We’ve learned a few things about "progress" this week:
1. Iraqi forces can’t do anything on their own.
After nearly five years of investment and training by American forces, the Iraqi military and security forces are still weaker than the militias (though they often are the militias). To this day--when things get intense--American forces are immediately called in to rescue government forces.
2. The United States wields no genuine political influence in Iraq.
We can pay local mukhtars protection money, we can drop bombs, and we can "surge" troops. But the bottom line is that whatever happens in Iraq will happen on account of Iraqi political decisions implemented by Iraqis. This is a product of both diplomatic ineptitude on the part of the Bush administration and the simple unfeasibility of the task at hand. And the fact that it’s their country. We’ve tried to use military means to broker political solutions for five years and we’ve proven the technique to be an abysmal failure.
3. Ask five American experts whose side we should be taking in this mess--or who we're fighting--and you’ll get five different answers.
No one knows what in the hell is going on. Especially the media--who reflexively blame everything on either "al Qaeda" or "Iran"--and certainly our policymakers. Five years into this thing, we don’t have enough Arabic speakers in this country, no one knows Iraqi history, and most Americans don’t care anyway.
4. Our real problem in Iraq is not al Qaeda, as the Bush administration would have you believe. It’s Iraqi militias who refuse to give up power and reconcile with each other to form a central government.
Though both the Bush administration and the Maliki government have tried to push this idea that a "final battle" against al "al Qaeda in Iraq" is looming in Mosul, this week has shown us that uncontrolled Shia militias represent a far more urgent problem for the government in Baghdad.
5. America’s real fight against extremism--both militarily and otherwise--is in Afghanistan and Pakistan, not Iraq.
Waziristan. Nuclear weapons. Drug money financing terror operations. Globally important oil and natural gas pipelines. Huge swaths of society that are uneducated and illiterate. Large refugee populations. Everyone is poor. And then there's the whole Osama bin Laden thing. It’s all there.
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All this suggests that we would be better served in Iraq by assisting with targeted counter-terrorism operations against non-Iraqi elements, providing limited air support to the government in Baghdad, making some effort to train the right people in Iraq, and strategically redeploying the rest of our forces.
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