"U.S. Could Scale Back Troops in Iraq, Rumsfeld Says"

Paul Koring, Toronto Globe and Mail

WASHINGTON — Some U.S. troops could be ordered home even if they fail to quash the mounting insurgency in Iraq, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday, admitting for the first time that the "heavy footprint" of American tanks, soldiers and warplanes might be fomenting more opposition than it quells.

After talks at the Pentagon with Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the hawkish Mr. Rumsfeld signalled a shift in U.S. priorities from aggressively stamping out the insurgency to taking an increasingly back-seat role to Iraqi forces. He said U.S. troops might be part of the problem, rather than the solution."The heavier your footprint is, the more intrusive you are in their lives," he said, adding that the military advantage of maintaining nearly 150,000 heavily armed U.S. ground forces in Iraq needs to be weighed against the anger aroused by their continuing presence nearly 18 months after they toppled Saddam Hussein's regime.

"No country wants foreign forces . . . any longer than they have to be there," Mr. Rumsfeld said, adding that Iraq may never be entirely peaceful and that it would be a mistake to maintain a huge number of U.S. troops on the ground to attempt to achieve that goal. Rather, he said, the focus needs to be on training and equipping Iraqi forces to battle the insurgency.

"Any implication that that place has to be peaceful and perfect before we can reduce coalition and U.S. forces, I think, would obviously be unwise, because it's never been peaceful and perfect, and it isn't likely to be," he said.

"It's a tough part of the world," he said, adding that nowhere -- and certainly not major American cities -- is entirely peaceful. "We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. . . . What's the difference? We just didn't see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night."

However, even in the most crime-ridden U.S. cities, there are few days that compare to what passes for Iraq's new normality.

Yesterday, insurgents kidnapped four more foreign workers, fired a small missile that exploded on a busy Baghdad street and sent a barrage of mortar shells at the Italian embassy.

And the cycle of violence seems to be worsening.

Foreign workers are fleeing Iraq, fearing kidnappings, and slowing already fitful reconstruction efforts. The number of suicide car bombings has soared in recent weeks, with more than 30 since the beginning of September. Mr. Allawi said more than 3,600 Iraqi civilians have been killed and 12,000 wounded in the past five months of fighting.

Yesterday, Mr. Rumsfeld said that a significant drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq might come sooner than years from now. It seemed an attempt to counter recent political gambits by Senator John Kerry, the Democrat trying to unseat President George W. Bush.

Mr. Kerry has said he would bring some U.S. troops home by from Iraq next summer, and all of them by the end of his first four-year term, if he were elected president.