USA prepares to leave Iraq

[stormthebeaches]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ma ... withdrawal

Each night, in a giant base north of Baghdad, a team that moves armies for a living prepares for a mission that will define America's time in Iraq, more than any other act since the invasion seven years ago.

Leading them is the senior American officer who will orchestrate the military withdrawal, a man who claims he has one of the highest job satisfaction levels in the country.

"I have the best job in Iraq right now," says Brigadier General Paul Wentz, of the US military's 13th Sustainment Command. "There is no question about it."

Whether that assessment is a reflection of the fraught earlier years of the occupation, or the imminent end of an increasingly unpopular war, or the fact that his staff have prepared so well that they can't fail, is open to conjecture. Either way, the men and women of the 13th Sustainment Command are raring to begin the biggest movement of troops and machines anywhere in the world since Vietnam, more than 40 years ago.

The order to do so will probably come within 60 days of a result being declared from Iraq's recent general election. The count of votes is painstakingly slow – only around 65% of ballots had been counted more than a week after polling day on 7 March. But if, as the Obama White House hopes, the result is eventually deemed to be credible, the US commander-in-chief will call an end to the war that he has previously described as "dumb".

As soon as Wentz receives the call from the commanding US general in Iraq, Ray Odierno, a massive network of trucks, planes and ships will start to evacuate around 45,000 troops and more than 1m tonnes of equipment, ranging from super-sized bulldozers to water coolers, as well as hundreds of different types of machines and weapons that were used to fight and run the war.

The pullout looms as quite a payday for the Iraqi army. Late last year the US government set a cap of $30m worth of equipment that commanders can leave behind at each facility – a 15-fold increase from when guidelines were first written five years ago.

A total of 31m items will be packed and stacked, including 43,000 military vehicles, 600-odd helicopters, 120,000 containers and 34,000 tonnes of ammunition. Shipping out is estimated to take 240,000 truckloads and 119 shipping freighters.

The withdrawal will leave only 50,000 US troops in Iraq by 30 August, none of them in combat roles, and reduce the number of bases from 290 to fewer than 10. Even with the remaining US presence, the withdrawal will probably be perceived, in Iraq and elsewhere, as the final act of the war.

It is a milestone Wentz is acutely aware of. "This will be a chapter in history and we will really try to make sure it's a good chapter in history," he says from an anteroom on the giant Balad airbase, near where his charges are still co-ordinating the movements of more than 3,000 US vehicles throughout Iraq each day. "Our guys are still busy and we like to feel we are making a difference. Success for us will be if we wake up in September and nobody knows we have gone."

That may be the benchmark inside Iraq, where people long ago started to rail against the enormous, slow-moving American convoys that used to snarl traffic, and the often interminable delays at checkpoints manned by US soldiers. But, in the US, another key indicator is more important – not repeating the mistakes of the last American withdrawal from Iraq, in 1991.

That pullout was blighted by delays, equipment losses and incompetence, and has since been seen as a case study of how not to do things.

"We have learned a lot since then," says Wentz. "We don't have those Indiana Jones warehouses that nobody knows what's inside.

"A lot of the bad things that came out of the first Gulf war have been fixed. We have introduced a lot of technology. This is very important to the American taxpayer. We have to be fiscally responsible and good stewards of government monies."

Although the bulk of the heavy lifting is yet to begin, tanks and giant military trucks known as MRAPS are already on the move, some of the pieces leaving Iraq with the units they arrived with and others being readied for another war.

"The equipment will be going south and will most likely be reworked in Kuwait and sent to the folks in Afghanistan," said Wentz.

"Some of the containers will go out through the port of Aqaba in Jordan and also the port of Umm Qasr. Each month we are getting rid of more and more capacity, but, so far, they are largely component parts that have built up over the years."

The preparation for the big move has been dubbed Operation Clean Sweep.

Most troops will fly out of Iraq into Kuwait, where they will connect with a well-established military flight network back to America.

Iraq's main roads are safer now, but the military still prefers to keep as many troops as possible away from the 10-hour drive south to Kuwait. The main thoroughfare down the spine of Iraq, known as Route Tampa, was built to move armies. The four-lane sealed highway was constructed by Saddam Hussein to move his troops and machines to the Iranian front and home again. It also gave him a direct route to Kuwait.

The US and British armies used Route Tampa to get to Baghdad in 2003. And American convoys have continued to use it ever since, despite being extensively targeted by militants who launched ambushes and detonated countless roadside bombs from sand berms that line the roads.

Captain Jason Vivian from the 80th Ordinance Battalion, based in Pennsylvania, is in charge of a clearing yard on the Balad base which will become one of the busiest hubs in Iraq when Odierno's move order is handed down. To him, getting the withdrawal rolling is the pinnacle of a career.

"This is why I joined the military," he says, standing between cranes and rows of heavy armour. "The surge and the invasion were both important, especially for a logistician, but this to me is what it's all about."

And people said that Obama wasn't ending the war in Iraq.

[General Brock]

I would certainly be pleased to be wrong about that. The only question perhaps is the extent of the withdrawal. The promise to leave is possibly the most stabilizing factor in Iraq; no Iraqi (edit: militant) wants to give America a reason to stay and this gives them incentive to discourage foreign fighters and restrain their own people.

[ShadowDragon8685]

My uncle's been cheerfully predicting, year after year, that if we announce a withdraw it will only embolden the enemy and cause them to step up attacks on the Americans in the hope of inflicting as much hurt as possible on our soldiery on its' way out the door.

No doubt he's been drawing on his experiences in Vietnam, forgetting that in this case there's no great North Iraqi Army which is still capable of sending waves after waves of uniformed armed men straight into our guns.

Not that the lessons of Vietnam are wholly inapplicable, I say, but it's not that they're straight-across parallels...

Regardless, it simply waits to be seen: will the insurgency take heart and try to kill as many of the great white satan as possible on his way out, or let satan have his reprieve so they can go back to cheerfully murdering each other without the devil wanting his due?

[The Grim Squeaker]

My uncle's been cheerfully predicting, year after year, that if we announce a withdraw it will only embolden the enemy and cause them to step up attacks on the Americans in the hope of inflicting as much hurt as possible on our soldiery on its' way out the door.

No doubt he's been drawing on his experiences in Vietnam, forgetting that in this case there's no great North Iraqi Army which is still capable of sending waves after waves of uniformed armed men straight into our guns.

Not that the lessons of Vietnam are wholly inapplicable, I say, but it's not that they're straight-across parallels...

Regardless, it simply waits to be seen: will the insurgency take heart and try to kill as many of the great white satan as possible on his way out, or let satan have his reprieve so they can go back to cheerfully murdering each other without the devil wanting his due?

Actually, during the withdrawal from Vietnam when the Vietkong attacked, the US inflicted MASSIVe casualties on them and utterly devastated them (due to being able to fight in a conventional conflict). The Viet kong suffered their worst defeats as the US withdrew, it was a propaganda victory, not a case of increased casualties on the US.

[The Spartan]

Nitpick: Grim, that wasn't the Vietcong marching into Saigon, it was the NVA (to use the old American term for the People's Army).

[hunter5]

Meh there already was a plane in place the last summer of Bush's term for the withdrawal of American troops. I think the agreement was 100% by 2011. I believe the only difference between that one and this one is there will be no permanent US base there.

[Ma Deuce]

Nitpick: Grim, that wasn't the Vietcong marching into Saigon, it was the NVA (to use the old American term for the People's Army).

He's probably think of the Tet Offensive in '68, which effectively destroyed the Vietcong for the rest of the conflict. That of course was well before the US withdrawal, and even further before the fall of Saigon in '75 (during which there were virtually no US troops left in South Vietnam).

As for the article...get back to me when those 50,000 so-called "non-combat" troops are gone as well, otherwise it's just another reduction, not a "pull out".

[Guardsman Bass]

As for the article...get back to me when those 50,000 so-called "non-combat" troops are gone as well, otherwise it's just another reduction, not a "pull out".

I'm wondering about that myself. I thought the Status of Forces agreement negotiated with the Iraqis required that all US forces be withdrawn by 2011, not just most of them with the 50,000-man contingent left behind. I suppose that could always be re-negotiated, but Maliki has really tried to play up the "Iraqi nationalist" side of things, and doing so to allow US troops to stay longer would be unpopular.