Bush Agrees to a 'Time Horizon' for U.S. Troop Withdrawals
Posted on: Saturday, 19 July 2008, 09:00 CDT
President Bush agreed to "a general time horizon" for withdrawing American troops in Iraq, the White House announced Friday, in a concession that reflected both progress in stabilizing Iraq and the depth of political opposition to an open-ended military presence in Iraq and at home.
Bush, who has long derided timetables for troop withdrawals as dangerous, agreed to at least a notional one as part of the administration's efforts to negotiate the terms for an American military presence in Iraq after a U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.
The agreement was announced in coordinated statements released Friday by the White House and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki's government .
The White House offered no specifics about how far off any "time horizon" would be, with officials saying details remained to be negotiated. Any dates cited in an agreement would be cast as goals for handing responsibility to Iraqis and not specifically for reducing American troops, said a White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe.
But the White House statement said that the two leaders "agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq."
The announcement came on the eve of a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan by the presumptive Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, who has vowed to pursue a strict phased timetable for withdrawing most combat troops from Iraq over 16 months beginning next year. He has cited Iraq's eagerness for a timetable as support for his strategy.
A spokesman for Obama, Bill Burton, called the announcement "a step in the right direction" but derided what he called the vagueness of the White House commitment.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Bush "has reversed course and dropped his adamant opposition to a timeline for redeployment of American troops from Iraq." He said the president "also has acknowledged the need to transition from a combat mission to one that focuses on training and counterterrorism." The administration, Biden added, "is finally facing reality."
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, praised the agreement as evidence that Bush's strategy of sending additional forces last year had worked .
In a statement, McCain said: "Progress between the United States and Iraq on a time horizon for American troop presence is further evidence that the surge has succeeded. ... If we had followed Sen. Obama's policy, Iraq would have descended into chaos, American casualties would be far higher, and the region would be destabilized."
Bush and his aides, traveling in Tucson, Ariz., and Houston to attend Republican fundraisers, insisted again that the administration was not accepting any timetable for withdrawing American forces, which now total roughly 140,000. But the administration has faced increasing resistance from the government in Iraq, where some officials have said publicly that Iraq can take charge of much of its security by 2009 and be able to operate without American help by 2012.
Under pressure from political parties wanting a diminishing American role, al-Maliki began demanding something in the agreement that would make it clear that American troops were on the way out. Iraq's statement Friday reflected those internal sensitivities; it referred more specifically than the American version to "a time frame for the complete transfer of the security responsibilities to the hands of the Iraqi security as preface to decrease the number of the American forces and withdraw them later from Iraq."
In Baghdad, a senior member of al-Maliki's Dawa Party, Ali al- Adeeb, said Friday that the withdrawal of American and other foreign forces was fundamental to any agreement.
"The Iraqi government considers the determination of a specific date for the withdrawal of foreign forces an important issue to deal with," he said. "I don't know what the American side thinks, but we consider it the core of the subject."
Al-Adeeb suggested that a final agreement was not imminent, but White House aides said they were confident one would be reached by the end of the month.
"We're converging on an agreement," an administration official said, noting that negotiators continued to hammer out provisions involving security matters. Those include command of military operations, legal immunities for civilian contractors and the authority to detain prisoners.
On the prospect of dates for American withdrawals, Johndroe, the White House spokesman, said that the agreement would not prescribe American troop levels over time but rather reflect a transition to Iraqi command.
"The agreement will look at goal dates for transition of responsibilities and missions," Johndroe said in an e-mail message. "The focus is on the Iraqi assumption of missions, not on what troop levels will be."
Administration officials say that they are negotiating an agreement that would establish the legal authority for American commanders to conduct combat operations, control airspace and detain Iraqi prisoners, while deferring the more complicated details of a "status of forces agreement" to the next administration.
The statements also referred to the withdrawal this month of the last of five additional combat brigades that Bush ordered to Iraq last year. The American commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is now reviewing the possibility of withdrawing more beginning in September.
The White House has been under pressure from top military officers to make more U.S. forces available for the war in Afghanistan, and that would be possible only by reducing the number of troops in Iraq, administration officials said.
The Washington Post and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
in the past
President Bush repeatedly has opposed efforts to set deadlines to remove U.S. troops from Iraq. joint announcement
The agreement was announced in coordinated statements released Friday by the White House and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki's government . The two leaders "agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq."
Source: Virginian - Pilot
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