BUSH URGED TO INCREASE IRAQ FORCES

    Informe de Brian Knowlton en “The International Herald Tribune” del 25.08.2003 

WASHINGTON Senior senators of both parties on Sunday urged the Bush administration to send thousands more American troops to Iraq and said that many billions more dollars were needed to stabilize and rebuild that country and Afghanistan.

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Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who was in Baghdad the day the UN headquarters was bombed, said that "at least another division" of American troops, or about 18,000, was needed. "Time is not on our side," he said.

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Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, put the need at 40,000 to 60,000 troops, a substantial increase over the current 139,000.

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And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who accompanied McCain on his fact-finding tour, said that the troop level in Iraq was sufficient but that billions of dollars of spending was required there and in Afghanistan.

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"I am a fiscal conservative and we're in debt," Graham said on Fox-TV, "but the infrastructure needs in Afghanistan and Iraq are billions.

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"We are underestimating the cost of this conflict, and we in the House and the Senate need to appropriate a lot more money." Their comments came after a particularly bloody week in Iraq, marked by the bombing Tuesday at UN headquarters in Baghdad, with 23 deaths, and mounting fears of more such terrorist attacks. That brought urgent international calls for better security - and U.S. talk of a new Security Council resolution to urge other nations to send troops - but no agreement yet.

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The legislators' comments demonstrated that not only Democrats but some leading members of President George W. Bush's Republican Party are increasingly concerned about the pace of progress in Iraq, and are pointedly questioning whether the resources being devoted to that job are sufficient.

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A new opinion poll, meantime, indicates rising doubts by the American public as well, with many taking a bleak view of U.S. progress in Iraq and strongly opposing new spending there.

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In the Newsweek poll, taken on Thursday and Friday, 69 percent of Americans said they were very or somewhat concerned that the United States would be bogged down in Iraq for years. Sixty percent said that the United States was already spending too much there.

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And amid these doubts, for the first time since pollsters asked the question last fall, more registered voters said they would not like to see Bush re-elected (49 percent) than those who said he should be re-elected (44 percent).

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"We're about to lose the American people," Senator Biden said on NBC.

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And Graham, citing a resurgent threat to the Afghanistan government from regrouping Al Qaeda militants and Taliban fighters, said, "This is a gut-check moment for the American people."

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The Bush administration has said that it hopes other countries will provide more troops for Iraq but sees no need to send more Americans now.

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Asked about one recent estimate that up to 500,000 coalition troops might be needed in Iraq, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "No, I don't agree." U.S. forces there, he said on CBS-TV, were "supremely confident in their ability to deal with the threat." But while the U.S. military was "stretched thin," it could send more troops if need be.

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L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, said: "It's not a question of more troops: It's a question of being effective with our intelligence, of getting more Iraqis to help us." The quality of intelligence being offered by Iraqis had risen sharply, he said; and nearly 60,000 Iraqis have been recruited to help in police and other security units.

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But the legislators cautioned that failure now could cause the costs of U.S. engagement in Iraq to rise sharply.

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McCain, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and a leading Republican voice in foreign affairs, said that the coalition needed "to spend a whole lot more money" to restore basic services in Iraq, or risk facing "a very serious situation." Biden was critical of the Bush administration's reluctance to support a multinational UN force for Iraq, and he scoffed at assurances that other countries were sending troops. For now, he said, those countries were contributing an average of 400 troops each.

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He predicted that U.S. forces would be in Iraq for three to five years, at a cost well over $100 billion, and said it was not "rocket science" to understand that more outside help was needed. "We've got to swallow our pride and do what needs to be done."

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But Bremer, while praising the UN humanitarian contribution, said that it was "hard for me to see how the UN itself can play a further military role" in Iraq. He and Myers said that the growing number of Iraqis in security positions had eased the demands on coalition forces. Bremer, however, acknowledged that the trustworthiness of some of those Iraqis could be problematic. The possibility that Iraqi guards employed by the UN played a part in the bombing there, he said, was "certainly a working hypothesis - one of many."

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Myers, while saying he was confident about U.S. troop levels in Iraq, did not minimize the terrorist threat.

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"A high-stakes game" was being played in Iraq and elsewhere, he said; global terrorism posed perhaps the greatest threat to the United States since World War II. Senator McCain said it was crucial to defeat terrorists inside of Iraq. "If they win here," he said, "then obviously we can't win the war on terrorism."