to take a leadership role in addressing some of the challenges that face the country, above all the security problem here in Baghdad," Gates said.
Meanwhile, the military said Thursday a roadside bomb and combat injuries had claimed three more American lives.
A statement released Thursday says the bomb killed an American soldier yesterday south of Baghdad. Two other servicemen died from combat injuries sustained in Anbar province, west of Baghdad.
One died Tuesday and the other died Thursday.
Also, a suicide bomber blew up among a group of Iraqi police volunteers Thursday at a police academy in eastern Baghdad, killing at least 14 people and wounding 21 others, police said.