U.S. must leave Iraq, retired generals say

Army Times


Setting a withdrawal timetable from Iraq might be a shaky strategic move, but it would provide a morale boost for service members and their families, a former Army War College commandant said Wednesday.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales Jr., testifying before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee about U.S. military strategy in Iraq, said he has no doubt that a major withdrawal of combat forces is coming because the U.S. has “run out of military options” and cannot indefinitely sustain troop levels.

“Regardless of who wins the election and regardless of conditions on the ground, by summer the troops will begin to come home,” said Scales, who headed the war college in 1997. “The only point of contention is how precipitous will be the withdrawal and whether the schedule of withdrawal should be a matter of administration policy.”

White House and Pentagon officials have resisted efforts by some lawmakers to set a fixed timetable for withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, arguing that insurgents and other groups would try to use the dates to their advantage.

Scales, who was one of the creators of the Army After Next program in 1995 that helped plan for transforming the force, agreed that following a fixed withdrawal schedule “is not a good idea in an insurgency because the indigenous population tends to side with the perceived winners.”