22 02 07 Where We Stand On Iraq
After our tirade earlier today, we thought it important to briefly summarize where we stand vis. Iraq. To this point the post war effort has been repeatedly mismanaged - by many people and for many different reasons. But there is no going back to correct past errors, the situation on the ground is what it is. We do not believe the President's "strategy" of a 20 odd K troop surge will have any measurable effect on its own. Rather, any positives in Iraq will be attributed directly to the new top level management of the war - Secretary of Defense Gates and General Petraeus. Both men are highly competent and are focused on the task at hand - defeating an insurgency. Gates is a realist and not an ideologue and Petraeus had an excellent prior tour in Iraq and has focused his recent efforts solely on getting the Army and Marines updated on how to fight and win an insurgency (see FM 3-24). In the end though we think the hurdles are too great - too few troops and a sectarian situation too far gone to put back in the bottle.So what should we do going forward? First, as we noted earlier, we would give the new commanders on the order of nine months to show quantifiable progress. Should the spectacular happen and the situation improve dramatically, then by all means let these guys call the shots going from there. But if there is no significant improvement on the ground, or perhaps a roll back to one similar to early 2006, alternatives must be pursued - something Secretary Gates has already said he is planning for. Our view would be (as we noted here last fall) to move out of the large population areas, reduce our footprint and focus on three primary areas: border security (hopefully done better than our Mexican border), troop/police training, and foreign jihadists. By focusing on the borders and jihadists we help both ourselves (after all the jihadi are our primary enemy) and the Iraqis. But at some point we must acknowledge we can't force the Iraqi's to solve their political problems at the point of our guns. It hasn't worked so far and there is no reason to expect it will in the future.
This is decidedly not a cut and run strategy nor is it leaving Iraq in a Cambodian situation. No foreign power will be allowed to invade Iraq and commit genocide. Any bloodbath (as if the situation today in the major population areas is not) will be primarily by the Iraqi's own hands. But this 'redeployment' allows us to focus on what is most important to our war on terror. And when the Iraqi's have finally had enough of killing each other and determine how they will move forward politically and economically, we should help with any reconstruction or aid requests they may have. No more throwing good money after bad and no more playing referee for our soldiers.
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