General says sending more troops to Iraq would not be helpful

The top U.S. commander for Iraq and Afghanistan insisted Tuesday that he has sufficient troops to succeed in Iraq, even though he cannot focus simultaneously on both the intense security effort in Baghdad and suppressing the violent insurgency in Anbar province.

Army Gen. John Abizaid said adding U.S. forces would be exactly the wrong thing to do because it would interfere with the effort to get Iraqi forces to take responsibility for the security of their country, which he called the key to victory. But the U.S. Central Command leader said he does not expect any reduction in the more than 145,000 American troops in Iraq until at least next spring, which he conceded was later than had been predicted.

In a breakfast session with the Defense Writers Group in Washington, Abizaid said he and Gen. George Casey, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, are concentrating their effort on overcoming the bloody sectarian violence in Baghdad between Shia and Sunni militias, which has resulted in hundreds of brutal murders in recent months. Casey sent in an Army Stryker brigade that had been scheduled to go home and the unit is now conducting major sweeps through different neighborhoods in the sprawling capital.

In congressional testimony earlier this summer, Abizaid the sectarian violence in Baghdad was "as bad as he had seen." Tuesday he said the situation there is "slightly better," but added that the "security tensions, if left unchecked, would be unsettling."

Abizaid conceded that because of the emphasis on Baghdad, Casey actually had to reduce U.S. troops in Anbar, the large western province that has been the scene of chronic violent attacks by al Qaeda-linked foreign terrorists and local Sunni militants. "It is very, very clear that Anbar is a problem that has to be dealt with eventually," he said.

And when questioned about why he said he had enough forces, when he could not deal with both of those security challenges, Abizaid declared that "every time Americans operate in large numbers it creates a dynamic where the Iraqis do less." The key to victory, he said, is getting the Iraqis to take over the fight, which would be delayed by adding more U.S. troops.