If I were a betting man, even though Ivo wrote the book on the Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy , I'd bet on his disputants. They seem to know the contents. 

May 20, 2006

In yet another apparent episode of the inability of the White House to steer a consistent diplomatic course in the Middle East, a new report says that the George W. Bush administration ordered U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in March to postpone indefinitely the talks with Iran on Iraq for which Khalilzad had previously gotten White House approval.The reversal of the earlier authorization for talks with Iran has resulted in a widening chasm between the United States and the other major powers on how to reach a diplomatic solution with Iran on the nuclear issue.Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported on Friday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "froze" the talks on Iraq that the United States and Iran had agreed to in mid-March, telling Khalilzad "it wasn't the right time to meet."....

Some in the administration may be open to an eventual shift of policy. Newsweek reported May 15 that Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns had "indicated to colleagues that he is mainly waiting for the right moment, when America's leverage and its chances of success are maximized."

But Bush appears to be listening not to the diplomats but to the same figures who vetoed the direct talks with Iran in March and have been irrevocably opposed for more than four years to any dealings with Tehran.

If I were a betting man, even though Ivo wrote the book on the Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy , I'd bet on his disputants. They seem to know the contents. 

May 20, 2006

In yet another apparent episode of the inability of the White House to steer a consistent diplomatic course in the Middle East, a new report says that the George W. Bush administration ordered U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in March to postpone indefinitely the talks with Iran on Iraq for which Khalilzad had previously gotten White House approval.The reversal of the earlier authorization for talks with Iran has resulted in a widening chasm between the United States and the other major powers on how to reach a diplomatic solution with Iran on the nuclear issue.Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported on Friday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "froze" the talks on Iraq that the United States and Iran had agreed to in mid-March, telling Khalilzad "it wasn't the right time to meet."....

Some in the administration may be open to an eventual shift of policy. Newsweek reported May 15 that Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns had "indicated to colleagues that he is mainly waiting for the right moment, when America's leverage and its chances of success are maximized."

But Bush appears to be listening not to the diplomats but to the same figures who vetoed the direct talks with Iran in March and have been irrevocably opposed for more than four years to any dealings with Tehran.

Getting Swept

Juan Cole:

The NYT reports Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who teaches at West Point, as estimating that the US military should have a big presence in Iraq for 5 to 7 years, while partnering with and building up the Iraqi military. So in 5 years the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish battalions will like each other more than they do now? Will be more willing to fight against armed groups from their own ethnicities?

My problem with that is that they seem to think that the Tal Afar operation was a success, whereas it is a political disaster, and if they are planning another 5 to 7 years of that sort of thing, then we are doomed. At Tal Afar they used Kurdish and Shiite troops to assault Sunni Turkmen, emptied the city on the grounds that it was full of foreign fighters, killed people and made them refugees, and then only took 50 foreign fighters captive. The Sunni Turkmen, not to mention the Turks in Ankara, will never forgive us. And the press reports show substantial disappointment in the city even among Shiites with the results. The Tal Afar operation is considered a "take and hold" or "oil spot" strategy, as opposed to search and destroy. But you can't just empty out one Sunni city after another, bring in troops of other ethnicities to level neighborhoods, force people into tent cities in the desert or into relatives' homes, and call that a counter-insurgency strategy. Every year the US military has been in the Sunni Arab heartland they have alienated more and more Iraqis.

So I think we should get the US ground troops out of there. As a matter of politics ("hearts and minds"), they aren't making things better and have no early prospect of doing so. If it is a matter of keeping air capability, and some special ops and armor in the neighborhood, that might be necessary to keep things from collapsing. By the way, why does the Iraqi army have only 70 tanks after all this time? (In 1990 I think they had 8,000 tanks!) How can you take and hold territory with no armor? And what about helicopter gunships? My own guess is that the US doesn't build up those capabilities because they can't be sure the Iraqi military won't at one point mutiny against them. But if that is the case, then the US troop presence really is stunting Iraqi capabilities.

[xpost Informed Comment]

The propaganda machine has been spinning Tal Afar success stories and even managed to fake out some favorable (and fatally incomplete) coverage from PBS Frontline.

What they are spinning is a compromise, pardon my French half-assed counterinsurgency program.

By the end of the Vietnam War, the military had finally figured out that to fight insurgents the counterinsurgent forces had to become insurgents themselves after a fashion. They had to live and work among the population, gain intelligence, and trust so that they could provide stability and security.

The problems with applying those lessons to Iraq:

1. Insufficient troops
2. Insufficient native born troops - white Christian boys stick out like a sore thumb
3. The US military in its much ballyhooed post-VN reconstruction (culminating with the Powell doctrine) junked its counter-insurgency capability.

Now we're trying desperately to rebuild the capacity but in the end even that must fail because you can't execute counterinsurgency strategy and tactics without sufficient qualified counterinsurgency (Sunni or Shiite Arabs).

Thus all efforts are doomed to failure but thus ever have been since March 2003.

For a more rigorously professional analysis, I recommend William Lind's writings at DNI. Lind, whom I actually worked with when we both young Senate staffers, knows his onions; is a consultant to the USMC, and a trenchant critic of this the Greatest Strategic Disaster in US History.

On War #130
August 18, 2005

Getting Swept

By William S. Lind

[I also highly recommend Cole's basic ME Reading List. If like me you thought you knew a good deal about ME History, you will be surprised how little you actually do.