New Report Recommends Iraq Handover in 5 Years

[cal04]

Panel Also Calls for 50 Percent Troop Reduction Within 3 Years

In a report to be released Sunday, a panel of experts assembled by the U.S. Institute of Peace calls for a 50 percent reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq within three years and a total withdrawal and handover of security to the Iraqi military in five years.

"The United States faces too many challenges around the world to continue its current level of effort in Iraq, or even the deployment that was in place before the surge," the report says. " . . . It is time to chart a clearer path forward."

The panel includes many of the experts that advised the Iraq Study Group panel led by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former Democratic congressman Lee H. Hamilton, which issued its report last December. Many of its recommendations have since been adopted, some reluctantly, by the Bush administration. The U.S. Institute of Peace ran the Baker-Hamilton report and assembled the experts.

The White House blocked the reconvening of the Baker-Hamilton panel, which was evenly divided among 10 prominent Democrats and Republicans, by urging Baker not to participate, according to U.S. officials. So USIP reconvened the experts who had advised them. The group, which met through the summer, is made up of some two dozen former U.S. officials and ambassadors, former CIA analysts, and Iraq specialists from think tanks and universities.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/08/AR2007090801144.html?hpid=topnews

[angstlessk]

1. Daniel Pipes served on the board of the US Institute of Peace..I need say no more

a warhawk serving says it is NOT an Institute for Peace any more than the Center for Democracy is for Democracy. It is about serving Isreal and corporations.g

[antiimperialist]

2. And the chairman is owner of "PFC Energy"

J. Robinson West (Chair of this group), is also Chairman of PFC Energy.


What is PFC energy?

PFC Energy-Bahrain has the support of the full compliment of PFC Energy's worldwide resources to advise companies and governments on regional geopolitics and OPEC strategies, upstream, midstream, downstream and integrated strategies, and investment opportunities, competitive positioning within the energy value chain, service sector capabilities, and crude, natural gas, refined product and petrochemical markets - this expertise is available for the MENA region, but also globally.


http://www.pfcenergy.com/contentDispatcher.aspx?id=4647