United States troops should begin withdrawing from combat and Washington should launch a diplomatic and political push to halt a ”grave and deteriorating” crisis in Iraq, a high-level panel studying the war said on Wednesday.
US President George Bush said he would take the highly anticipated report ”very seriously” after meeting with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, but the White House has made clear he will not be bound by its conclusions and has begun its own review of Iraq policy.
”The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” the five Republicans and five Democrats in the group said in the report. ”There is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq,” the report added.
”Our most important recommendations call for new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region and a change in the primary mission of US forces in Iraq that will enable the US to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly,” the report said.
More than three-and-a-half years after the March 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, about 140 000 American troops remain in Iraq fighting an insurgency and trying to stop savage sectarian strife between Shi’ites and Sunnis.
The report also called for the US to engage with Iran and Syria, whom US officials accuse of fomenting the insurgency in Iraq, in an effort to stabilise the country. The White House has resisted such talks.
”This report gives a very tough assessment of the situation in Iraq,” Bush said after meeting for about an hour with the group’s members, who include two former secretaries of state. ”I told the members that this report, called The Way Forward, will be taken very seriously by this administration.”
The report called for a new commitment by the Bush administration to press for a ”comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace”, arguing that the US cannot meet its goals in the Middle East without addressing the festering conflict.
No hard timetable
The report also recommended that the US military launch a rapid effort to train Iraqi forces to defend their country and said US forces should gradually move to a supporting role.
It set no hard timetable for the transition but said, by the first quarter of 2008, depending on conditions, US combat troops not needed for ”force protection” could be out of Iraq.
The report stresses that Iraqis need to take on a larger share of the military role and suggested the US should begin to withdraw support if Iraq’s government does not make major progress toward national reconciliation, improved security and better governance.
”The US must not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq,” it said.
The conflict in Iraq, which is increasingly unpopular in the US, has lasted longer than US involvement in World War II and killed more than 2 900 American troops.
Hundreds of Iraqis are being killed in sectarian violence every week, raising debate over whether the country has descended into civil war and whether the US-backed government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki can stem the carnage.
In Baghdad on Wednesday fierce clashes erupted between Shi’ite militias and residents of a Sunni neighbourhood in western Baghdad following a mortar barrage that wounded five people, and mortar rounds fell on the central Midan district of the capital, killing 10 people and wounding 54.
Bush has been under added political pressure to change course in Iraq since the November 7 elections, when US voters, soured on the war, ended Republican control of Congress.
The White House has sought to blunt the impact of the Iraq Study Group’s work by conducting its own review of the war. Bush aides have said he is likely to take weeks, rather than months, to decide how and whether to change his policy.
In the clearest sign Bush is searching for solutions, a day after the Republicans’ humiliating election losses he tapped former CIA director Robert Gates to replace Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an architect of the war who became a favourite target of critics.
Gates on Tuesday said the US was not winning in Iraq and dismissed the prospect of quick solutions. ”It’s my impression that, frankly, there are no new ideas on Iraq,” Gates told his Senate confirmation hearing. — Reuters