Don't Punt on the Troops Issue

red55 · Nov 14, 2006

Good article from Newsweek on the Troops issue.

Don't Punt on The Troops Issue
The question of boots on the ground is critical to any progress.

By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

. . . Here is the tough question: What are America's objectives in Iraq and how can we achieve them? More bluntly, what is to be done with the roughly 140,000 U.S. troops stationed there? What is their mission? If they have new goals, do these require more Americans or fewer? Not to tackle this issue is to present a doughnut document—all sides and no center.

In answering this question, we need to keep three factors in mind:

1. This is not our chessboard. The Iraqi government has authority over all the political issues in the country. We may have excellent ideas about federalism, revenue-sharing and amnesty, but the ruling coalition has to agree and then actually implement them. So far, despite our many efforts, they have refused. There is a desperate neoconservative plea for more troops to try one more time in Iraq. But a new military strategy, even with adequate forces, cannot work without political moves that reinforce it. The opposite is happening today. American military efforts are actually being undermined by Iraq's government. The stark truth is, we do not have an Iraqi partner willing to make the hard decisions. Wishing otherwise is, well, wishful thinking.

2. Time is not on America's side. Month by month, U.S. influence in Iraq is waning. Deals that we could have imposed on Iraq's rival factions in 2003 are now impossible. A year ago, America's ambassador to Iraq had real influence. Today he is being marginalized. Thus any new policy that requires new approaches to the neighbors and lengthy negotiations carries the cost associated with waiting.

3. America's only real leverage is the threat of withdrawal. Many outsiders fail to grasp how much political power the United States has handed over in Iraq. The Americans could not partition Iraq or distribute its revenues even if Bush decided to. But Washington can warn the ruling coalition that unless certain conditions are met, U.S. troops will begin a substantial drawdown, quit providing basic security on the streets of Iraq and instead take on a narrower role, akin to the Special Forces mission in Afghanistan.
And one last thing: for such a threat to be meaningful, we must be prepared to carry it out.
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KajunKenny · Nov 17, 2006

So this guy is saying that we should threaten them to take steps in the right direction? I don't know if this guy has watched tv lately. Cause the USA's threats are meaning less and less on the international front. NK has proven that time and time again.

Honestly, no solution in Iraq is a good one. Anything that we try to do will have it's up and downs. It's just the way the country is.

Be prepared to be in Iraq for years to come...

red55 · Nov 17, 2006

KajunKenny said: ↑

So this guy is saying that we should threaten them to take steps in the right direction? I don't know if this guy has watched tv lately. Cause the USA's threats are meaning less and less on the international front. NK has proven that time and time again.
Click to expand...

That is his point. Our influence over them is less and less the longer we stay. We can no longer impose our will on the Iraqi government. We have turned over political control to them and they are defying us more and more. We must force them to assume control of the police and military so that they can no longer bame us for the violence. They want us to stay and do the dirty work and be the bogey man for all of their frustrations.

We are fast approaching the point where we can not leave on our own terms. If we keep staying the course, they will eventually order us to leave and we will have to slink out with our tails between our legs or start the war over again.

If we set a timetable and start redeploying troops on our terms, then the Iraqi government will have to step up to the plate. Right now the Sunnis and Shiites can kill each other and bame it all on us. I say let them kill each other with no one to blame but themselves.

We need to stop patrolling the strets of this civil war that's going on between these angry ragheads and getting our troops killed for nothing. We could redeploy them to the Kurdish area, where they are cooperating with us and to the Syrian and Iranian borders and finally seal them against foreign influences. We could also deploy them to the Saudi and Kuwait borders to protect our allies from incursion.

We can continue to hold the airport and the green zone to permit international travel and diplomacy and we can continue to hold training bases where we can keep trying to get the Iraqi police and military into some kind of order, although that is looking like an impossible task, too.

They would be close enough to influence any foreigners to stay out of it and to protect neighboring allies, but leave the patrolling to the Iraqis. Continuing to patrol the streets with a too-small army is not stopping the violence, inflames the radicals of bth sides, and is getting our troops killed for nothing.

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Don't Punt on the Troops Issue

red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

KajunKenny Founding Member

red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

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