United States military leaders and Pentagon officials have made it clear through public statements and deliberately leaked stories in recent weeks that they plan to violate a central provision of the US-Iraq withdrawal agreement requiring the complete pullout of all US combat troops from Iraqi cities by mid-2009 by reclassifying combat troops as support troops.So, by classifying tens of thousands of combat troops as support troops, no troop withdrawals will be made, and there's not a thing anyone can do about it. Confident that they have Obama in a corner politically and that domestically, the President will have his hands more than full, they figure Obama won't want to fight this battle at all.
The scheme to engage in chicanery in labeling US troops represents both open defiance of an agreement which the US military has never accepted and a way of blocking president-elect Barack Obama's proposed plan for withdrawal of all US combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of his taking office.
By redesignating tens of thousands of combat troops as support troops, those officials apparently hope to make it difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to insist on getting all combat troops of the country by mid-2010.
A source close to the Obama transition team has told Inter Press Service that Obama had made the decision for a frankly political reason. Obama and his advisers believed the administration would be politically vulnerable on national security and viewed the Gates nomination as a way of blunting political criticism of its policies.Gates, Odierno and Petraeus are telling Obama to go to hell. Surely the GOP will back any play like this that the Pentagon and Gates make, saying that Obama should support out troops, listen to our commanders on the ground, etc. Should Obama wade into this one, they figure they will cut him off at the knees in the middle of the worst economic crisis in 75 years.
The Gates decision was followed immediately by the leak of a major element in the military plan to push back against a 16-month withdrawal plan - a scheme to keep US combat troops in Iraqi cities after mid-2009, in defiance of the terms of the withdrawal agreement.
The New York Times first revealed that "Pentagon planners" were proposing the "relabeling" of US combat units as "training and support" units in a December 4 story. The Times story also revealed that Pentagon planners were projecting that as many as 70,000 US troops would be maintained in Iraq "for a substantial time even beyond 2011", despite the agreement's explicit requirement that all US troops would have to be withdrawn by then.
Odierno provided a further hint on December 13 that the US military intended to ignore the provision of the agreement requiring withdrawal of all US combat troops from cities and towns by the end of May 2009. Odierno told reporters flatly that US troops would not move from numerous security posts in cities beyond next summer's deadline for their removal, saying, "We believe that's part of our transition teams."
His spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel James Hutton, explained that these "transition teams" would consist of "enablers" rather than "combat forces", and that this would be consistent with the withdrawal agreement.
But both Odierno's and Hutton's remarks were clearly based on the Pentagon plan for the "relabeling" of US combat forces as support forces in order to evade a key constraint in the pact that the Times had reported earlier.
But wade in he must. Our republic is at stake here. If the generals win this battle, then we will never be out of Iraq, not in your lifetime. Obama will have to make it clear to the Pentagon that America intends to honor its agreement. If he does not, then we're under a military junta in all but name, with the neocons and the GOP war hawks running the country for good.
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