General Warns Against Pullout

Move Would Be 'Step Backwards' for Central Iraq, He Says

A senior U.S. commander in central Iraq said yesterday that a reduction of U.S. forces in his region this year would be "a giant step backwards," allowing insurgents to quickly return and jeopardizing the military's "tactical momentum" in reducing violence.

"In my battlespace . . . I need the forces" until a transition to the Iraqi army and police is possible, said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who oversees a contentious region south of Baghdad. "That's not going to happen between now and Christmas," he told Pentagon reporters in a video conference from Iraq.

Lynch spoke a day after Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) called on President Bush to announce by Sept. 15 a plan to begin withdrawing U.S. troops -- even a small, symbolic number -- from Iraq by Christmas, a move Warner argued would send a message to Iraqi leaders that the U.S. military commitment is not "open-ended."

The comments by Lynch also followed a report in the Los Angeles Times yesterday that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, is expected to advise Bush to cut U.S. combat brigades in Iraq by half in 2008, reducing the overall number of troops to less than 100,000 from the current total of more than 160,000.

Pace, speaking yesterday through a spokesman, called the newspaper report "purely speculative," although he did not deny that such a cut is among the options he is considering.

"The story is wrong. . . . I have not made nor decided on any recommendations yet," he said, according to the spokesman.

Lynch's warning reflects the varying levels of stability and violence in different parts of Iraq. Last month, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, said he had proposed a troop reduction for the region that would begin in January and, over the next 18 months, would cut in half the U.S. military's presence of about six combat brigades.

Other U.S. regional commanders have also assessed the possibility of troop reductions, taking into consideration the strength of the insurgency and the capability of Iraqi security forces and government institutions. Twenty U.S. combat brigades are currently in Iraq.

Lynch said pulling U.S. troops from his area would allow Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias operating there to reestablish their strongholds virtually overnight -- with fighters returning in as little as 48 hours after American forces left. "He'd start building the bombs again, he'd start attacking the locals again, and he'd start exporting that violence into Baghdad, and we would take a giant step backwards," he said, referring to "the enemy."

Overall attacks in Lynch's area of responsibility -- south of Baghdad and stretching from the Iranian border to Saudi Arabia -- have fallen by 26 percent since April, while attacks on Iraqi civilians have dropped by more than a third, he said. If U.S. forces were to reduce their presence, now spread across 29 patrol bases, he said, insurgents would again target Iraqi civilians, including the nearly 10,000 who have joined fledgling neighborhood security forces over the past six weeks.

Lynch estimated that next spring or summer might be a more realistic timetable for cutting U.S. troop levels in his region, highlighting what he called a growing threat from Iranian-trained operatives and from munitions, including precision rockets and armor-piercing projectiles, made with Iranian components.

He said about 50 Iranian and Iraqi operatives, trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and working for Iran, are active in his area, and are part of the same group that killed five U.S. soldiers in Karbala province in January.

Lynch said "a new wave of lethality" -- including 48 attacks using explosively formed projectiles and 66 attacks using precision rockets -- has killed 13 U.S. troops in his area since April. In one incident, he said, more than three dozen Iranian-made rockets were aimed at a U.S. base in the area, and when insurgents fired some of them and hit the base on July 11, one soldier was killed and 15 others were wounded.