WASHINGTON - The White House said on Saturday it was premature to talk about reducing troop levels in Iraq after a newspaper report suggested the US administration was considering a drastic cut in force levels next year.
"The business at hand is to complete the mission, and to pursue the present strategy, and any decision for future force levels will be made by the president based on advice from commanders in the field and his national security advisers," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told AFP.
Perino's comments came in response to a New York Times article saying administration officials were working on several "concepts" for reducing the number of US combat troops in Iraq by as much as 50 percent in 2008.
Citing unnamed senior administration officials, the newspaper said the possible options could lower US troop levels in Iraq to roughly 100,000 by the time the 2008 US presidential election is in full swing.
Perino said the 30,000 additional troops ordered to Iraq as part of President George W. Bush's strategy to restore security to the capital Baghdad and the western Al-Anbar province have not all arrived yet.
And she said the goal of the "surge" strategy has always been to eventually scale back the number of US troops deployed.
"The purpose of the reinforcements that are moving in is to help Iraqis create the very conditions that would allow US troops to begin coming home," Perino said in an email to reporters.
"We of course would like to be in a position to bring down troop levels, but certain conditions, as assessed by senior military advisors and commanders on the ground, need to be met to warrant that," she added.
According to the Times report, the mission of US troops would shift to training Iraqi troops and fighting Al-Qaeda while removing Americans from many of the counter-insurgency efforts inside Baghdad.
Advocates of reducing the troops and scaling back their mission next year appear to include Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the newspaper said.
Gates has said previously troop reductions might be considered depending on the findings of a progress report on the security strategy due in September from the commander of US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus.
Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, criticized the Bush administration over the New York Times article, saying officials were dropping hints instead of taking concrete action to phase out the US presence in Iraq.
"This isn't the first time the administration has talked about redeploying troops from Iraq, but actions speak far louder than off-the-record words," Feingold said in a statement.
"While any plan to reduce our military presence in Iraq is a step in the right direction, leaving substantial numbers of US troops in the middle of Iraq's civil war indefinitely is unacceptable," he said.
Bush signed into law late Friday a bill committing 100 billion dollars to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after the Democratic majority dropped its attempt to include a timeline for withdrawal. Bush had vetoed a previous bill that had a deadline for a US pull-out from Iraq.
05/26/2007 21:37 GMT