House Dem. cautions on speed of U.S. troop pullout from Iraq

Amid a rising chorus of Democratic lawmakers pressing for a swift U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, a freshman House Democrat with extensive national security credentials on Tuesday said it could take up to two years to pull out troops and equipment.

Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., a former three-star admiral, said the logistical hurdles of moving thousands of troops and vehicles, coupled with an increasingly volatile situation on the ground in Iraq, would make leaving the country a long and difficult mission.

"The time to do it will take at least -- at least -- a year," Sestak told an audience at the Center for American Progress. But it would take between 15 months and two years to do it well, he said.

Sestak, who served as the director of defense policy in the Clinton White House, estimated it would take 100 days to shutter and clean up each of the U.S. military's 64 forward operating bases in Iraq.

There is also the logistics challenge of transporting roughly 160,000 troops, as well as vehicles and other equipment, over hostile roads south to Kuwait, where they must be cleaned before being shipped to the United States. "As we say in the military, amateurs do tactics, experts do logistics," Sestak said.

During his fall campaign, Sestak called on the White House to pull all troops out of Iraq by the end of this year -- a position that, at the time, went beyond the position of many congressional Democrats, who had been calling for a phased withdrawal. Sestak's comments Tuesday seemed to temper an intensifying effort within his party to withdraw most U.S. combat forces from Iraq within six months.

Sestak did not directly address his party's efforts, but acknowledged that even 15 months "is probably pushing it to do it safely unless you just walked away" without closing bases and moving much of the equipment.

His effort to inject realistic expectations into the withdrawal debate follows recent statements by House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., who believes it would take a year to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq. Murtha, a leading opponent of the war, had led efforts to pass a six-month timetable for troop withdrawal.

Sestak continued his push to at least begin reducing the U.S. military presence in Iraq -- a move he emphasized was necessary to alleviate the burden constant deployments have placed on ground forces. "We must redeploy to salvage the Army's readiness," Sestak said, adding that the service is "about to unravel."

Meanwhile, Sestak said Congress must find a bipartisan solution to ending the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

"The only way we are going to be successful ... is if the actual leaders of the respective caucuses, the leaders, come together and recognize it is not about politics," he said. But Sestak acknowledged that his efforts in the last several weeks to revive support for the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group were unsuccessful.