Deployments to sustain surge through year’s end

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon announced Tuesday that 35,000 soldiers in 10 Army combat brigades will begin deploying to Iraq in August, making it possible to sustain the increase of U.S. troops there until at least the end of this year.

U.S. commanders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that heightened troop levels, announced by President Bush in January, will need to last into the spring of 2008. The military has said it would assess in September how well its counterinsurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, is working.

“The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure,” said Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the day-to-day commander for U.S. military operations in Iraq. The new requirement of up to 15-month tours for active-duty soldiers will allow the troop increase to last until spring, said Odierno, who favors keeping experienced forces in place.

As the initial U.S. troop buildup in Baghdad nears its June completion, commanders said that violence could increase in coming months, and some indicators in Baghdad suggest that is already happening.

Partial data on attacks gathered from five U.S. brigades operating in Baghdad showed that total attacks since the new strategy began in February were either steady or increasing. In some cases, certain kinds of attacks dipped as the U.S. troop increase began, only to begin rising again in recent weeks. Overall, “the number of attacks has stayed relatively constant” in Baghdad, said one U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be quoted by name.

Although the military can help curtail violence, U.S. commanders say that Iraqi leaders must ultimately forge political compromises in order to create an enduring peace. “They have to pass a certain amount of key legislation for all of this to move forward. If they don’t, we could secure all we want but it’s not going to be successful,” Odierno said, adding that “the jury’s still out” on whether Iraq’s leaders will act in the national interest.

The main thrust of the military effort in the near term, Odierno said, is to position a critical mass of U.S. and Iraqi troops inside Baghdad to quell the violence that was spiraling out of control late last year.

The push to expand the U.S. and Iraqi presence in Baghdad’s neighborhoods reflects what U.S. commanders now acknowledge was a mistaken drawdown in 2005 and 2006 of American troops in the capital.

“It’s fairly obvious that we transferred out too soon,” said Col. Bryan Roberts, who commands a U.S. cavalry brigade in central Baghdad.