US legislation could set Iraq pullout date

[Ron Burgundy]

AFP - The House of Representatives is expected to consider this week crucial legislation for the Iraq war that includes a provision requiring a US withdrawal by September 2008.

But White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said in interviews Sunday that such a deadline would leave Iraq to Al-Qaeda.

"Their strategy, though, is very clear. They want to get a safe haven in Iraq from which they can then destabilize neighboring regimes and come and plan actions against the United States," he said.

"If the Iraqi forces cannot handle the situation, which is the case now, we have Iraq as a safe haven for terrorists, who will destabilize their neighbors and attack us.

"If we succeed, we've got an Iraq that is an ally in the war on terror," he said of the US surge strategy.

"The problem is arbitrary timelines," he said. "That is mandating failure."

Hadley spoke on CNN and ABC television.

However, congressional backers of a deadline said the troop surge would not change what the Pentagon this week acknowledged was a civil war in Iraq.

"This will not change the fundamental dynamics," said Democratic Senator John Kerry.

He said the Iraqi government needed the pressure of a deadline.

"It's time for the Iraqis to assume the responsibility for Iraq," Kerry said on Fox News Sunday.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates meanwhile said it was too soon to know whether the US troop increase in Iraq was making progress, as the White House fended off heavy pressure to wind up the war begun four years ago.

Eight weeks into Bush's last-ditch plan to deploy 21,500 more combat troops to quell violence in Baghdad and Al-Anbar province, Gates said a real estimate of progress would take months.

"The way I would characterize it is, so far so good," Gates told CBS television's "Face the Nation.

"It's very early" to make a more definitive assessment, he said, noting that the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, had said that it would take until this summer to know if the plan was succeeding.

Gates added that he was also generally happy with Iraqi troop performance since the United States began deploying its reinforcements which, with support troops would number more than 25,000.

"I would say that the Iraqis are meeting the commitments that they have made to us, that they have made the appointments, the troops that they have promised are showing up," Gates said. "We're basically buying them time."

He downplayed a Defense Department description of the Iraq conflict as a "civil war," saying the sectarian violence really reflected deliberate provocation by Al-Qaeda.

"The reality is that stoking sectarian violence is a very specific strategy on the part of Al-Qaeda and the insurgents."

"You don't have thousands of Shiites and Sunnis falling in on each other or attacking each other. You have hit squads going around the city," he said. "So this is a purposeful strategy."

Gates was speaking ahead of the fourth anniversary of the March 20, 2003 US invasion that toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and has left more than 3,200 US soldiers dead, including eight more this weekend.

Tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the war in Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles over the weekend to mark the invasion's anniversary and demand a US troop pullout.

Bush defended the war effort Saturday and warned that an early withdrawal would be "disastrous."

In his weekly radio address, he reiterated his determination to veto any measure from the opposition Democrat-controlled Congress to mandate a pullout from Iraq.

However, a Newsweek magazine opinion poll released Saturday showed the president's approval rating for the Iraq war stood at a paltry 27 percent.

Meanwhile, 59 percent of those surveyed support Democrat legislation to require the withdrawal of US troops by the fall of 2008.

On Thursday, the Senate rejected a Democratic bill to set a timetable to remove combat troops by March 2008.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070319/pl_afp/usiraqgatesforce [link]