2007-09-04

By David S. Cloud and Steven Lee Myers
New York Times
09/04/2007 01:30:17 AM PDT

AL-ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq - President Bush on Monday made a surprise visit to Iraq for meetings with his commanders and senior Iraqi officials, raising the possibility that some U.S. soldiers could soon begin to withdraw from Iraq if security gains in recent months continued.

Bush's visit to Iraq - his third - was a dramatic move with a clear political goal: to set the tone for a series of upcoming hearings in Congress. The hearings are expected to be critical of the administration's strategy, but Bush tried to pre-empt opponents' pressure for a withdrawal by hailing what he called recent successes in Iraq and by contending that only making Iraq stable would allow U.S. forces to pull back.

Bush spoke during an eight-hour visit to the remote desert base in the restive Sunni province of Al-Anbar, where he had summoned Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and others to demonstrate that reconciliation among Iraq's warring sectarian factions was at least conceivable, if not yet a fact.

To ensure security, the White House shrouded Bush's visit in secrecy, issuing a misleading schedule that said he would leave the White House on Monday and Air Force One would refuel in Hawaii. Instead, the president left the White House on Sunday night, traveled to Andrews Air Force Base without the usual motorcade and, after an overnight flight, arrived in Iraq on a sweltering summer afternoon when temperatures reached 110 degrees.

After talks with Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, Bush said they "tell me that if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces."

Bush did not say how large a troop withdrawal was possible. Nor did he say whether he envisioned any forces being withdrawn sooner than next spring, when the first of the additional 30,000 troops Bush sent to Iraq this year are due to come home anyway.

Still, his remarks were the clearest indication yet that a reduction would begin sometime in the months ahead, answering the growing opposition in Washington to an unpopular war while at the same time trying to argue that any change in strategy was not a failure.

"Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground - not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media," Bush told a gathering of U.S. troops, who responded with a rousing cheer. "In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home."

Bush flew with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, an extraordinary gathering of top leaders in a war zone. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Iraq separately and joined them.

Several administration officials say Bush and his commanders and military advisers have neared a consensus on beginning a reduction in U.S. forces. Speaking to reporters traveling with him, Gates said Monday that he had formulated his opinion, though he declined to reveal it.

The Al-Anbar region is a Sunni stronghold where in recent months there have been significant improvements in security. Administration officials have been touting the gains as evidence that the increase in U.S. troops has proved a success - a word Bush used eight times in his public remarks Monday.

During his visit, Bush did not leave the base, a heavily fortified home to about 10,000 U.S. soldiers about 120 miles west of Baghdad. Hadley said planning for the trip had started five or six weeks ago.

Administration officials seemed defensive about the notion that the trip was a publicity stunt. They said Bush wanted to meet face-to-face with Petraeus and Crocker, who are to testify before Congress about progress in Iraq next week, and with Iraqi leaders he has been pressing from afar to take steps toward political reconciliation.

By summoning Maliki and other top officials to the Sunni heartland, a region the Shiite prime minister has rarely visited, Bush succeeded in forcing a public display of unity.

In Washington, a spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said the president's visit and his assertions about progress would do little to persuade skeptics. "Despite this massive PR operation, the American people are still demanding a new strategy," the spokesman, Jim Manley, said in a telephone interview.

Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the reversal in Al-Anbar had less do with U.S. strategy than with local frustration over the extremism of Al-Qaida fighters trying to impose their doctrine. Cordesman suggested it was more of an anomaly than a model that could be applied elsewhere in Iraq, where sectarian divisions and strife appear to be worsening.

"We are spinning events that don't really reflect the reality on the ground," he said.

While some administration officials have recently described the Sunni shift in Al-Anbar as serendipitous, they portrayed the improvements as an outgrowth, at least in part, of the decision to send nearly 4,000 additional Marines to the province as part of the White House strategy to increase troops. "This is not serendipity," Hadley said.

Distrust remains deep between Sunnis in Al-Anbar and the Maliki government - and it is clear that Maliki sees efforts by the U.S. military to organize armed groups of Sunnis to assist U.S. troops as a policy that amounts to assisting his enemies. Nor is it clear that the same model can be made to work in areas of Iraq where Sunnis and Shiites live together.

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