Military leader says troop level could rise

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman said Sunday that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase next year, not decrease, if the insurgency continues.

Gen. Peter Pace's comments, on "Fox News Sunday," suggested that the Pentagon's plan to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, announced Friday by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, depended on several variables.

Pace, like Rumsfeld, said the military and the Bush administration have no specific target for how many troops to keep in Iraq now that the general elections are over.

Instead, Pace said, military commanders will continue to monitor the Pentagon's "offramps and onramps [into Iraq] based on what we have on the ground."

The four-star Marine general said that any decisions to withdraw troops — or to deploy more forces into Iraq — will depend mostly on whether the insurgency continues to launch deadly attacks against U.S. forces and friendly elements of the fledgling Baghdad government.

"So if things go the way we expect them to, as more Iraqi units stand up, we'll be able to bring our troops down and turn over that territory to the Iraqis," Pace said on the talk show. "But on the other hand, the enemy has a vote in this, and if they were to cause some kind of problems that required more troops, then we would do exactly what we've done in the past, which is give the commanders on the ground what they need. And in that case, you could see troop level go up a little bit to handle that problem."

Pace, the first Marine appointed to the top command post, also said U.S. troops probably will be redeployed to specific regions within Iraq based on where the insurgency is strongest and where Iraq's battalions of young and inexperienced troops are struggling the most.

He said that if Americans were looking at a color-coded map of deployments next year, they would "watch the colors change" as Iraqi battalions take over for U.S. forces.

Rumsfeld announced Friday during a trip to Iraq that President Bush has signed off on the withdrawal of an undisclosed number of U.S. combat troops from Iraq next year.