Gates, in Iraq, Talks of Effects of Budget Fight

Mr. Gates, responding to a question from a soldier here about whether he would be paid for his service in Iraq, said he would be, he just was not sure when. Mr. Gates then presented this sequence of events of what could happen to American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world as a result of the budget showdown.

If the government shuts down from April 8 to 15, Mr. Gates said, troops would get half their pay in the checks received on April 15. If the government were to stay shut down until April 30, Mr. Gates said, troops would miss a whole check. Troops are generally paid on the first and the 15th of each month.

Once the government starts up again, Mr. Gates said, troops would receive the pay they were owed.

“But you all know as well as I do that a lot of these young troops live pretty much paycheck to paycheck,” he told reporters. “And when I start to think about the inconveniences it’s going to cost these kids and a lot of their families, even half a paycheck delayed can be a problem for them. So I hope they work this whole thing out.”

Mr. Gates did not offer an opinion on how Congress was handling the budget impasse. “I’m not going to wade into that swamp,” he said. Earlier, in remarks to about 200 soldiers at Camp Liberty on the outskirts of Baghdad, Mr. Gates joked that “as a historian, it always occurred to me that the smart thing for government was always to pay the guys with guns first.”

Mr. Gates also told the troops that his trip was “probably my last” to Iraq, a rare public acknowledgment of the timing of his planned departure as defense secretary this summer, when he would typically visit Iraq again. President Obama has yet to name a successor, although Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have been mentioned as possible replacements.

Later Thursday, Mr. Gates met with Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and its president, Jalal Talabani. Chief among his concerns are what will happen to the country once all American forces leave at the end of this year, as scheduled under an agreement between the United States and the Iraqi government.

Mr. Gates and American military commanders have made no secret of their view that some of the 47,000 American troops in Iraq should remain after 2011 as a stability force, particularly as tensions have flared between Arabs and Kurds in the north. But Mr. Gates said that the Iraqi government must first request that the American troops stay. That has not happened yet, much to the growing impatience of American commanders who say they need to know now in order to plan into 2012.

“We are willing to have a presence beyond that time,” Mr. Gates told the soldiers at Camp Liberty. “But we’ve got a lot of commitments around the world.” He added that “if folks are going to want us to have a presence, we’re going to need to get on with it pretty quickly in terms of our planning and our ability to figure out where we get the forces.”

He also said that although the Iraqis had shown interest in keeping some American troops in the country, “The politics are such, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Mr. Gates was obliquely referring to the politics surrounding Mr. Maliki, who is hemmed in by a bloc of politicians loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Mr. Sadr, whose support Mr. Maliki relied on to secure a second term as prime minister, is opposed to any delay in the American withdrawal. Any extension of the American troop presence would require the politically risky decision by Mr. Maliki to ask for it.

The top American commander in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, made clear on Thursday that Iraq was not ready to defend itself, particularly from the skies. He said the Iraqis also needed help with intelligence gathering, logistics and the use of different weapons systems in coherent warfare. He said that there was a debate in the Iraqi government about whether the United States should stay or not, and that the wind of that debate was not blowing in one direction, “It’s blowing in every direction.”

Despite the uncertainties, Mr. Gates told the troops at Camp Liberty that “Iraq has been an extraordinary success story for the United States military.” In briefly reflective comments, he recalled for them the first of some dozen trips to Iraq as defense secretary, in December 2006, when violence was raging and he held a news conference at a nearby base while a firefight went on in the background.

Today, Mr. Gates said, countries in turmoil across the Middle East “would be happy if they could get to where Iraq is today — it isn’t perfect, but it’s new and it is a democracy and people do have rights.”

In conclusion, he recalled that when he took over as defense secretary, people said he would be evaluated by how Iraq turned out. “And I’ll let people judge for themselves,” he said.