Iraq: How many troops should stay?

Well, it’s “really happening,” said Dan Murphy in CSMonitor.com. Two years after President Obama promised a full withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, White House officials leaked plans last week to draw down to just 3,000 troops on Jan. 1, 2012. That’s far fewer than the 14,000 to 18,000 troops requested by U.S. generals, and a precipitous drop from the 48,000 still stationed there now. Many Iraqis are expressing alarm over “the prospect of such a drastic drawdown,” said Michael Schmidt in The New York Times. “Iraq is just not ready,” said the governor of Anbar Province, Mohammed Qasim Abed, who for eight years has called for the Americans to leave. With Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds still struggling for control, and the country’s elected leaders inspiring little confidence, Abed and other Iraqis fear a return to the sectarian violence and chaos that followed Saddam Hussein’s ouster eight years ago.

A few thousand troops “is a shockingly low number,” said Max Boot in Commentary​Magazine.com. What the Iraqis need more than anything is military trainers to strengthen their own security forces. A force of only 3,000, however, “may be just enough troops to provide targets for Iranian-backed militias, but not enough to have a meaningful impact in a country of more than 25 million people.” The Iraqi government indicated that it might accept 10,000 U.S. troops, said James Kitfield in TheAtlantic.com. But for political reasons, Obama would rather take the chance that the effort to transform Iraq will fail “at the finish line,’’ despite the blood and treasure sacrificed to get this far.

“Who do we think we are fooling?” said Stephen Walt in ForeignPolicy.com. As the administration has quietly acknowledged, those 3,000 troops will be augmented by a “major” CIA presence, and “thousands of paramilitary security contractors” working for the State Department. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad will be extensively expanded, and many of the staff will be diplomats in name only. Obama, in other words, may be able to claim that he fulfilled his pledge to bring the troops home, even as, say, 10,000 heavily armed Americans protect our interests. The danger is that “we will think we have left Iraq when we really haven’t, and so we won’t understand why many people there (and in neighboring countries) continue to see the United States as having designs on the region.”

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