Quote:
Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Club -
I don't pretend to really know, and its not my job to know, the best answer to that question. I also can't fully comment on "different" because it is neither clear nor public knowledge exactly what the administration is trying to do and how they are trying to do it.
I'm certainly not in favor of a quick withdrawal, and I'm not ready to support an announced "phased withdrawal" at this point. My one qualm about a Democratic House is that they might/will try to force this through the power of the purse.
But we need to have in place policies to:
(a) build an effective Iraqi Army and police force so that they _can_ take over (we are working at that, but I don't think we have enough resources pointed there); and
(b) figure out what the fuck we can do to help end the civil war between the Shia and Sunnis in Iraq -- (not doing well there at all); and
(c) encourage and assist the Iraqi government to confront and disarm or otherwise neutralize the major militias (essential to (b) above.) Mailiki's govt. is starting to try to do that, witness the recent battles with Al Sadr's people. I have no idea how they can succeed in achieving anything other than _perhaps_ a negotiated standdown, which is of limited value. (kind of like letting the IRA keep its guns)
(d) Plus, there is still an enormous amount of social and economic reconstruction remaining to be done -- a good bit of which we had promised to do -- lots of unfinished projects in part because of security needs shutting things down and/or siphoning off money. Are we going to do that, or not?
(e) Plus, we need to continue to contain the insurgeny and fight "al Qaeda in Iraq" -- pending the successful completion of (a) above. This is going pretty well, although our goals now (holding on until the Iraqis take over) are much more modest than they once were.
The Army now will tell you: (1) that they can't defeat/end the insurgency (especially in the West); but that (2) this is not their mission anyway. Problem for the administration is that it is hard to rally public support behind a strategy of bleeding to "contain" a foreign insurgency.
In my view -- we're doing best at (a) and (e) above -- no accident that those are the tasks most heavily military on the military/civilian policy axis. However, (a) and (e) won't matter a damn if we don't get the rest right.
We are in the position now of desparately trying to fix a very complicated and dangerous mess that, in many respects, we made and/or made worse.
S_A_M
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I have a slightly different view. The biggest problem I see underlying our Iraq policy is that the administration is simple-minded about it's goals: our goal is victory was Bush's most recent statement.
There are currently multiple insurgencies going on in Iraq. For the most part, these power struggles are differing groups positioning themselves, fully aware that there is a power vacuum that is currently only being filled because American forces are present. It is questionable as to whether we are putting in place an Iraqi government with adequate support to maintain itself.
Most of the insurgents have little to do with al-Qaeda; some do. Some are very clearly linked to Iran, which certainly has used and encouraged terrorism but is a different creature than al-Qaeda.
If our real enemy is terrorism, we should be limiting our goals accordingly and devoting our resources to the battles that are focused on combatting terrorism. We should put more emphasis on Afghanistan and on the Caucasian countries, and we should find a way to stabilize the parts of Iraq that are more easily stabilized - for example, an independent Kurdistan may be easier to manager than Kurdistan as football in Iraqi politics.
Most importantly, we should recognize that the Lebanese style consititution hasn't garnered enough legitimacy to survive. It will need to be revisited and an Iraqi solution developed - or, the country needs to be permitted to break apart.
The current administration is completely ill-equipped to let both the army and the career state department types have enough leeway to deal with the situation in all its complexity.
