For troops, home is hope deferred

BY CRAIG GORDON | Newsday Washington Bureau

July 29, 2006

WASHINGTON - Barely a month after commanders in Iraq proposed a troop reduction plan, the Pentagon is reversing course to bolster Baghdad security - all but eliminating hopes for a large-scale pullout of U.S. forces this year.

The latest moves are likely to push troop levels in Iraq back up to 135,000 over the coming months, Pentagon officials said Friday. That's right around the time U.S. commanders had hoped to be going in the opposite direction, down to 100,000 by year's end.

Asked about the chances of getting down to that level before the November congressional elections, one Bush administration official quipped, "I wouldn't take that bet."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld this week took the unusual step of extending the tour of duty for a unit already on its way out of Iraq, the 3,500-member 172nd Stryker Brigade from Alaska.

Rumsfeld added up to four months to the unit's already completed yearlong deployment, even though about 400 soldiers already had left Iraq. Some may have to go back, an Army official said.

In another sign of the growing seriousness of the security situation in Iraq, the 172nd is expected to be transferred to Baghdad from Mosul, a city that has recently seen its own outburst of violence.

This rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul deployment strategy is drawing worry from military analysts, who fear the Baghdad focus will leave U.S. troops in other dangerous parts of Iraq vulnerable.

The Pentagon this week also signaled that it doesn't foresee major troop rollbacks in the offing, ordering an Army brigade in Germany to leave for Iraq this month after originally putting that deployment on hold in May.

Pentagon officials this week also announced the next round of units going to Iraq, deployments that U.S. commanders once hoped could simply be canceled to reduce the number of U.S. forces.

"The department continues to plan for a level of effort roughly equivalent to what we have there now," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Friday. "We plan in a way that allows us to add forces if we need to and decrease forces if we can."

Still, President George W. Bush's Republican allies, who are fighting to keep control of Congress, had hoped for some good news on troop withdrawals before November to assuage voters frustrated by what they see as a rising U.S. death toll but little progress.

But military commanders, and Bush himself, have made clear that Baghdad is the top priority. Iraq's capital has become the central battleground between Sunni and Shia fighters, pushing the death toll nationwide to 100 civilians a day last month.

Bush this week committed additional troops to bolster an Iraqi government security plan for Baghdad after the initial plan failed. U.S. commanders are expected to shift about 4,000 U.S. forces from other parts of Iraq, such as the Stryker brigade and military police units.