The Iraq war is entering a new, post-election phase in which U.S. troops will focus on training Iraqi security forces, but no American withdrawal is in sight, top Pentagon officials said Thursday. "In this new phase, the priority will be on increasing our efforts to help the Iraqis assume more responsibility for providing security for their country," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon. But in Senate testimony, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded that less than a third of 136,000 Iraqi troops and police counted as "trained and equipped" are capable of independent combat operations. "It does not mean the rest of them are not useful because in many parts of the country all you need are police on duty," Myers told the Senate Armed Services Committee.Wolfowitz told the panel that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq would be reduced in coming weeks from 150,000 to about 135,000, or about the same level as before reinforcements were sent in for the Jan. 30 elections. But while Iraq's elections have buoyed U.S. and Iraqi officials, Wolfowitz indicated that the American troop level was likely to remain that high throughout the year - a suggestion that provoked a
| Teddy, remember that time in the '50s when the Army tried to train you to be an M.P.? About that long, perhaps longer. |
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said, "One of the reasons why there's continuous questions is because of the various setbacks we've had in the training and equipping of the Iraqis." But Wolfowitz and Myers said Iraqi forces performed well on election day, stopping seven attempted car bombings in Baghdad and one south of the city and providing security at polling places. Wolfowitz also reported that on each of the first two days after Sunday's elections, an estimated 2,500 Iraqis joined Iraq's security forces. Their most important gaps are intangible, Wolfowitz said: leadership, command and control arrangements, experience, and unit cohesion. "These intangibles take time to develop," he said. "Some of them are, frankly, best developed by actual combat experience."