U.S. commander requests thousands more troops for Iraq

By Seattle Times news services

	ABDEL KADER SAADI / AP A U.S. supply truck is looted after being ambushed by insurgents on the Baghdad-to-Fallujah highway yesterday.
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Evidence mounted yesterday that coalition forces — in weeklong fights against Sunnis in Fallujah and Shiites in Baghdad and in southern Iraq — were losing control of the roads as another supply convoy was set ablaze.

In an e-mail, a defense contractor who asked not to be named said that the situation was getting worse and that while the United States controlled pockets within Iraq, the rebels "own the roads."

Halliburton, the U.S. company that has a $3.2 billion contract for delivering most of the military supplies in Iraq, said yesterday it had suspended some convoys, raising the danger of shortages in food, fuel and water if the situation continues.

Privately, company officials expressed concerns about security provided to the convoys. Halliburton's fuel convoys are protected by U.S. soldiers under the terms of a contract signed in December 2001.

The military can order soldiers to perform tasks, but contractors in Iraq are free to make their own decisions about security risks. While the United States can eventually hold a company responsible, there is no immediate recourse to force a civilian worker to do a job.

Gunmen yesterday battered U.S. supply lines around Baghdad, attacking a convoy of flatbed trucks carrying M113 armored personnel carriers south of the capital and setting them ablaze. A supply truck was burned and looted on the road from the airport. No U.S. deaths were reported, but in the chaos of the past week, casualty reports have often lagged by days.

The U.S. military has been trying to regain control of supply routes, particularly on Baghdad's western edge, where gunmen in the past week have attacked fuel convoys, shot down an Apache helicopter and killed two U.S. civilian contractors after dragging them from their car. The military also said yesterday that two soldiers and seven Halliburton workers were missing after an attack in that area Friday.

Gen. John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, which handles operations in the Middle East, wouldn't say in a teleconference yesterday how many more troops would be needed in Iraq or how long they would stay.

He said he was requesting "a strong, mobile, combat-arms capability" of "two brigades' worth of combat power, if not more." A mechanized combat brigade generally numbers 5,000 to 7,000 troops.

It wasn't immediately clear whether the two additional brigades would come from fresh units in the United States or forces already in Iraq and Kuwait but scheduled to come home, senior defense officials said. Abizaid wouldn't say which units were under consideration.

The United States has about 130,000 troops in Iraq; about 10,000 of them due to leave were told last week that their tour of duty had been extended 90 days.

Abizaid's decision to press for bulking up U.S. firepower is a polite rebuff to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who for months has rejected sending more troops to Iraq during a presidential-election year. "What Abizaid is really doing is confronting Rumsfeld," a senior Pentagon official said. "He's not going to let the election calendar determine what he needs to do the job."

Civilian control of the military is a time-honored U.S. tradition, saluted briskly if not always revered by military brass. As fighting in Iraq intensified last week, killing more than 60 troops, Abizaid and his senior commanders were emboldened to press the case for more combat strength, Pentagon sources said.

	SYLWIA KAPUSCINSKI / DETROIT FREE PRESS Army Staff Sgt. Joe Vann, center, and Staff Sgt. Nestor Ibarra secure the scene near where a military truck hit a bomb yesterday on a highway to the Baghdad airport.

The Pentagon official said Abizaid, who is regarded as more independent than his predecessor, Gen. Tommy Franks, has been repeatedly discouraged from asking for more soldiers because President Bush has publicly pledged to bring 25,000 troops home from Iraq before the November elections.

"Rumsfeld has made it clear to the whole building that he wasn't interested in getting any requests for more troops," the Pentagon official said.

Abizaid has consistently said he has enough "assets" to carry out his assigned mission. Sources close to Abizaid said, however, that for months he's wanted to expand that mission.

Either Rumsfeld or the Joint Chiefs of Staff could alter or reject Abizaid's request, but some observers were betting on troop increases.

"If Abizaid says he needs two brigades, one can be certain that that's the very minimum he needs, given the reluctance by him and other commanders to acknowledge that they need any more troops at all," said former Ambassador James Dobbins, who supervised peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia and now works for the Rand Corp. Increasing the U.S. presence has a distinct downside, some analysts said.

"The last thing we need in Iraq is more troops," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., public-policy group. "The U.S. troop presence is part of the reason we have a problem. We've gotten to the point after a year where the Iraqis just resent having troops in all their towns."

Abizaid acknowledged yesterday that some U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces had defected during the weeklong uprising and others had refused to fight.

"These numbers are not large but they are troubling to us, and clearly we've got to work on the Iraqi security forces," he said.

With less than three months before the scheduled June 30 transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government, the poor showing of Iraqi forces calls into question how well they will be prepared to handle security after the handover and how long a large U.S. presence in Iraq will be needed.

U.S. commanders in Baghdad said yesterday they will reach out to former senior members of Saddam Hussein's disbanded army to try to stiffen Iraqi security forces.

U.S. officials have sought to avoid relying on former senior members of the Iraq army that existed under Saddam. But Abizaid indicated this approach would change.

"It's also very clear that we've got to get more senior Iraqis involved, former military types involved in the security forces," he said. "In the next couple of days, you'll see a large number of senior officers being appointed to key positions in the ministry of defense and the Iraqi joint staff and in Iraqi field commands."

"The truth of the matter is that until we get well-formed Iraqi chains of command" for the police and the new army, "it's going to be tough to get them to perform at the level we want," Abizaid said.

The four-star general tempered his criticism, however, by stressing that many Iraqis have served valiantly alongside U.S. forces and many have died. "We're extremely proud of the way that many of them have fought," he said.

Compiled from Knight Ridder Newspapers, The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and The New York Daily News.

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