Surge should last until spring general says

John Burns:

An American general directing a major part of the offensive aimed at securing Baghdad said Sunday that it would take until next spring for the operation to succeed, and that an early American withdrawal would clear the way for “the enemy to come back” to areas now being cleared of insurgents.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commanding 15,000 American and about 7,000 Iraqi troops on Baghdad’s southern approaches, spoke more forcefully than any American commander to date in urging that the so-called troop surge ordered by President Bush continue into the spring of 2008. That would match the deadline of March 31 set by the Pentagon, which has said that limits on American troops available for deployment will force an end to the increase by then.

“It’s going to take us through the summer and fall to deny the enemy his sanctuaries” south of Baghdad, General Lynch said at a news briefing in the Iraqi capital. “And then it’s going to take us through the first of the year and into the spring” to consolidate the gains now being made by the American offensive and to move enough Iraqi forces into the cleared areas to ensure that they remain so, he said.

The general spoke as momentum is gathering in Congress for an early withdrawal date for the 160,000 American troops, as well as an accelerated end to the troop buildup, which have increased American combat casualties in the past three months to the highest levels of the war. In renewed debate over the past week, Congressional opponents of the war have demanded a withdrawal deadline, with some proposing that Congress use its war-appropriations powers to end the troop increase much sooner, possibly this fall.

General Lynch, a blunt-spoken, cigar-smoking Ohio native who commands the Third Infantry Division, said that all the American troops who began an offensive south of Baghdad in mid-June are part of the five-month-old troop buildup, and that they were making “significant” gains in areas that were previously enemy sanctuaries. Pulling back before the job was completed, he said, would create “an environment where the enemy could come back and fill the void.”

He implied that an early withdrawal would amount to an abandonment of Iraqi civilians who he said have rallied in support of the American and Iraqi troops, and would leave the civilians exposed to renewed brutalities by extremist groups. “When we go out there, the first question they ask is, ‘Are you staying?’ ” , he said. “And the second question is, ‘How can we help?’ ”. He added, “What we hear is, ‘We’ve had enough of people attacking our villages, attacking our homes, and attacking our children.’ ”

General Lynch said his troops had promised local people that they would stay in the areas they had taken from the extremists until enough Iraqi forces were available to take over, and said this had helped sustain “a groundswell” of feeling against the extremists. He said locals had pinpointed hideouts of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an extremist group that claims to ties to Osama bin Laden, that have been used to send suicide bombers into Baghdad, helped troops locate 170 large arms caches. The general also said the locals had founded new neighborhood patrol units called “Iraqi provincial volunteers” that supplied their own weapons and ammunition.

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General Lynch said he was “amazed” at the cooperation his troops were encountering in previously hostile areas. He cited the village of Al Taqa, near the Euphrates about 20 miles southwest of Baghdad, where four American soldiers were killed in an ambush on May 12 and three others were taken hostage. One of the hostages was later found dead, leaving two soldiers missing.

Brig. Gen. Jim Huggins, a deputy to General Lynch, said an Iraqi commander in the area had told him on Saturday that women and children in the village had begun using plastic pipes to tap on streetlamps and other metal objects to warn when extremists were in the area planting roadside bombs and planning other attacks. “The tapping,” General Huggins said, was a signal that “these people have had enough.”

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Other commanders are going to have to be as outspoken if they are going to get a chance to save the gains they have made. It looks like they need to go over the heads of the politicians in Congress who are pushing for the failure of their mission. The irrational fears of some Republicans and the political posturing of democrats are the best hope of the enemy at this point. They will not be able to defeat these troops, but they are doing a bang up job in the hearts and minds of Congress.