Obama mum on size of 'residual force'

Washington: On the campaign trail, Senator Barack Obama offered a pledge that electrified and motivated his liberal base, vowing to "end the war" in Iraq.

But as he moves closer to the White House, President-elect Obama is making clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat forces out within 16 months.

"I said that I would remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months, with the understanding that it might be necessary - likely to be necessary -to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq," Obama said this week as he introduced his national security team.

Publicly at least, Obama has not set a firm number for that "residual force", a phrase certain to become central to the debate on the way ahead in Iraq, though one of his national security advisers, Richard Danzig, said during the campaign that it could amount to 30,000 to 55,000 troops. Nor has Obama laid out any timetable beyond 16 months for troop drawdowns.

In the meantime, military planners are drawing up tentative schedules aimed at meeting both Obama's goal for withdrawing combat troops, with a target of May 2010, and the December 31, 2011, date for sending the rest of American troops home that is spelled out in the new agreement between the United States and the Iraqi government.

That status-of-forces agreement remains subject to change, by mutual agreement, and army planners acknowledge privately that they are examining projections that could see the number of Americans hovering between 30,000 and 50,000 - and some say as high as 70,000 - for a substantial time even beyond 2011.

As American combat forces decline in numbers and more provinces are turned over to Iraqi control, these military planners say, Iraqi security forces will remain reliant on significant numbers of Americans for training, supplies, logistics, intelligence and transportation for a long time to come.

There always was a tension, if not a bit of a contradiction, in the two parts of Obama's campaign platform to "end the war" by withdrawing all combat troops by May 2010.

To be sure, Obama was careful to say that the drawdowns he was promising included only combat troops. But supporters who keyed on the language of ending the war might be forgiven if they thought that would mean bringing home all of the troops.

Pentagon planners say that it is possible that Obama's goal could be accomplished at least in part by relabelling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be "re-missioned", their efforts redefined as training and support for the Iraqis.