Bush meets experts on Iraq strategy

Military commanders who met Bush yesterday sought more advisers to train the Iraqis, not more US combat troops in Iraq. They also urged the administration to pour significantly more funding into equipment for Iraqi security forces, according to a defence specialist familiar with the meetings.

General John Abizaid, top US commander in the Middle East, and General George Casey, the top general in Iraq, want more armoured vehicles, body armour and other critical equipment for the Iraqis, said the defence specialist.

Abizaid has told the Senate Armed Services Committee that troop levels in Iraq need to stay fairly stable and the use of military adviser teams expanded. About 140,000 US troops and about 5,000 advisers are in Iraq.

The message to Bush, the defence specialist said, is that the US cannot withdraw a substantial number of combat troops by early 2008, as suggested in the Iraq Study Group report, because the Iraqis will not be ready to assume control of their country. Bush was delaying making public his new Iraq policy plan in part to allow officials to work out the funding, he said.

Bush has scheduled a session with senior defence officials at the Pentagon today. He has already has visited this week with State Department officials to review options, hosted a few outside Iraq experts, and met with Iraq’s Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi. Last week, the president held talks with the leader of the largest Shiite bloc in Iraq’s parliament, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, and with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the president’s staunchest war ally.

Iraq has proposed that its troops assume primary responsibility for security in Baghdad early next year and that US troops be shifted to the capital’s periphery, The New York Times reported on its website today.

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told the Times that the plan was presented during Bush’s meeting with Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki in Amman, Jordan, on November 30.

Bush’s meetings at the Pentagon were expected to cap his high-profile outreach effort, which surrounded last week’s presentation of the Iraq Study Group report, a blistering review from an independent, bipartisan commission.

The Iraq Study Group recommended most combat troops be withdrawn by early 2008 and the US mission changed from combat to training and support of Iraqi units. It also called for an energetic effort to seek a diplomatic solution to Iraq’s violence by engaging its neighbours, including Iran and Syria.

Bush, cool to both of the commission’s central ideas, had been expected to follow his information-gathering with a pre-Christmas announcement of his own altered blueprint for US involvement in Iraq. But the White House, citing the president’s request for more time to refine and game out new policies, said yesterday that Bush would wait until early next year.

“It’s not ready yet,” White House press secretary Tony Snow said. “There may be some areas on which there are still going to be debates, but most have kind of been ironed out.”

Dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of the war is at an all-time high. Democrats take control of Congress on January 4 because of mid-term elections that turned in large part on that issue.

Democratic senator Harry Reid, about to become Senate majority leader, criticised Bush’s decision to delay unveiling the new Iraq plan.

“It has been six weeks since the American people demanded change in Iraq. In that time Iraq has descended further toward all-out civil war and all the president has done is fire Donald Rumsfeld and conduct a listening tour,” Reid said.

“Talking to the same people he should have talked to four years ago does not relieve the president of the need to demonstrate leadership and change his policy now.”