AS America’s troop surge in Baghdad gathers force, Robert Gates, the defence secretary, is already planning for failure. If the battle for security in Iraq does not succeed, he has told Congress he is prepared to move troops “out of harm’s way”.

Policy experts at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for a fresh change in strategy should it be required. “I would be irresponsible if I weren’t thinking about what the alternatives might be,” Gates said.

General David Petraeus, the “warrior scholar” and expert on counter-insurgency, took up command of his forces in Iraq yesterday as joint US-Iraqi security sweeps of Sunni and Shi’ite neighbourhoods got under way.

“The stakes are high,” Petraeus said at yesterday’s handover ceremony. “The way ahead will be hard but it is not hopeless. The mission is doable.”

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham last week described Petraeus as “our last best chance as a military commander to bring about change on the ground”.

A suicide car bombing in central Baghdad offered a swift reminder of the challenges faced by US and Iraqi troops. A man driving a car rigged with explosives detonated his bomb near a queue of shoppers outside a bakery yesterday morning, killing five and wounding 10. Three American soldiers were killed and four wounded in an explosion near Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad.

American soldiers have been setting up new joint security stations or mini-forts, where they will live around the clock with members of the Iraqi army and police.

According to Major-General William Caldwell, the US military spokesman, 10 such stations are “up and running and there will be at least double if not triple that number that will eventually be out there”.

They are already being called the Alamo after the Texan fort where US troops were besieged by Mexican insurgents in 1836 (and were ultimately overwhelmed).

Some are based in Iraqi police stations, others in fortified clusters of houses surrounded by concrete barriers with room for parking tanks and Humvees. Most lack running water and the troops use oil drums as lavatories. The windows are blocked by sandbags.

Vehicles on patrol attract roadside bombs with such regularity that US soldiers suspect there are informants in their midst. Captain Ramiro Roldan from the 1st Cavalry in east Baghdad said: “We can’t for sure say that all of the Iraqi elements on the compound are completely on our side.”

The US troops bunk in separate rooms from the Iraqis but share cigarettes and try to social-ise in the hope of building trust.

At a new joint security station in Al-Doura, a mixed Sunni and Shi’ite trouble spot, Sergeant Doug Maddi expressed confidence that, “when people see us together with the Iraqi security forces, it’s a good thing, and as the word spreads through the community that this is here, we’ll start to get calls on the tip lines”. Yet securing Al-Doura was a key objective in last August’s battle for Baghdad, which failed after a spluttering few months.

The new surge has got off to an equally uncertain start. Six American helicopters have been downed in the last three weeks and the crackdown could not begin last Monday because too few Iraqi troops turned up — the same problem that bedevilled last summer’s push.

Raids against Shi’ite militia leaders and Sunni insurgents have been taking place across the city, but many rebels have gone to ground. Supporters of the Shi’ite Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric, were warned last week by Nasser al-Rubaie, the head of his parliamentary group, not to resist troops.

“Our instructions are to melt away and disappear,” said a member of the Mahdi militia.

Temporary checkpoints that have been set up across the city are failing to quell the violence. In Yarmouk, a largely Sunni area, an eyewitness saw two Iraqis in a minibus murdered within 30 metres of a check-point. “They were stopped by three men in a white Nissan. They got out, shot the driver and his passenger and injured a woman in the back. Nobody did anything about it,” he said.

At least one Iraqi brigade showed up for duty last week at only 55% or 60% of its full strength. Gates told the Senate armed services committee last week that it was not “good enough”. “We are hoping it [the surge] will succeed, planning for it to succeed, allocating the resources for it to succeed,” Gates said, but he added that troops could be moved “out of harm’s way” if it failed.

Frederick Kagan, a military historian and leading advocate of the surge, said Gates may have been trying to soothe congressmen who have been “boxing the administration around the ears for years for not having a Plan B”, but he was unhappy that Gates was “starting to talk now about what to do if the surge fails”.

“There is not a persuasive middle ground between trying to win and being totally defeated,” Kagan said. The Pentagon has not budgeted for the surge lasting beyond the summer, on Gates’s advice.

Colleagues who served with Gates on the Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by James Baker, believe he remains sympathetic to one of the group’s main proposals — the withdrawal of all US combat troops by early 2008, leaving behind only embedded trainers, special operations forces and a rapid reaction force.

Leon Panetta, a member of the ISG, said Gates was “very concerned about what to do if the Iraqis couldn’t get their act together”. Panetta added; “He is being a good soldier and implementing what the president wants but he hasn’t lost sight of our recommendations.”

Putin: America is fuelling worldwide nuclear arms race

President Vladimir Putin of Russia launched a scathing attack on the United States yesterday, accusing the Bush administration of encouraging a new arms race that forces smaller nations such as Iran to develop nuclear weapons, writes Imre Karacs.

Speaking at a security conference in Munich attended by Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Putin said the US had “overstepped its national borders in every way” by resorting to force that was “almost uncontained”.

“This is very dangerous. Nobody feels secure any more because nobody can hide behind international law,” Putin declared. “This is nourishing the arms race with the desire of countries to get nuclear weapons.”

Although he did not single out any country, it was clear Putin was referring primarily to Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is today expected to announce a breakthrough in its efforts to become a nuclear power.

Standing beside an orchestra playing a specially commissioned “nuclear symphony” to mark the 28th anniversary of the Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad is expected to report on progress in installing the first of 3,000 centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Enriched uranium from there could be used to generate nuclear power, as Iran claims it wants to do, or to build nuclear bombs, which the West fears is Tehran’s true intention.

“We believe the Iranian nuclear dossier is resolvable by negotiation,” Larijani insisted yesterday.

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