US commander in Iraq: I need more soldiers, more time

Gen. David Petraeus also stressed the need for a spirit of compromise to take hold.

from the March 9, 2007 edition

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US officials had projected that troop levels would start to fall again by August. Petraeus said the troops will have to stay until "some time well beyond the summer." The New York Times reported that a recent confidential memo by Petraeus's principal deputy, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, called for the additional troops to stay through February 2008.

Petraeus supporters say he's being honest in pitching for a long timeline, but that he's also politically savvy enough not to ask for everything he wants all at once.

"I am positive he will be truthful to himself and inside the command, and he will be blunt with the administration because he's been given a losing hand and he's going to try to make this thing come out the right way,'' says Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star general. Petraeus won't "delude himself and others when he knows he has 24 months to turn this around."

The US won't be at full strength in Iraq until June. But even then, General McCaffrey warns, lasting gains won't be made quickly. "Can you, by continuous levels of combat presence, change the underlying nature of a civil war? Or course not, and Petraeus knows that,'' he says. What Petraeus can do, McCaffrey argues, is to create conditions in which the Shiite-backed government and allied militias and Sunni Arab insurgents decide it's in neither's interest to keep fighting.

Petraeus said Thursday that Sunni insurgents appear to be moving out of the way of heightened US combat patrols, and said he may soon dispatch more forces to Diyala Province, just north of Baghdad. Sunni insurgents appear to be regrouping there, he said. Petraeus did strike some upbeat notes, saying that Sunni Arab Anbar Province – home to Fallujah and locale of the most US combat deaths – has been calmer, and attributed that to local leaders saying "enough" to the conflict.

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