Sobering Talk About Baghdad

The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East said Wednesday it could take "many more months" to end the sectarian violence in Baghdad and "a matter of years" to train the Iraqi army properly.
Army Gen. John Abizaid's assessment, sobering at times and optimistic at others, came a day after President Bush declared Iraq the "central battlefield" in the war against terrorism during a speech in Washington.
In an interview with local media at MacDill Air Force Base, Abizaid said there are no speedy solutions to the religious fanaticism fueling al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
"The extremism in the region, it's difficult, it's dangerous, but it's not mainstream. The vast majority of the people in the region don't want it to be mainstream," Abizaid said.
"Our challenge is to figure out how to shape it so that moderate influences can emerge as the primary voice in the region. That's easy to say, but it's hard to do," he said.
Using the phrase "The Long War," Abizaid compared the current global conflict to the lengthy ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that began after World War II.
"I don't think it's the never-ending war any more than the Cold War turned out to be the never-ending war," he said.
"If you were asking people in the mid-1950s whether or not it was never-ending, they'd look out there and say, 'This is going to be a long problem for us and we're not quite sure how it's going to come out,'" Abizaid said.
As commander of U.S. Central Command, Abizaid oversees a region stretching from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa. He returned Sunday from a three-week trip to the area, where about 215,000 U.S. troops are deployed. More than 140,000 of them are in Iraq.
A boost in Baghdad's forces has reduced civilian deaths and stabilized other areas. But the violence between Muslim factions in Baghdad remains a potentially "fatal" problem if not brought under control, he said.
"We've got to be careful about thinking that this problem in Baghdad is going to be over anytime soon," Abizaid said. "This is going to take a couple of months at least before we know how we're doing."
While calling the levels of violence "high" and "dangerous," Abizaid said the country is not at the brink of civil war.
"As long as Iraq holds together in its government, as long as Iraq holds together in its armed forces, as long the majority of the people … don't want the country to descend into civil war and are working hard to hold it together, then I think we're not there," he said.
Abizaid said Iraqi forces are fighting, but like the government of Iraq they have not matured into a force capable of taking responsibility for their own security.
"Probably we were a bit optimistic in thinking Iraqi forces will be completely ready to take over sectors when the government hasn't gelled yet," Abizaid said. "We're not there yet. It's going to take some time for that to come together."
Discipline among the Iraqi forces has been spotty, he said.
"There are some units like the Iraqi special operations units that are some of the best units anywhere in the Middle East," Abizaid said. "There are other units that disappointed us greatly because they were unable to answer the call … "
Iraqi forces have taken more casualties than U.S. forces, he said.
In a briefing before the interview with Abizaid, Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti said the area of greatest concern to U.S. military commanders in the war on terror is al-Qaida's ability to manipulate information over the Internet.
"They don't have any limits, they don't have any need to be truthful," Scaparrotti said.
In Iraq, Abizaid wants Centcom to be put out of a military job.
"The whole problem in front of us is not to do it all ourselves," Abizaid said. "We have to turn over more and more of the responsibility for fighting the country's battles, for administering the country's resources, to the Iraqis.
"We don't win if we stay there forever," he said. "We don't win if we increase the number of American troops to 500,000. We don't win if we do everything for them."