Seymour Hersh: Where is the Iraq war headed next?

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press Tuesday November 29, 2005 00:26 by redjade

“I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

An Iraqi child flashes a victory sign as a U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle is seen burning in Baghdad, Iraq (Monday, Nov. 28, 2005)

UP IN THE AIR
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Where is the Iraq war headed next?

In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent withi his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq next year. The Administration’s best-case scenario is that the parliamentary electio scheduled for December 15th will produce a coalition government that will join the Administration in calling for a withdrawal to begin in the spring.

[....]

A high-level Pentagon war planner told me, however, that he has seen scant indication that the President would authorize a significant pullout of American troops if he believed that it would impede the war against the insurgency. There are several proposals currently under review by the White House and the Pentagon; the most ambitious calls for American combat forces to be reduced from a hundred and fifty-five thousand troops to fewer than eighty thousand by next fall, with all American forces officially designated “combat” to be pulled out of the area by the summer of 2008. In terms of implementation, the planner said, “the drawdown plans that I’m familiar with are condition-based, event-driven, and not in a specific time frame”—that is, they depend on the ability of a new Iraqi government to defeat the insurgency. (A Pentagon spokesman said that the Administration had not made any decisions and had “no plan to leave, only a plan to complete the mission.”)

[....]

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

• Read the whole article...
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051205fa_fact

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Photo: AP Photo / Karim Kadim
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/051128/481/bag10311280914

About Seymour Hersh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh

Past:
Jan 17 2005
Seymour Hersh: The US War in Iran has Already Started
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68264