(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-23 16:00

Christine Wormuth, who served as staff director of Gen. James Jones' commission on training Iraqi security forces, said she estimates some 8,000 to 10,000 troops are dedicated to training. These "transition teams" are tasked solely with training and equipping Iraqi police, army, air force, maritime and intelligence forces.

But an undetermined number of additional troops provide "on the job" training for Iraqi security forces by conducting daily patrols and other combat missions alongside them, she said.

Last year, the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission whose findings were the basis for the Democratic proposal, recommended that 10,000 to 20,000 troops should be embedded with Iraqi combat units.

Senate Democrats who championed the proposal say it was written deliberately to give the military flexibility and not cap force levels. Unlike their counterparts in the House, many Senate Democrats have opposed stronger measures that would set firm deadlines on troop withdrawals or effectively force an end to the war by cutting off money for combat.

"There's no way to say down the line how many insurgency threats there will be, how many militia threats there will be, how many al-Qaida and other terrorist threats there will be," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Still, Levin and other Democrats say the US could still launch effective anti-terrorism strikes in Iraq using elite special operations forces without the massive footprint of conventional forces.

"We've been told now that 90 percent of the Iraqi units are capable of taking the lead, so six or nine months from now we would expect those units would not only be taking the lead, they would be handling those missions," he said.

Rep. John Murtha, who helped lead the anti-war effort in the House this year, said the bill might leave as few as 3,000 or as many as 30,000 troops, but that the broader message would be to blur the U.S. footprint substantially.

"I'm willing to negotiate, but I think the most vulnerable part of this operation is the logistics tail," which should be taken out of enemy reach, he said.

Meanwhile, military analysts caution against worrying too much about the particulars. The legislation has yet to pass Congress by a veto-proof majority. It also isn't binding; under the bill, Bush can ignore the 2008 deadline to end combat.

Indeed, the legislation is more of a signal to the White House that Congress' patience with the war is gone, than any mandate on how to run operations. That could explain why entities like the Government Accountability Office have not examined the ramifications of the bill.

Or as Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, put it: "As long as you're discussing a bill that is designed for political purposes, you don't have to get down to the issue of whether it would work or not."

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