As the death toll for U.S. troops in Iraq reached 4,000, President Bush conferred Monday with top U.S. officials in Washington and in Baghdad and vowed in a public statement that the outcome of the war “will merit the sacrifice.”
Bush held a two-hour videoconference with Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. In congressional testimony scheduled for April, they are expected to describe continued but slow improvement in military and political conditions, even as recent weeks have seen an increase in suicide bombings, along with Sunday’s renewal of rocket attacks on Baghdad’s Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and much of the Iraqi government are located.
Among the wounded in four separate attacks were an American military contractor and an embassy employee from Jordan, both of whom remain in serious condition, a U.S. official in Baghdad said. Military officials said the munitions were Iranian-made, fired from northeastern Baghdad by renegade Shiite militia groups.
Overall attacks in Iraq continue to decline, but the decrease has slowed over the past three months and has begun to plateau — car bombings have decreased, but suicide bombings have increased. Petraeus plans to tell Congress that the withdrawal of U.S. forces that began late last year — and has now reached about 9,000 troops — will continue until the end of July, with three additional brigades expected to be withdrawn without replacement.
At that point, Petraeus has said, he will stop removing forces pending what aides called an “evaluation” of whether Iraqi forces and remaining U.S. troops can sustain lower levels of violence. “We have every desire to continue with the withdrawal of forces,” one military official said. “The issue will be once we remove over 25 percent of combat power plus other associated units … we let the dust settle … and look to see where we’re at,” he said, adding that the evaluation period would probably be no shorter than six weeks.
Although administration officials have said that the withdrawals by July should leave U.S. troop strength in Iraq about where it was last spring — approximately 130,000 — the military official said the net number remaining may be larger. “They’re in the process now of trying to scrub the numbers,” he said. “Figuring out boots on the ground is difficult.”
