Odierno: Any eventual withdrawal will be done 'extremely slowly'

Above: Soldiers from the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division engage insurgents after receiving gunfire in Buhriz in March

BAGHDAD, May 25 — Since taking over in December as the American ground commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno has urged patience to those seeking quick progress. He has privately pushed to extend the current American troop buildup into next year, and he said Thursday that whenever an American pullback does come, no one should expect it to be rapid.

“We’ll do this in a very deliberate and slow way,” General Odierno, a 1976 West Point graduate from Rockaway, N.J., said in an interview here. “I call this thinning the lines. We’ll do it extremely slowly. We won’t take everybody out at once.”

His message appears to reflect a profound change in his views on how to stabilize Iraq since his last tour here, as commander of the Fourth Infantry Division in 2003 and 2004. Then his soldiers were known for heavy use of force, an approach that some military analysts have blamed for helping drive Sunni Arabs into the arms of the insurgency.

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