U.S. makes military gains in Iraq

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By ROBERT BURNS / Associated Press ANALYSIS

BAGHDAD -- The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working.

In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it’s apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year.

It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.

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No matter how well or how long the U.S. military carries out its counterinsurgency mission, it cannot guarantee victory.

Only the Iraqis can. And to do so they probably need many more months of heavy U.S. military involvement. Even then, it is far from certain that they are capable of putting this shattered country together again.

It’s been an uphill struggle from the start to build Iraqi security forces that are able to fight and -- more importantly at this juncture -- able to divorce themselves from deep-rooted sectarian loyalties. It is the latter requirement -- evenhandedness and reliability -- that is furthest from being fulfilled.

There is no magic formula for success.

And magic is what it may take to turn military gains into the strategy’s ultimate goal: a political process that moves Iraq’s rival Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds from the brink of civil war to the threshold of peace -- and to get there on a timetable that takes account of growing war fatigue in the United States.

Efforts at Iraqi reconciliation saw another blow Monday: Five Cabinet ministers loyal to Iraq’s first post-Saddam Hussein leader decided to boycott government meetings, further deepening a crisis that threatens Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The boycott would leave the Shiite-led government with no Sunni participants, at least temporarily.

Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up -- with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists -- rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act.

Commanders are encouraged by signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence. They are also counting on improvements in the Iraqi army and police, which are burdened by religious rivalries and are not ready to take over national defense duties from U.S. troops this year.

U.S. military leaders want Congress and President Bush to give them more time to keep trying -- to reach a point, perhaps in 2009, when the Iraqis will be closer to reconciliation and ready to provide much of their own security.

The idea, after all, is not to kill or capture every terrorist and insurgent. That can’t be done. The idea is to create a security environment more favorable to political action by the government, to provide breathing space for leaders of rival factions to work out a peaceful way to share power.

The U.S. military, partnering in many instances with Iraqi forces, is now creating that security cushion -- not everywhere, but in much of the north, the west and most importantly in key areas of Baghdad.

Sectarian killings continue and extremist groups remain a threat, yet they are being squeezed harder. The U.S. military has caught some momentum, thanks to the extra 30,000 troops -- for a total of 159,000 on the ground -- that Bush agreed to send as part of the new counterinsurgency strategy announced in January. The troops are interacting more with the local people and are protecting them more effectively.

At this stage, however, there is precious little evidence that Iraqi leaders are inclined to take advantage of that.

Even so, U.S. officers seem convinced that it is too soon to stop, that by tamping down the sectarian violence, at least in Baghdad, they are giving the Iraqis a chance to come together. They insist it is unrealistic to expect the Iraqis to resolve their problems in a matter of months. And they argue that withdrawing would only lead to bigger problems, for the U.S. and for Iraq.

That is likely to be the message that Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. officials in Iraq, convey to Congress and to Bush in September. They are in no position to predict how long it might take the Iraqi government to achieve reconciliation, but they are likely to concede, if asked, that if the Iraqis do not take key steps in the months ahead the entire U.S. approach may unravel.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose views on how to proceed in Iraq also will figure prominently in Bush’s decisions, says the administration, in hoping for movement toward political reconciliation this year, underestimated the depth of mistrust between rival sects.

The culture of fear in Baghdad is ingrained.

The Shiites, now in power after decades of being dominated by the minority Sunnis during Saddam Hussein’s rule, remain fearful of a Sunni revival. The Sunnis see their own survival at stake.

Kurds have enjoyed more than a decade of semi-autonomy in the north, where control over oil wealth is in play.

Which gets to two matters that underlie much of the conviction in Congress that it is time to get out of Iraq.

First: Do the potential benefits of sticking with the war strategy outweigh the cost, in American blood and treasure? Total U.S. war deaths now exceed 3,665 and are climbing by more than two per day, on average.

And second: Would Iraqi political leaders be more likely to settle their sectarian differences if they knew that America’s patience was ending and that its troops were leaving -- at least the combat forces?

There is clearly a consensus among senior U.S. commanders in Iraq that the answer to the first question is yes. They feel that so much has been sacrificed already that it makes no sense to quit now. Lt. Gen. James Dubik, in charge of training and equipping Iraqi forces, said the counterinsurgency strategy, not fully implemented until June, has finally wrested the initiative from the insurgents.

“It was fought over and died for, and there’s no reason to give it back right now,” Dubik told AP.

On compelling Iraq’s political leaders to move toward reconciliation, few American officers appear to believe that an early pullout would do the trick. They think it would propel the country further into chaos.

Crocker is explicit on that point.

“A massive human catastrophe (could follow), with the bloodshed among the Iraqi civilians on a scale we have not seen and may find hard to imagine,” he told AP.

Nonetheless, leaving -- in at least a limited way -- appears likely to begin in 2008. Petraeus might be inclined to send home, perhaps as early as January, one of the extra five Army brigades that Bush sent to Baghdad. Some of the roughly 4,000 extra Marines in Anbar province might head out by then, too.

If that happens, and if Bush overcomes congressional pressure to get out faster in a presidential election year, Petraeus probably would stretch out the troop drawdown over many months. He might also switch some units from one part of the country to another, reflecting an uneven pace of security progress, while leaving the bulk of the force in place at least until 2009, when a new president will be in the White House.

AP Military Writer Robert Burns, on his 18th reporting trip to Iraq since the start of the war in 2003, has written about U.S. military involvement in Iraq and the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War, mostly from his base in Washington.