The US indicated late on Tuesday that conditions for a gradual pullout of its troops from violence-torn Iraq could become ripe "fairly soon," but warned that a decision about their withdrawal will not be made unilaterally.
The US may not need the number of troops it has in Iraq "all that much longer," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on two TV channels, amid reports the Pentagon may pull back three combat brigades.
With political pressure building on US President George W. Bush to shift course in Iraq, US officials are trying to reassure Americans that sufficient progress is being made in training Iraqi forces to possibly permit some US troops to leave.
In both interviews Rice stressed that the moment when US soldiers will start returning home could be close.
"The president has said that as soon as Iraqi forces are ready, we want to see a reduction in our own forces, and I think those days are going to be coming fairly soon when Iraqis are going to be more and more capable of carrying out the functions to secure their own future," Rice said on Fox News.
On CNN, Rice said the number of international coalition forces in Iraq "is clearly going to come down" because, as she suspected, "the American forces are not going to be needed in the numbers that they are there for all that much longer."
Rice's comments come after a bitter debate on Capitol Hill about Bush's Iraq policy, including a demand by one of the most hawkish members of the US Congress, Democratic Representative John Murtha, that US forces withdraw immediately.
The Washington Post said yesterday that barring any major surprises in Iraq, the Pentagon tentatively plans to reduce the number of US forces there early next year by as many as three combat brigades, from 18 now, but to keep at least one brigade "on call" in Kuwait in case more troops are needed quickly.
Quoting several senior military officers, the Post said Pentagon authorities also have set a series of "decision points" during next year to consider further force cuts that, under a "moderately optimistic" scenario, would drop the total number of troops to fewer than 100,000 from more than 150,000 now, including 10 combat brigades, by the end of the year.
A US Army brigade has between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers.
Lieutenant General John Vines, the second-ranking US commander in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters in a teleconference on Tuesday that any recommendation from US commanders in Iraq to begin withdrawing forces would be made based on the security situation and not on political considerations.
"A precipitous pullout, I believe, would be destabilizing," Vines said.
BRITISH WARNING
Meanwhile, a report by a British think tank said British and US troops could be embroiled in Iraq for "decades," adding that the occupation was a "gift" to al-Qaeda.
Entitled Iraq and the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, the report by the Oxford Research Group said the war was "still in its early stages and likely to last for decades."
The study said al-Qaeda could keep the US tied up in Iraq for many years, and Britain would only withdraw troops in the "highly unlikely" event of a "break" with Washington.
The report said al-Qaeda had won recruits by portraying the US presence in Iraq as a "neo-Christian occupation of a major Islamic state." It also warns that a US withdrawal would be a "foreign policy disaster greater than the retreat from Vietnam."
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