Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal
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An internal military assessment offers the first comprehensive look at the progress of the effort to stabilize Baghdad with the heavy influx of additional troops.
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Some of the military's finest minds helped craft the strategy that has produced some signs of good news out of Iraq. But even they don't know if it will work.
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A revised U.S. military plan envisions establishing security at the local level in Baghdad and elsewhere by next summer, it likely would take another year to get Iraqi forces ready to enforce any newfound stability, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
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The report from a morgue official casts doubt on the effectiveness of an American operation to reduce violence in Baghdad.
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Moktada al-Sadr said the push to quell violence in Baghdad was doomed to fail as long as it was directed by the U.S. military.
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U.S. and Iraqi troops have pushed insurgents and other fighters out of about a third of Baghdad's neighborhoods under a three-month-old plan to pacify the city of 6 million people, according to a U.S. military report released yesterday.
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American commanders believe it is essential to hobble the extremists in order to sustain recent security gains and ultimately pacify Iraq.
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Far from the daily warfare in the streets of the Iraqi capital, another, quieter struggle is being waged -- that for control of Iraq's intelligence agencies.
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Struggling to defend its Iraq policy, the Bush administration in a 23-page classified report points to limited progress being made by the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
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U.S. and Iraqi forces are meeting little resistance as they sweep through Baghdad, a U.S. officer said on Friday, a day after Iraq's president said a Shi'ite militia had ordered its leaders to leave the country.
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American troops face "significant challenges" in western Iraq's volatile Anbar region -- the deadliest province for U.S. forces -- but military efforts there are secondary to the priority of quelling sectarian unrest in Baghdad, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq said yesterday.
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A U.S.-backed Iraqi security plan seen as a last-ditch attempt to halt violence in Baghdad will not produce results overnight, a U.S. general warned on Sunday, after a one-ton suicide truck bomb killed 135 people.
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The extra troops that Iraq promised to send into Baghdad in a new U.S.-Iraqi military buildup are arriving on schedule but in inadequate numbers, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.
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American military commanders now seriously doubt that Iraqi security forces will be able to hold the ground that U.S. troops are fighting to clear &#151; gloomy predictions that strike at the heart of Washington's key strategy to turn the tide in Iraq.
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A senior American commander in Iraq said Tuesday that U.S.-led military operations are "stifling" the insurgency in western Anbar province but are not strong enough to defeat it.
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Iraqi leaders hope to flesh out a deal to end sectarian bloodshed in Baghdad when they meet again on Tuesday but conceded a four-point plan, drafted under U.S. pressure, was still a long way short on vital substance.
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U.S. forces hope to hand over half of Baghdad to Iraqi security control by the end of 2008, after violence in Iraq dropped to its lowest level since January 2006, the No. 2 U.S. general in Iraq said on Wednesday.