By Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt
The New York Times, 18 December 2005
WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - The Fourth Infantry Division returns to Iraq next month for a complex, yearlong tour that illustrates the risks and goals of the American military's postelection mission across Iraq.
The more than 20,000 troops in the division, about 15 percent of the 138,000-strong American commitment scheduled to remain in Iraq at least through the early part of the year, will be responsible for security across a swath of central and south-central Iraq that is much larger than previous commands have tried to cover there.
The expanded mission includes more than a hope, but a requirement, that Iraqi security forces take over the security mission in larger areas of their own country. The planning is also driven by a cold reality that many of the allied troops - including Ukraine, Bulgaria, Italy and possibly even Poland - seem likely to leave Iraq over coming months.
So, like American troops all across Iraq, the Fourth Infantry Division, from its headquarters in Baghdad, will have no choice but to rely on increasing numbers of Iraqi troops, testing as never before the American and Iraqi forces - and the new government to be assembled from the parliamentary election that was held Thursday.
The Americans are planning to turn over bases to Iraqis, and more significantly plan to turn over a much larger share of the battle space to Iraqis, with the goal to minimize a visible American presence that alienates many Iraqis and provides a target for the insurgency. When possible, the American military will remain in a stand-back role, available to rush in if Iraqi forces need assistance.
American commanders make it no secret that the coming Iraqi government, with its sovereign stature and a full, four-year tenure, means they will be operating in new political terrain. Mounting pressures in the United States - and a new Iraqi government all but certain to assert its authority in coming months - will require that the American military demonstrate some kind of success and then withdraw as many troops as quickly and as safely as possible.
The goal is to make Iraqi patrols the norm, with stability no longer dependent on the large foreign force that has so constantly enraged Iraqis. That goal has become every bit as important as quelling the insurgency, if not more so. The new mission for the Fourth Infantry Division is planned around that new goal.
"It is very much a laboratory for the overall mission, linked not just to the development of the Iraqi armed forces but to efforts to make the special security forces act like national police forces," and not loyal only to local religious or ethnic leaders, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"How much of the battle space can the Iraqi forces take over, and who is actually doing the fighting - those are the key measurements," Mr. Cordesman said.
"The measure cannot be the elimination of the insurgency, as desirable as that would be," he said. "You cannot eliminate all of the bombings."
In a strong indication of the tenor of the coming months, several of the incoming commanders are also returning veterans of the Iraq mission, and come from a school of thought that balances both the rebuilding of Iraq's economy and civil institutions and the contest of arms against the insurgents.
Still, the American reliance on overwhelming firepower will remain central.
The Fourth Infantry Division is the largest and most technologically advanced heavy division in the Army, with the most modern Abrams tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and armored Humvees in the military's inventory.
The division re-enters Iraq redesigned to be more flexible, growing to four brigade combat teams from three, each a self-contained fighting unit hauling the latest high-tech communications and surveillance gear to operate with greater certainty of its locations - and that of adversaries.
The new, enlarged boundaries assigned to the Fourth Infantry Division were described by officials at the Pentagon and in Iraq, but the military asked that the details not be printed because they might assist the insurgency in its planning.
In this postelection phase, incoming commanders are starting off free from the burden of earlier bitter debates about war planning, prewar intelligence or the number of troops engaged in the first months of the invasion and occupation.
"They are not looking over their shoulders," said Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army vice chief of staff. "They are looking forward."
The Fourth Infantry Division is headed by Maj. Gen. J. D. Thurman, who served as chief of operations for the Coalition Forces Land Component Command, which planned and ran the rapid ground war into Baghdad, and then spent a tour at the Pentagon helping the Army redesign the way its attack helicopters would be sent into combat.
Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the new commander of the Iraqi training mission, previously served two years in Saudi Arabia and already has served 15 months of combat duty in Iraq, as he commanded the First Armored Division for its earlier tour, when it was assigned to provide security in Baghdad after the fall of the old government, and battled a Shiite militia uprising to the south of the capital.
General Dempsey said the elections on Thursday offered a new framework - and a new time frame, if not a deadline, for the allied effort.
"For the first time since this mission began, we've got a government that will come into power with the expectation that it will sit for four years," he said.
"You've got a six-month window of opportunity to assist them in putting in place a system that reflects democratic processes in a free market economy," he added.
"Why do I say six months? Any nation is gong to begin to assert itself after that first six-month period, and will develop habits and processes of its own," the general said. "Our influence begins to wane a bit."
Another returning veteran is the three-star officer who early next year takes command of the day-to-day fight and military-led reconstruction mission all across Iraq; he is Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, who left Baghdad this year after a tour as commander of the First Cavalry Division.
General Chiarelli provided insight into the way ahead for next year in an essay for an Army journal over the summer in which he argued that the military mission must provide essential city services, create jobs and promote local governmental control.
"A gun on every street corner, although visually appealing, provides only a short-term solution," the general wrote in the journal, Military Review, and "does not equate to long-term security grounded in a democratic process."
"If there is nothing else done other than kill bad guys and train others to kill bad guys, the only thing accomplished is moving more people from the fence to the insurgent category," he wrote. "There remains no opportunity to grow the supporter base."
Training Iraqi security forces has been delayed in part by a lack of American trainers, but commanders say that by early next year, the full complement of 2,500 American military advisers will be in place working and living directly with Iraqi units, from battalions up to ministries in Baghdad.
These advisers to Iraqi Army, special police and border patrol forces will instruct Iraqi forces and provide a vital link to American intelligence and logistics support.
In addition, entire American units will partner with Iraqi units to provide more training. General Dempsey's latest count of Iraqi forces - about 75,000 police officers and about 100,000 soldiers - is projected to grow rapidly.
As the Iraqi forces take on additional responsibility, and prove their combat worthiness, American commanders in the country are poised to recommend a reduction of United States forces, with a tentative planning target of dropping to 100,000 by autumn.
Across Iraq, American forces say they will be ready to rely on the Iraqis, though many acknowledge that previous assessments of how quickly domestic security forces would step up to the fight have been far too optimistic, with well-publicized instances of Iraqi troops fleeing the fight or not returning to duty after a particularly intense battle.
Maj. Gen. Thomas R. Turner II, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said that within six months, he expected Iraqis to lead operations in about half of his division's area of responsibility in north-central Iraq, an area the size of Louisiana.
Over the past four to five months, Iraq police officials have reverified the credentials of police officers on the payrolls in all 18 provinces by creating an automated database that took fingerprints and retinal scans. These measures have slashed hundreds of "ghost" officers from the payrolls.
General Dempsey said another major focus next year would be on building up the Iraqi Defense and Interior Ministries to manage their own forces. Over the past month, raids on two Iraqi-run detention centers in Baghdad found scores of abused Iraqi detainees, prompting the military to order inspections of hundreds of Iraqi detention centers.
General Dempsey acknowledged that hundreds of militia gunmen had joined police departments around the country, while still retaining loyalties to their militia commanders.
"Some of these units are corrupt," said one Army company commander on his second yearlong tour in Iraq, who asked for anonymity in order to discuss his critical assessment of the Iraqi police forces candidly. "They are also poorly equipped in many cases, although they are becoming more of a focus and this is improving."
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Citation: Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt. "New Mission for U.S. Division: To Put Iraqi Forces to the Test," The New York Times, 18 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/international/middleeast/18strategy.html
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