Gen. Franks Sees Troops Needed for Years in Iraq

With the number of American casualties climbing, the commander of allied forces during the war said Thursday that some U.S. forces may have to remain in Iraq for years.

But authorities are set to launch a Shiite-dominated Iraqi governing council as early as Sunday, a move intended to ease the sense of occupation among Iraqis and give them some control over their internal and international affairs, a Kurdish political source said today.

In addition to seven political parties, the council is to be made up of about 15 other representatives of Iraqi society, which officials hope will help calm anti-U.S. sentiment in the country. Prominent among them is expected to be Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni Muslim former foreign minister, several women and representatives of Iraq’s Christian and Turkmen minority groups.

During 3 1/2 hours of questioning before the House Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. Tommy Franks told lawmakers that the Pentagon hopes to move significant numbers of troops out of Iraq by next July. But he acknowledged that they could be compelled to remain for years longer.

“I anticipate we’ll be involved in Iraq for the foreseeable future,” Franks said. “Whether that means two years or four years, I don’t know.”

Franks’ comments came during another day on the defensive for the Bush administration, which has seen its rapid military success in Iraq tarnished by questions over prewar intelligence and by ongoing attacks on American soldiers that are slowing the process of reconstruction as well as costing lives.

President Bush, in the middle of a five-nation tour of Africa, acknowledged that the threats facing U.S. soldiers in Iraq are serious and likely to persist.

“There’s no question we’ve got a security issue in Iraq, and we’re just going to have to deal with it person by person. We’re going to have to remain tough,” the president told reporters in Gaborone, Botswana.

Franks’ testimony came on a day that military commanders in Baghdad reported that two more soldiers were killed in attacks near Baghdad and Tikrit. Since Bush declared major combat over May 1, 31 Americans have died in Iraq from hostile fire.

In the first casualty reported Thursday, a 3rd Corps Support Command soldier was killed when a convoy was ambushed by small-arms fire near the city of Mahmudiyah south of Baghdad on Wednesday evening.

Later that night, a 4th Infantry Division soldier was killed and another was injured in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on their convoy near Tikrit in northern Iraq.

In Baghdad on Thursday, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said his analysts have not yet detected signs of national or regional coordination of the attacks on U.S. forces and added that it was too early to tell if recently broadcast audiotapes purported to be Saddam Hussein urging continued fighting have had an effect.

Sanchez speculated that “maybe that was the plan” by Hussein from the beginning -- to withdraw his forces from direct engagement to fight a prolonged guerrilla campaign.

Iraq has been racked by confusion, violence and ill feeling under the administration of the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority. Many Iraqis have complained that the absence of an Iraqi government has hampered efforts to reorganize the society and start repairing damage to infrastructure caused by the three-week war against Hussein and two weeks of rampant looting that began April 9, the day U.S. Marines reached central Baghdad.

“We welcome this step,” Sheerwan Dizaai, spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party, said of the plan to launch the council.

During eight weeks of negotiation between the seven parties and chief U.S. civil administrator L. Paul Bremer III, the Iraqis managed to win more powers for the council than originally proposed. It will have the authority to appoint ministers, set economic policy and represent Iraq in foreign countries and international forums.

The council will also have a voice in security inside Iraq. “No policy areas will be reserved for the coalition,” said a senior Western diplomat in Baghdad.

Bremer, the effective ruler of Iraq under the U.S.-led occupation, met with leading Iraqi politicians on Thursday and agreed to name the rest of the council, according to Dizaai.

In Africa, where he is promoting his initiatives to battle AIDS and encourage democratic reforms, Bush counseled patience in the Iraq effort.

“We’re making steady progress. A free Iraq will mean a peaceful world. And it’s very important for us to stay the course,” Bush said.

Bush claimed in his State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium in Africa. A U.S. official on Thursday said that in September the Central Intelligence Agency unsuccessfully sought to convince the British government to drop such claims from a key intelligence report.

That British paper concluded that Iraq had “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” That became the basis for Bush’s claim in his January speech.

“We did share with them our concerns about the uranium issue,” a U.S. official said, adding that the CIA considered the information “sketchy, incomplete, unconvincing.”

The British included the assertion anyway, saying they had information from other sources that had not been shared with the Americans. “They said that they thought they had it solidly enough to report, and so they did,” the U.S. official said.

In Africa, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell offered the administration’s toughest defense so far of how the questionable assertion made it into the president’s address, where it was used to help make his case for war.

“There was no effort or attempt on the part of the president or anyone else in the administration to mislead or to deceive the American people,” Powell told reporters at a news conference in Pretoria, the South African administrative capital, that was dominated by questions about the intelligence report and when policymakers knew it was false.

Powell called the questions “very overwrought and overblown and overdrawn” and insisted that “we were not cooking the books” to make the threat from Iraq appear more serious than it was.

In Washington, Franks acknowledged that the campaign to secure and stabilize Iraq is “really hard.” Although he agreed with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s testimony a day earlier that the majority of attacks on U.S. troops are limited to a relatively small area of central Iraq known as the “Sunni Triangle,” Franks noted that about 70% of Iraqis live in that region.

In his second day of testimony on Capitol Hill, Franks said that although American troops have detained 3,400 Iraqis, attacks by Iraqi insurgents are coming at a rate of between 10 and 25 a day, and they are growing in sophistication.

Lawmakers complimented Franks -- who retired Monday as commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Southwest Asia and the Horn of Africa -- as well as the troops he commanded. But Democrats on the committee criticized the Pentagon’s planning for the postwar stabilization of Iraq.

“I have a fear that, if left unchecked, we may find ourselves in the throes of guerrilla warfare for years,” Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee’s senior Democrat, told Franks.

“We cannot leave Iraq,” Skelton warned, echoed by other Democratic lawmakers on the committee. “This must be a success.”

Committee member Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Pleasanton) lashed out at Franks for what she said were intelligence lapses that misrepresented the threat posed by Hussein and misread the way his military and loyalists would react during and after the war.

During an exchange in which Franks repeatedly interrupted her, Tauscher chided him for testifying that banned materials will be found in Iraq that will “vindicate” the administration’s intelligence estimates.

“I don’t think that there’s enough time in the day or enough energy that we could spend vindicating some of the intelligence,” Tauscher said.

She said CIA Director George Tenet should be called to testify before the committee “to evaluate whether the intelligence used to send [soldiers] into harm’s way ... was sound.”

Franks insisted that the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is “building momentum.” Reconstruction authorities there have already hired 35,000 Iraqi police, he noted, more than half the total force of 60,000 they hope to eventually reach.

He said the Pentagon hopes to have recruited and trained a nine-division Iraqi army by next July.

Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Anaheim asked Franks if he would refer to the attacks against American troops as guerrilla warfare.

Franks said he would not call the situation guerrilla warfare because he does not believe the attacks are supported by the Iraqi people.

But pressed by Sanchez, who said that guerrilla groups in Colombia and Nicaragua have also not been supported by most people in those countries, Franks said: “I mean, if people want to refer to what we see as a guerrilla effort, then that’s OK.” He added that it did not fit his “own personal definition” of guerrilla war.

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Times staff writers Schrader reported from Washington, Chen from Botswana and Daniszewski from Baghdad. Staff writers Greg Miller in Washington and Terry McDermott in Baghdad also contributed to this report.