"Intelligence Brief: The Implications of Strategic Withdrawal from Iraq"
Power and Interest News Report (PINR)analyzes a plausible and perhaps inevitable implications of strategic withdrawal from Iraq. Some excerpts:
he Los Angeles Times on Monday reported that a Pentagon official told the newspaper that the United States was working on contingency plans in case its surge policy in Iraq fails. The plans call for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops in conjunction with increased military training of Iraqi forces. The contingency plan corresponds with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' testimony before the U.S. Congress recently, where he stated that a failure of the surge policy would result in withdrawing U.S. troops "out of harm's way." These statements demonstrate that the United States is prepared to cut its losses in Iraq and to adapt to a new security reality in the Middle East should it become clear that the Iraq intervention has failed.
[snip]The problem in the case of Iraq is that it is simply "too little, too late." The increase in troops will add about 21,500 soldiers to the 141,000 already in the country, yet the new total number of troops is still not enough to effectively push back the tide of the insurgency throughout Iraq.
[snip]
Therefore, if it becomes accepted that the surge strategy has failed, the United States will have to fall back on strategic withdrawal. While that scenario will affect U.S. interests negatively, there will be no other options for the United States to pursue. Furthermore, the United States will still be able to protect its interests after it begins withdrawing troops from Iraq. It can monitor developments on the ground from secure bases, and work to influence political developments in the country. Its forces can continue to monitor the threat from al-Qaeda and other militant Islamist groups in Iraq and dispose of these enemies through small-scale raids and surgical strikes.
[snip]
When assessing the involvement of outside powers in Iraq's progression, the fact remains that the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq opened the door for Iran to better achieve its interests in the Middle East. This was a significant side effect of the war, and one that should have been better anticipated by decision makers in Washington. That being said, while Iran can be expected to increase its influence in Iraq even further after a U.S. withdrawal, it does not mean that Iran will be able to use Iraq to increase its regional power greatly. The United States will still be affecting political outcomes in Iraq and will be employing its military to protect the regional status quo. A strong U.S. posture in the region will deter Iran from making excessive geostrategic gains in the Middle East. Washington has already begun this strategy, seen through its January decision to beef up its navy in the Persian Gulf. [See: "Intelligence Brief: U.S. Moves to Regain Leverage over Iran"]
The bottom line is that withdrawing the majority of U.S. forces from Iraq will not necessarily be a disaster for U.S. interests. The failure to achieve the original mission in Iraq has already occurred, and the United States has already suffered a significant loss of its interests. Withdrawing troops from the country may not make matters much worse.
Instead, upon withdrawal the United States can begin to pursue operations more in line with its capabilities, using technology to eliminate potential Islamist threats and using its overt and covert elements to work toward a stable government in Baghdad. As for Iran, it is already benefiting from the situation, and a withdrawal of U.S. troops will not suddenly tilt the chessboard in Iran's favor provided that Washington takes adequate steps to contain the country in the region. Regardless of what happens in Iraq, the United States can be expected to maintain its dominance in the Middle East and work to prevent Iraq's instability from spreading outward.
ABF, for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran
2 comments:
What is not addressed is that a failure of 'the surge' is not about 'the surge'. The necessary prerequisites to get a functional, non-dictatorial government working in Iraq needs to deal with the mosaic nature of the people inside Iraq. The largest problem in Iraq is *not* terrorists but the lack of a civil society that has been so degraded for decades that the largest, reliable governing unit is the tribe.
You cannot get Iraq running from the outside nor even attempt to hold it stable from the outside as the internal crossing divisions of ethnicity, culture, religion, education and tribes all point to something that is not amenable to cohesion without some protection to actually build a civil society. Not 'rebuild' but *build*. The scattered shards left by the Ba'athist regime and the entirety of Ba'athist time in power, which pre-dates Saddam, was an attempt to play faction on faction and remove any legitimacy of interior societal cohesion without the Ba'athists in control. By making everyone dependent upon the central government, the actual society itself decayed until it has a hard time existing.
Pulling to some nebulous 'periphery' guarantees the decay of Iraq into regionalism and then tribalism. Iraq is not one Nation so much as a collection of multiple cross-interests that must see an advantage of building a society together, rather than looking towards tribal affiliations to safeguard themselves.
The Kurds had this problem, although on a smaller scale, back in 1991 and have been able to use ethnic adherance and cohesion to overcome tribal problems. The Arab portion of Iraq does not have any meaningful ethnic cohesion ability left that is *not* tribal based. A non-sectarian government must *also* be non-tribal aligned to specific tribes, but empower those tribes on a provincial level. The elections this summer of provincial governments is key to this further building as the central government has rightly kicked the apportionment of oil profits out to the provinces. The money is no longer at the central government level, but is becoming a more distributed and localized concept. This gives the tribes something to work towards across province boundaries: oil wealth.
Why we write off Iraq so quickly when the US spent 7 years in Revolution and 5 years nearly having everything collapse under the Articles of Confederation is beyond me. It takes time to build a society from scratch and the US spent well over 12 years and more like 30 getting to that point. Iraqis are not miracle workers, but human beings.
What we talk about with in 'the surge' is not eliminating the terrorists. It is about giving breathing space to Iraqis to finally start knitting their society together and understand that they are in the cross-hairs of every other government that is a direct neighbor to them and to a fair number that are *not*. If that knitting cannot be accomplished, then the end result will be those cross-Nation State fractures opening at the tribal level.
And that bodes ill for the entire region as blood will trump religion everywhere in the region, and the result of that is true horror, not the little things we have been seeing to date in Iraq. That is the mere compounding daily of the interest on the entire bill, not even the interest itself. The bill itself is horrific to consider... and there is no 'Plan B' that can stop it.
I agree.
Also, since when did you start believing the Los Angeles Times? lol. I wouldn't believe a word Gates said if it did not go along with what GWB has been saying. It simply won't happen. Period.
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