Sanchez Takes His Leave as Commander of Coalition Troops

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez stepped down Thursday as the top U.S. commander in Iraq, his 14-month tenure clouded by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the military’s failure to crush the ongoing insurgency.

Sanchez’s departure was part of a long-scheduled command shift, officials said. Gen. George W. Casey, the Army vice chief of staff and a four-star general, replaced Sanchez as head of the U.S.-led coalition’s 160,000 troops in Iraq.

Fellow officers paid tribute to Sanchez in an elaborate ceremony at a U.S. base here featuring color guards, speeches and a brass band

Violence continued Thursday across Iraq, claiming the lives of a Marine in western Iraq and a soldier near the northern city of Mosul. New attacks were reported against officials of the fledgling Iraqi government.

Sanchez acknowledged that the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military detention center west of Baghdad was a major setback to the war effort. Graphic images of the abuse stoked anti-U.S. sentiments.

“Abu Ghraib was a great defeat for the coalition here in this country,” Sanchez told reporters after relinquishing command. “The impacts of Abu Ghraib have been very far-reaching.”

Military investigators are examining whether policies or directives from the military high command here may have contributed to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Sanchez rejected another oft-repeated criticism -- that he and the former U.S. civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, were slow to recognize the strength of an armed opposition that began last year. The uprising, which started as scattered attacks on coalition convoys and troops, escalated into a full-fledged insurgency mounted by loyalists of former dictator Saddam Hussein, religious extremists, anti-U.S. nationalists and others.

“I think we understood the magnitude of the threat we were facing at the time,” said Sanchez, who is scheduled to return to his Army command in Germany.

Still, the departing general said it was a surprise when insurgent attacks in western, southern and central Iraq erupted simultaneously in April. Privately, some officers criticized Sanchez for declaring publicly that the U.S. military planned to “kill or capture” Muqtada Sadr, a Shiite Muslim cleric whose militia fought for months against U.S. forces in Baghdad and a few southern cities.

The U.S. neither killed nor captured Sadr, who has a large following among disenfranchised young Shiite men. Sadr, who became more popular once he confronted U.S. forces, has recently endorsed a truce and has moved toward political engagement with the new Iraqi government.

For more than a year, Sanchez and Bremer represented the military and political faces of the occupation, appearing together for interviews and at public events. Sanchez was a down-to-earth figure from Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, whereas Bremer projected an air of patrician sophistication. Both have become closely identified with the occupation’s failures.

Bremer left Iraq on Monday, and Sanchez is to leave within a week.

In remarks Thursday, Sanchez tacitly endorsed the new government’s emerging security strategy: make peace through a prospective amnesty for former collaborators with Hussein’s Baath Party regime, while crushing religious extremists -- both foreign and Iraqi -- now allied with the Baathists against the U.S.-led forces.

“I think we have a great opportunity ahead to take down this insurgency,” Sanchez said. The general spoke on the same day that a combative Hussein appeared before an Iraqi judge on war crimes and other charges. The capture of Hussein in December was arguably the high point of Sanchez’s tenure, and was celebrated then at a news conference featuring Sanchez and Bremer inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, headquarters of the U.S.-led occupation.

But Hussein’s capture did not stanch the insurgency. On the contrary, militants seemed to gain strength even as Hussein languished in U.S. custody.

Sanchez will be leaving Iraq just days after a sovereign Iraqi government took power in preparation for elections projected for January. The U.S. military is focusing on training and equipping an Iraqi security force of about 250,000. But Sanchez and others say the Iraqis will not be ready to assume full control for some time.

“I think we’re going to have to fight to get through the elections,” acknowledged Gen. John Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command and attended the send-off for Sanchez.

Also Thursday, a Finance Ministry official was wounded and two members of his staff were killed by a bomb planted in their convoy in Baghdad, news services reported. It was among the latest attacks targeting employees of the new government.

In Samarra, northwest of the capital, four Iraqi bodyguards were killed when insurgents attacked the house of a government official, Reuters news agency reported.

Times staff writer Carol J. Williams contributed to this report.