Al-Qaida in Iraq has stepped up massive truck bombings in towns outside Baghdad to try to defeat the new U.S.-led security crackdown in the capital, the nation’s top military officer testified Thursday.
Gen. Peter Pace, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, used the phrase “good news, bad news” to describe the level of violence since the reinforcement campaign started in mid-February.
He told the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense that Sunni and Shiite death squads “have been reduced significantly.”
“The bad news is that the large bombs going off, perpetrated by al-Qaida, have increased,” Pace said.
He said the Sunni Muslim al-Qaida’s plan is to ignite sectarian violence, as it did a year ago in bombing a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra.
“There has to be a political solution,” said Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who appeared with Pace. “And the political solution is reconciliation among the Iraqis themselves.”
Gates said two critical programs, laws to divide up the country’s oil wealth and to facilitate how the new government rids itself of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party operatives, are close to passage.
“In those two areas, there seems to be progress,” he said.
Pace and Gates appeared at a hearing to defend the Defense Department’s regular arms budget for fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1. The House and Senate have passed their versions of a separate $122 billion emergency spending bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year.
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., subcommittee chairman, used the forum to again criticize the Bush administration’s war planning, focusing on what he said is the sorry readiness of the Army and National Guard.
“Today, because of the administration’s mishandling of the war, the United States military is weaker than it was five years ago,” Murtha said. “Our forces are stretched thin and are caught in now what I consider an Iraqicivil war.”
Gates, who arrived as defense secretary as the Iraq war neared the four-year mark, did not dispute Murtha’s contentions. Instead, he talked of $46 billion in the 2008 budget for the Army and $10 billion for the Marine Corps to replace war-battered equipment.
Pace said neither ground service will fill the backlog of needed vehicles and tanks until two years after the war ends.
