BAGHDAD - You see them everywhere in the Iraqi capital - careening down city streets in white Toyota pickup trucks with mounted machine guns; manning checkpoints to foil suicide bombers. These are the new Iraqi security forces.
As my driver approached an Iraqi intersection one evening, dozens of Iraqi soldiers in camouflage ran toward our car, guns pointed. We had crossed paths with a convoy escorting Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. The good news is that the Iraqi soldiers were protecting their own (and weren't so trigger-happy as to shoot us). The sobering news is that the new Iraqi security forces are far from ready to replace U.S. troops.
The issue of when Iraqi forces can defend their country becomes more pressing as U.S. political pressure grows for a timeline for troop withdrawals. A report of a secret memo to Prime Minister Tony Blair surfaced this week in the British newspaper The Mail saying that "emerging U.S. plans" call for cutting coalition forces from 160,000 to 66,000 troops by early 2006.
It's hard to believe that such plans are more than a hypothetical option. The Bush administration rejects any timetable until Iraqi forces can handle the insurgents. The Iraqis aren't even close.
The consequences of a swift U.S. withdrawal would be grim. "It will lead to disaster," says Laith Kubba, spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. "There will be a bloodbath."
I heard that forecast not only from Iraqi Shiites, who fear Saddam Hussein's Baath Party will make a comeback, but also from Iraqi Sunnis who held power under Mr. Hussein. Most of the insurgents are Sunnis. Sunnis worry a swift U.S. exit would free Shiites to take revenge against them. Iraqis also fear a U.S. departure would draw even more radical Arab Islamists into their country.
"We are not thinking about a timetable" for a U.S. exit, Mr. al-Jaafari told me in an interview inside the heavily protected Green Zone. "When we reach the ability to depend on ourselves for security, then the Americans can leave."
But it's very hard to predict when Iraqis will be ready. U.S. occupation czar L. Paul Bremer III made a huge mistake when he disbanded the Iraqi army in 2003, rather than let Iraqis revamp the institution.
When the Pentagon sent Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus in June 2004 to retrain Iraqi forces, he had to rebuild the military almost from scratch.
