Iraq: Strategic Reset
25 June 2007 8:33 pm by Taylor Marsh
Iraq: Strategic Reset bumped
“What I found in discussions with current and former members of
this administration is that there is no agreed-upon strategic view of the
Iraq problem or the region … the current Washington decision-making process
lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together
strategically.” – Retired Marine Corps General John Sheehan
The above quote from Sheehan, a man who had the good sense to turn down the
“war czar post,” gets at the heart of the Republican ineptitude in
Iraq. It also illustrates why we simply cannot trust their presidential candidates.
They all seem to want to follow Bush further into the Iraqi abyss, including
Fred how much is that lobbyist in the window Thompson.
But it’s official. I’m done with believing training the Iraqis is worth any
more effort. Finished. It’s o-v-e-r for me. That’s just one reason this
new report on how to change direction in Iraq, as well as get a handle on the
growing political and military wildfire in the Middle East, has my attention.
Read it and see what you think.
The United States should mitigate the increasingly violent fragmentation
in Iraq by ceasing the unconditional arming and training of Iraq’s national
security forces until a political consensus and sustainable political solution
is reached. As the United States redeploys its military forces, it should
immediately phase out its training of Iraq’s national security forces
and place strict limits on arming and equipping them. Spending billions to
arm Iraq’s security forces without political consensus among Iraq’s
leaders carries significant risks—the largest of which is arming faction-ridden
national Iraqi units before a unified national government exists that these
armed forces will loyally support. Training and equipping Iraqi security forces
risks making Iraq’s civil war even bloodier and more vicious than it
already is today. It also increases the dangers that these weapons will one
day be turned against the United States and its allies in the region.Strategic
Reset
Reclaiming Control of U.S. Security in the Middle East
Honestly, the title of the report in and of itself illustrates that the authors
get it. We need to completely reset our efforts and refocus them. First for
me is redeployment, but it is now joined with a full halt in arming and training
the Iraqis. It’s obvious now that they have no intention of controlling violence,
so all we’re doing is further arming them to fight each other with our troops
in the middle.
These next steps are equally important, once our troops begin redeployment.
The end goal of a more realistic U.S. strategy in the Middle East is a more
secure region developed without turning our backs on democratic values. In
the next year, the United States needs to focus its Middle East regional strategy
by:- Developing crisis management strategies to address more effectively the
fallout from conflicts such as the intra-Palestinian battles in the spring
of 2007.
– Using regional and international proposals to provide a diplomatic framework
to move the Arab-Israeli conflict toward resolution.
– Engaging in diplomacy with U.S. rivals such as Iran and Syria similar to
the way the United States negotiated with the Soviet Union and China in the
Cold War.
– Offering smartly targeted rule-of-law assistance to reduce and eliminate
security vacuums and help foster democratic values from the ground up.
There is nothing more important than turning our focus towards the region.
We’ve got to get ourselves pulled away from an Iraq-centric foreign policy.
Can Bush do this? Doubtful, but the Democratic presidential candidates need
to start talking about these elements. Our entire focus on Iraq is killing us.
The current Iraq strategy is exactly what Al Qaeda wants—the United
States distracted and pinned down by Iraq’s internal conflicts and trapped
in a quagmire that has become the perfect rallying cry and recruitment tool
for Al Qaeda. The United States has no good options given the strategic and
tactical mistakes made on Iraq since 2002, but simply staying the course with
an indefinite military presence is not advancing U.S. interests.Instead, the United States must reset its strategy by looking beyond the
deteriorating situation in Iraq in order to counter the threat from global
terrorist groups and ensure stability in the entire Middle East and Gulf region.
To do this, we need to develop a new overall Middle East strategy, not just
a series of tactics focused heavily on Iraq.
Counterterrorism and rebuilding alliances need to be joined with a redeployment and reassignment of our military objective in Iraq and the region. Putting our forces in neighboring countries will also allow for our armed forces to regroup from force depletion. Facing that Republicans have left us no good options in Iraq isn’t easy, but ignoring that we will have some military role in Iraq, if only in a counterterrorism role, as well as to keep the violence from spreading, for some time to come is critical. Otherwise our candidates will promise things they cannot possibly deliver or shouldn’t even think of delivering. However, the first job is to re-establish
America’s image, which Bush-Cheney has destroyed. That’s going to take more
than puddle hopping diplomacy. After redeployment outside of Iraq, it’s job one.
