Capturing Saddam may mean smaller U.S. troop presence in Iraq

WASHINGTON -- The logic is simple: If the arrest of Saddam Hussein takes the punch out of the Iraqi insurgency, security should improve. If security improves, more U.S. troops should come home.

No one can reliably predict how long it will take the U.S. military to unravel fully the network of insurgents, even with new information gleaned from the capture of the ousted Iraqi leader. Also, the Pentagon does not want to raise early hopes of a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Any official talk of scaling back the U.S. military presence in Iraq might undercut the Bush administration's efforts to persuade more countries to contribute combat forces.

The Pentagon already is planning a modest reduction in the number of U.S. troops in the spring, when a fresh contingent of ground troops is to replace those approaching the end of one-year tours in the country. The number of American troops in Iraq is scheduled to drop from the current 131,000 to about 110,000 by May.

That could be about all for a while, however. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on "Fox News Sunday" that the U.S. presence in Iraq will total at least 100,000 people through 2004.

One of the first questions that arose after last weekend's capture of ousted Iraqi President Saddam was, "Why not cut back even further, considering that he was No. 1 on the Pentagon's Iraq enemy list?"

The answer seems to be that more reductions are possible -- perhaps even likely -- but until it is abundantly clear that the insurgency is dead, the soldiers and Marines scheduled to head for Iraq in the months ahead should expect to go, officials and private experts say.

"That's just a reality," says Dan Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a private think tank in Arlington, Va.

Already, the Pentagon announced on Thursday that about 2,000 more soldiers than previously planned will go to Iraq in January. Part of the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, from Fort Bragg, N.C., will be on a four-month assignment to provide extra continuity during the rotation.

In Goure's view, there is a slight possibility that by the spring, during the latter portion of the 2004 troop rotation, some replacement units could be scaled back if security is notably improved. To cut back more than that, he says, would be too big of a risk.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that while Saddam's widely publicized capture should take a toll on the insurgency, some people in what he called the "anti-liberation" camp might, in the short term, "race around striving to show that they still are anti-liberation, and they want to restore the Baathists," the political party that underpinned Saddam's rule.

"They might make more efforts to kill people," he told a Pentagon news conference last week.

Still, Rumsfeld said it seemed reasonable to think that in the longer run, the televised images of Saddam in U.S. captivity will change the thinking of those who believed he might be restored to power. Even the most loyal supporter, "looking at those images, has to say, 'Gee, I don't think today I'm quite as strong a supporter as I was yesterday,"' Rumsfeld said.

Any decision to scale back the U.S. troop presence in Iraq beyond the current plan would be made mainly by Rumsfeld, based on recommendations from commanders such as Gen. John Abizaid, the head of Central Command, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior officer on the ground in Iraq, although President Bush as commander in chief has the final say.

Myers, the Joint Chiefs chairman, expressed a similar view.

"Saddam's era is over," he said in Baghdad last week. "But it takes time for people to accept the changes."

Abizaid said on Wednesday that although Saddam's capture was a big blow to the insurgency, "There's still a lot of violence ahead in Iraq."

Later that day, a 1st Armored Division soldier was killed in an ambush; he was the first American killed by hostile fire since Saddam's capture on Dec. 13. The death raised to 200 the number of U.S. troops killed in action since Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1.

The death rate for U.S. troops in Iraq has slowed somewhat this month after 79 were killed in November, the most for any month since the war began in March. Through the first 20 days of December, 22 American troops had been killed, including an Army sergeant who died Dec. 2 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington of injuries sustained in an ambush Nov. 8 in Fallujah.

According to an unofficial Associated Press tally based on official reports, every state has suffered at least one military death in Iraq except Montana. California, the nation's most populous state, has the most with 50. Each of Alaska, Hawaii, New Hampshire, New Mexico and West Virginia has had one death. All other states and the District of Columbia have had two or more.