"The Bush administration and top military commanders are looking beyond the promised September progress report on Iraq and are preparing Congress and the American public for a long-term presence of US troops in the occupied nation", the June 8 New York Times reported, adding: "Officials have started downplaying the importance of the September assessment by Army General David Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker as they work to lower public expectations about any quick progress in Iraq."
On June 7, US Army General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad, confirmed earlier media reports that four months after the beginning of US President George Bush's "surge" strategy — which doubled the number of US combat troops in the Iraqi capital to 42,000 — his forces only control one-third of Baghdad's 457 neighbourhoods. Fil told NPR that by September he hoped to have gained control of at least half the city of 6 million residents.
The September "progress" report on the troop surge strategy began as an offhand pledge by Petraeus to the US Senate Armed Services Committee during confirmation proceedings in January to become a four-star general commanding US military operations in Iraq.
In April, US war secretary Robert Gates promoted it into a formal report to Congress during a meeting in Baghdad with Petraeus and Crocker. On June 3, however, Crocker told reporters that September would be "too soon" to make an assessment of how the troop surge strategy was working.
"There is an increasing realisation that a glowing report is simply not going to be viewed as credible", Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East expert with the Congressional Research Service, told the NYT. Indeed, many of the Pentagon's recent claims about making "progress" in its counterinsurgency war in Iraq are completely at odds with the surge in US troop fatalities over the last few months.
On June 7, for example, United Press International reported that the "Pentagon claims that since January, US forces have killed or captured more than 20,000 insurgents". UPI added that from "June 2005 through September 2006, the total number of insurgents was repeatedly put at 20,000 by US officials, according to figures compiled by the Iraq Index Project of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank" — which would mean that the US occupation forces had pretty much annihilated the Iraqi anti-occupation guerrillas.
However, since the beginning of the year there has been no decline in the ability of Iraqi resistance fighters to inflict casualties on US forces. To the contrary, UPI observed, "US casualties, especially fatalities, soared in April and May this year". An average of 3.46 US troops were killed every day in April; 4.06 per day were killed in May. During the first three months of 2007, the rate was 2.6 per day.
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon's latest quarterly report on Iraq, released on June 11, noted that mortar and rocket attacks on Baghdad's Green Zone — the heavily fortified compound that houses the US embassy, the US occupation command and the offices of Washington's puppet Iraqi government — have surged, from 17 in March to 39 in the first three weeks of May.
The June 8 NYT reported that US officials are now looking at extending the surge well into next year. It also reported that top US officials, "led by Bush, have begun citing the so-called 'Korean model' as a precedent for future stationing of US forces in Iraq. Some 54 years after the ceasefire in the Korean War, there are 29,000 US troops in South Korea in a standby mode in case of renewed hostilities with North Korea …
"Bush and Gates have described a scenario where American units would be pulled back to permanent bases in Iraq, a step that would help US forces indefinitely provide Iraqi security forces with logistical support needed to fight insurgents."
More details on this plan were provided by the June 8 Washington Post, which reported that US military officials in Iraq were drawing up plans for "a smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years".
The paper reported the long-term force would consist of a mechanised infantry division of some 20,000 troops, a "training and advisory force" of 10,000 and "more than 10,000 troops, plus some civilian contractors" to provide logistical support.
Currently, the Pentagon has around 150,000 soldiers and 126,000 civilian contractors in Iraq, with 48,000 of them engaged directly in security roles.
According to the Post's sources, who include "senior commanders" in Baghdad, the plan is based on a possible large-scale "drawdown" of US forces in Iraq being implemented in the months after the next US president is inaugurated in January 2009.
The Post reported: "Despite the talk in the US capital that Petraeus has only until September to stabilize the situation in Iraq, some officers here are quietly suggesting that they really may have until Jan. 20, 2009 — when President Bush leaves office — to put the smaller, revised force in place. They doubt that Bush will pull the plug on the war or that Congress will ultimately force his hand."
The "post-Bush" Iraq war plan — with a permanent occupation force of at least 40,000 US troops — is therefore being drawn up to give the next president the option of pretending to meet US voters' demand for an "exit strategy" while keeping the US counterinsurgency war going.
However, as the Post noted, "This is hardly the first time officials have considered troop reductions. The original US war plan called for the [US] Army to have only 30,000 troops in Iraq by fall 2003; later, top commanders planned for a drawdown in the summer of 2004. Neither option came to pass, as the military found itself engaged in a tougher and longer war in Iraq than it or the Bush administration had expected."
In a clear indication of what the US occupation is ultimately aimed at, the June 12 NYT reported that at a meeting between Admiral William Fallon and Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al Maliki, Iraq's draft oil law was a particular focus. "Is it reasonable to expect it to be completed in July?", Fallon reportedly asked the PM. "We have to show some progress in July for the upcoming report [to Congress]."
The draft oil law, approved by Maliki's cabinet in February and submitted to parliament in May, will enable the big US and British oil companies to take over Iraq's oil industry, which was nationalised in 1972.
The draft law is opposed by the armed resistance, Sunni Arab MPs and MPs aligned with anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, and by the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, which represents 26,000 Iraqi oil workers. Since mid-May, the IFOU has announced, but repeatedly postponed, a strike of all its members to protest against the draft law.
The Democratic Party leadership in the US Congress has joined with Bush to make the oil law's passage through parliament the top benchmark for measuring the Maliki government's "progress".
UPI reported on June 1 that a "senior" US State Department official had denied that Washington had drafted the oil law and was "telling Baghdad what to do". But "opponents in and out of Iraq", UPI noted, "point to Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001, which included a wish list for privatizing Iraq's oil; a pre-war working group of the US State Department that focused on Iraq's oil sector; the US Agency for International Development's contract with Virigina-based consultant BearingPoint for 'broad economic reform' of Iraq, including the oil sector; and a meeting organized by the US Energy Department last year in Washington between the oil minister and the heads of oil companies".
"The people as well as all the members of parliament believe that this law is not only for robbing Iraq of its oil wealth but also for the division of Iraq", Iraqi MP Mohammed Al Dynee told UPI. "At first they believed that America had come to give them freedom and democracy, and they have now started to understand that America did not come at all for that; they came for the oil, and the best proof of that is this oil law."