Petraeus to put pressure on Iraqi leaders

The defense secretary suggested the possibility of a higher number of troops leaving Iraq.

COMBINED DISPATCHES

WASHINGTON — Despite President Bush’s pledge Thursday that U.S. troops will remain in Iraq after he leaves office, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David Petraeus, said Friday that he will still use the prospect of troop withdrawals to persuade Iraq’s political leaders to resolve their differences.

In a half-hour interview Friday with McClatchy Newspapers at the Pentagon, Petraeus said the message that he and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker will take back to Baghdad is: “Let’s get on with it [or] you are going to have to take it on by yourself.”

Iraq’s leaders know the drawdown is going to happen, Petraeus said.

‘Ordinary life’

He said that Bush’s assertion in his nationally televised speech that “ordinary life is beginning to return” to Baghdad “is “probably true in a number of areas.” He cited three neighborhoods, Adhamiyah, Kadhemiyah and Ghazaliyah, as success stories.

“It still needs to return in others,” he added.

Petraeus spoke to McClatchy minutes after visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. It was one of the final acts of what had been a momentous visit to Washington that began with two days of testimony before Congress and culminated with Bush saying that he was endorsing Petraeus’ proposal for drawing down troops in Iraq.

Petraeus said that he and Crocker will tell Sunni leaders, “Let’s help you represent your constituents,” with coalition forces working on the most important issues to them, such as freeing Sunni prisoners detained at U.S. facilities.

The Shiites, who now dominate the government and have often operated along sectarian lines, will be encouraged to represent all Iraqis, Petraeus said.

The general expressed discomfort with his growing public persona and with the fact that some now see him as a political figure who’s become the face of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

Developments

In other developments:

UDefense Secretary Robert Gates raised the possibility Friday of cutting U.S. troop levels in Iraq to 100,000 by the end of next year, well beyond the cuts President Bush has approved. Stressing that he was expressing a hope, not an administration plan, Gates said it was possible that conditions in Iraq would improve enough to merit much deeper troop cuts than are currently scheduled for 2008

USome 1,500 mourners called for revenge Friday as they buried the leader of the Sunni revolt against al-Qaida, who was assassinated by a bomb after meeting with President Bush earlier this month. An al-Qaida front in Iraq claimed responsibility for the blast that killed Adbul-Sattar Abu Risha, 37, and three companions. A statement posted on the Internet by the Islamic State of Iraq called Abu Risha “one of the dogs of Bush” and described Thursday’s killing as a “heroic operation that took more than a month to prepare.”

UIn Diyala province, a bomb exploded near a U.S. military vehicle Friday, killing four American soldiers, the U.S. command said. They were the first American deaths reported in Iraq since Monday.