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In fact Bush has no intention of going back to Baker-Hamilton, says a senior White House official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on the record. Sure, he’s paying a lot more lip service to its recommendations, partly in an effort to gain new bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill after the White House’s successful effort to thwart a Democrat-led withdrawal plan. But one of the central recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report called for a dramatic consolidation of the U.S. presence onto a handful of large bases like Balad. There, U.S. air units and special ops would mainly focus on killing Al Qaeda and leave the Iraqis more or less to their own devices.
A long-term presence at Balad is still part of the plan—it always was—but the White House official told NEWSWEEK this week that the Baker-Hamilton panel misunderstood the mission. “What Baker-Hamilton didn’t get right is the military feasibility of doing anti-Al Qaeda missions based primarily on special forces operations,” he told me. “That isn’t feasible because Al Qaeda is so entrenched in the population.” When the National Intelligence Estimate “gamed this out,” he said, it concluded that sectarian violence was now so out of control that to allow Shiite reprisals to occur while the Americans remained hunkered down on their bases would only fuel support among the Sunnis for Al Qaeda, which would grow even more entrenched. Hence the surge’s effort to rein in Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other chief culprits.
This will continue for many months. So while the president supports Baker-Hamilton’s “end state”—stabilizing Iraq—he doesn’t intend to get there using its recommendations. That means “a fairly robust presence beyond the end of 2008,” the official said. “A sustainable presence.” How would you define that? I asked him. “Well, sustainable has always been kind of a 10-[combat-]brigade presence. We’re at 20 now.” A plan for 10 U.S. brigades amounts to about 50,000 combat troops, and another 30,000 troops in support. So about 80,000 U.S. troops will need to stay in Iraq over the long term, about half of the force planned for the height of the surge this summer ...
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