DC's 'Open secret': Rumsfeld wants to quit Iraq (the life of 'fobbits') [View All]

DC's 'Open secret': Rumsfeld wants to quit Iraq
Sherwood Ross
Middle East Times
August 14, 2006

WASHINGTON, DC -- It is an "open secret" in Washington US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "wants to extricate himself from Iraq" but President George W. Bush "remains resolute," thus the US hangs on, a US investigative reporter has written.

The result is a military posture in limbo somewhere between aggressiveness and withdrawal that could bog the US down in Iraq for years. Tragically, it opens the door to escalation of the horrific violence which in Baghdad on kills around 50 people daily and wounds many times more.

The Pentagon has largely switched from rooting out and killing insurgents, as in the first two years of the war (2003-4), to hunkering its troops down in "isolated mega-bases," said George Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine and author of The Assassins' Gate (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This approach, known in Washington as an "exit strategy," has put the much victimized Iraqi public at increased risk.

"Commanders are under tremendous pressure to keep casualties low, and combat deaths have been declining for several months, as patrols are reduced and the Americans rely more and more on air power," Packer wrote in the magazine April 10 in words that sound prescient four months later as civilian killed and wounded overflow Iraqi morgues and hospitals.

"The retreat to enduring FOBs seems like an acknowledgment that counterinsurgency is just too hard," Packer wrote. He quoted Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer, who stated, "If you really want to reduce your casualties go back to Fort Riley. It's absurd to think that you can protect the population from armed insurgents without putting your men's lives at risk."

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http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060814-035136-1700r