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I decided this is important enough to be posted as a new topic.

Analysist See Bleak Road Ahead

By CHARLES J. HANLEY AP Special Correspondent
The Associated Press

Nov 30, 2005 — Two senior Army analysts who in 2003 accurately foretold the turmoil that would be unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq offer a bleak assessment in a new study of what now lies ahead in that bloodied land.

They advise, however, against setting a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal unless Washington finds the situation "irredeemable."

A timetable "is an excuse for allowing the system to collapse," the Army War College's W. Andrew Terrill and Conrad C. Crane write.

Political pressure is building in Washington for a concrete plan to extricate U.S. forces from Iraq. On Tuesday, on the eve of an important address on Iraq at the U.S. Naval Academy, President Bush told reporters he wants the troops home, "but I don't want them to come home without having achieved victory."

In a February 2003 report, a month before the U.S. invasion, Crane and Terrill had warned that the United States might "win the war but lose the peace" if it attacked Iraq. They suggested armed resistance to an occupation would grow, a harsh American response would further alienate Iraqis, and establishing political stability would prove difficult all predictions that were borne out.

They warned in particular against disbanding the pre-invasion Iraqi army, a step that was nonetheless taken and is now viewed as a blunder that fed the anti-U.S. insurgency.

In their new 60-page report, veteran Middle East scholar Terrill and Crane, director of the Army Military History Institute, say a U.S. troop presence in Iraq probably cannot be sustained more than three years further. Meantime, they write:

"It appears increasingly unlikely that U.S., Iraqi and coalition forces will crush the insurgency prior to the beginning of a phased U.S. and coalition withdrawal."

"It is no longer clear that the United States will be able to create (Iraqi) military and police forces that can secure the entire country no matter how long U.S. forces remain."

And "the United States may also have to scale back its expectations for Iraq's political future," by accepting a relatively stable but undemocratic state as preferable to a civil war among Iraq's ethnic and religious factions.