Terrorist acts such as this week’s apparent suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad are becoming the biggest security threat in Iraq, and Washington may have to change its tactics to cope with that, the top U.S. military commander for the region said Thursday.
While the U.S. fights a guerrilla war against forces still loyal to Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, Islamic fundamentalists from other countries are moving into Iraq to battle Americans, said Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, which is in charge of the Pentagon’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The terrorist problem is emerging as the No. 1 security threat, and we are applying a lot of time, energy and resources to identify it, understand it and deal with it,” he said.
Appearing with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a Pentagon news briefing Thursday, Abizaid said this did not mean that the U.S. should increase its troop strength in Iraq, although additional forces from other nations are welcome.
“You have to change the way that you’re using your troops,” Abizaid said. “So you do tactics, techniques and procedures differently. . . . You have to bring in different types of troops. You saw that as the 3rd Infantry Division, a heavy force, left, we brought in the 82nd Airborne Division–lighter troops.”
More than additional “boots on the ground,” the U.S. needs good intelligence about the enemy, he said.
“The real issue is intelligence,” he said. “You have to have good, solid intelligence in a conflict such as this so you can get at the terrorists. That’s the No. 1 thing we’ve got to have, and we’re working hard at it.”
According to Rumsfeld, the 140,000-strong U.S. force in Iraq has been augmented by 50,000 to 60,000 Iraqis, who have been recruited to provide varying forms of security. The 27 other nations in the U.S.-led coalition are providing an additional 20,000 troops. Most of these belong to a British division and a Polish division, which the U.S. hopes to reinforce with one or two additional foreign divisions later, Abizaid said.
This also does not mean U.S. troop strength can be reduced, he said.
“As foreign troops come in, as other coalition [members] come in, and as Iraqi forces become more mature, we intend to turn over some of the internal security duties that we’re currently doing to them,” Abizaid said. “We’ll adopt a more aggressive posture on external duties, such as borders or other sorts of things.”
Increasing U.S. troop strength could be a liability in the present situation, he said.
“There’s a downside where you increase your lines of communication, you increase your number of logistics troops, you increase the energy that you have to expend just to guard yourself,” he said. “I have never been one in favor of huge, ponderous forces, but [I favor] light, agile, mobile forces that not only can deal with the problem in Iraq but throughout the theater.”
Rumsfeld said that the president and he have agreed that the number of U.S. troops will be decided solely by Abizaid’s determination of the need.
Though Rumsfeld made reference to “the Baathists and their terrorist allies” in proclaiming at the beginning of the briefing that “their cause is lost,” Abizaid said that Hussein loyalists and outside Islamic fundamentalist groups have not become “allies per se.”
“There are some indications of cooperation in specific areas,” he said. “Of course, ideologically, they are not at all compatible.”
