President Bush this week announced that he would reduce troop levels in Iraq by roughly 8,000 by February, a move that would bring the U.S. deployment to 138,000, a few thousand more than before the 2007 troop surge. Bush said the troop reduction was now possible because “civilian deaths are down, sectarian killings are down, suicide bombings are down, and normal life is returning.” At the same time, Bush said the U.S. would commit about 5,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, where insurgent attacks and coalition losses are at a record high.
Bush’s announcement reverberated immediately on the campaign trail. John McCain hailed the development as proof that the U.S. was winning the war in Iraq, thanks to the surge, which he backed. Barack Obama said Bush’s plan “comes up short” both on troop reductions in Iraq and troop additions in Afghanistan.
Word of the troop pullout was “greeted mostly with shrugs,” said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an editorial. That’s because when it come to bringing this tragic misadventure to a close, Bush is “almost irrelevant.” Indeed, only one Marine battalion is to be withdrawn this fall; most of the reduction wouldn’t occur until “after this president has handed the problem off to his successor.” And what a problem it is: Despite the surge, Iraq is nowhere near having a functional national government.
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Even Gen. David Petraeus agrees with that assessment, said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In fact, the departing U.S. commander in Iraq opposes troop reductions at this point, declaring that security in Iraq is not yet “self-sustaining” and that recent gains are “fragile or reversible.” The surge, support for the Sunni awakening, and other policy changes certainly helped pacify neighborhoods and towns. “But at the national level, sectarian politicians have still not reconciled.”
Which raises an interesting question, said Craig Crawford in Congressional Quarterly Online. Until now, Bush has always taken his cues from the widely respected Petraeus. So why did Bush, after routinely ignoring previous calls for troop reductions, suddenly buck Petraeus and change course? In a word, politics. “The political value of this move is obvious. Even a modest reduction such as this helps McCain argue that we are winning in Iraq—a theme repeated almost hourly at the Republican convention last week.”
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