Military advises Bush not to trim Iraq forces before year’s end
WASHINGTON — President Bush’s top defense advisers have recommended he maintain 15 combat brigades in Iraq until the end of the year, contrary to expectations that the improved security in Iraq would allow for quicker cuts, the Associated Press has learned.
Military leaders told the AP that the closely held plan would send a small Marine contingent to Afghanistan in November to replace one of two Marine units expected to head home then.
If Bush follows the recommendations, he would delay any additional buildup in Afghanistan until early next year, when another brigade would be deployed there instead of to Iraq.
That move would cut the number of brigades in Iraq to 14 in February.
The plan is aimed at taking advantage of security gains in Iraq to bolster the military effort in Afghanistan, where violence is on the rise. Several senior military and defense officials described the recommendations on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public.
They also acknowledged the plan is a compromise since Gen. David Petraeus, the top U. S. commander in Iraq, wanted to maintain the current force levels in Iraq — about 146,000 troops — through June.
Bush is weighing the recommendations. If he adopts them, it would be left to the next president to execute further troop reductions in Iraq and a greater buildup in Afghanistan. Bush’s term ends in January.
It had been widely expected that Petraeus would recommend a faster pullback in Iraq, perhaps reducing the number of combat brigades from 15 to 14 this fall. But several recent events may have changed the calculus.
Among the more important changes was the unanticipated decision by Georgia to bring home its contingent of about 2,000 soldiers after Russia invaded the former Soviet republic in early August.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, the Iraqi government announced Thursday that the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which has been closed since 2006, will undergo work to reopen it and will include a museum documenting Saddam Hussein’s crimes — but not the abuses committed there by U. S. guards.
The sprawling complex will be refurbished with the goal of housing new inmates in about a year, the government said. A section of the 280-acre site just west of Baghdad will be converted into the museum featuring execution chamber exhibits and other displays of torture tools used by Saddam’s regime, including an iron chain for tying prisoners together.
But Iraq’s predominantly Shiite government has no plans to document the U. S. military abuse scandal that erupted in 2004 with the publication of photographs that shocked the world: grinning U. S. soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners, some naked, being held on leashes or in painful and sexually humiliating positions.
Iraq’s deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim, told the Associated Press that the American brutality was “nothing” compared with the violence and atrocities of Saddam and his Sunni- dominated Baath party.
“There is evidence of the crimes [Saddam committed] such as the hooks used to dangle prisoners, tools used to beat and torture prisoners and . . . the execution chambers in which 50 or 100 people were killed at once,” he said.
In eastern Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed two American soldiers Thursday, the U. S. military said, raising the U. S. toll to 4,153 since the war began.
