Politics and War
The president pushes back as a deadly month adds to voters' anxiety
October's toll. Even as Bush tried to dig himself out of the Iraq mess at home, the situation on the ground seemed to deteriorate further. As of Friday, 97 American troops had died in Iraq in October, the single most deadly month in a year. More broadly, U.S. commanders are questioning the commitment of the Iraqi government itself-and the apparent disconnect between the wishes of the White House and the will of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
That disconnect was brought into sharp relief last week as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad announced that, at Washington's urging, Maliki had agreed to setting goals for confronting militias and reforming the death squad-infiltrated Ministry of Interior. Maliki publicly responded that he had done no such thing. The White House fired back at the media for supposedly distorting Maliki's remarks. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld snapped that the media should "just back off" calls for specific goals from a government still getting its bearings.
But as U.S. casualties mount, U.S. military officials are beginning to think that applying more pressure would be a good idea. They express growing frustration at the willingness of the Iraqi prime minister to talk tough-but only to Washington. "We have every right to put a damn timeline on some stuff," says a senior military official in Baghdad. "If nothing else, it should create a sense of urgency-that's what I would hope."
All the semantics in Washington over benchmarks, timelines, and timetables have only a distant relationship to what is actually going on in Iraq, where Maliki has yet to show he has the ability or the will to rein in even his professed allies. One major issue is his reluctance to confront Moqtada al-Sadr, the powerful anti-American Shiite cleric who has pledged to support the fledgling Iraqi government yet maintains the Mahdi Army, an independent militia that recently took over a town south of Baghdad and controls Baghdad's Sadr City slums.
Yet Maliki's leverage against Sadr seems limited. Sadr was instrumental in making Maliki prime minister, and the young firebrand cleric now controls five ministries and the largest voting bloc in the parliament. So Maliki was incensed after American soldiers conducted a raid in Sadr City to search for a death-squad commander-particularly since the prime minister has promised Sadr autonomy in exchange for political support.
To deal with the rising number of problems, Gen. George Casey, the top U.S commander in Iraq, signaled last week that he may call for more troops to increase security in Baghdad. That move could also lead to increasing the overall level of U.S. troops in the country, currently at 145,000-though Rumsfeld last week rejected the notion that such a statement constituted a call for more troops. Still, the deteriorating condition of the country raises the even more sensitive question of whether to call upon more National Guard and reserve soldiers to bolster an Army and Marine Corps stretched to their limits. Such a call may include reinterpreting the rules by which guardsmen deploy, which currently involve two-year deployment caps.
It's not a very palatable move. But increasingly, it seems that nothing about the war in Iraq ever is.
With Anna Mulrine and Linda Robinson
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