Quote of the Day

By Ron Beasley

The way to get out of Iraq is to get out of Iraq.
~Juan Cole

Cernig discussed Obama's op-ed on Iraq in the NYT today.  While it's certainly better than anything we have gotten from the Bush administration or St John McSame I still had some problems with it.  Well Juan Cole had the same problems.  The first issue is leaving a "few" troops in Iraq.  I have always considered this foolishly dangerous.  I'll let Juan Cole explain:

That suggestion is not plausible for several reasons. If there is only a small force in the country, who will rescue them if their helicopter gets shot down or they are ambushed and besieged? Then, how would a small American unit be any good against a terrorist organization operating in remote parts of Sunni Iraq? They don't know Arabic, can't hope for really good intelligence from locals, etc. Wouldn't it be more efficient to let the Special Police Commandos of the Iraqi Interior Ministry take care of this sort of thing? By the way, no one seems to be calling themselves "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" any more on the jihadi bulletin boards. The main fundamentalist vigilante group is the "Islamic State of Iraq."

And then there is the problem that the Iraqis are demanding veto power over US operations in Iraq, a demand that will only grow with time. If they don't concur that a Sunni group is terrorists, the Baghdad government could just keep the US unit cooling its heels. It is precisely over issues such as Iraqi demands that US troops get permission before they act that Karen DeYoung at WaPo says have definitively derailed negotiations between Bush and al-Maliki on a Status of Forces Agreement. Now the two leaders seem likely just initial some quick and dirty executive-to-executive understanding that may not last past Bush's last day in office next January. So the Iraqis are unlikely to want a special forces unit of the sort Senator Obama envisages running around Iraq at will.

It will be over with by then. Iraqis want their sovereignty back.

The vast majority of the Iraqis don't like the US soldiers very much.  That includes a majority of those in the Iraqi security forces.  A few US troops will be nothing other than a "few" targets.  As Cole says "The way to get out of Iraq is to get out of Iraq" period!

He also has a problem with Obama's plans fro Afghanistan:

The major critique I have is that Obama keeps talking about intensifying the search and destroy missions being carried out by US troops in the Pushtun areas of southern Afghanistan. As we should have learned from Vietnam, search and destroy missions only alienate the local population and drive it into the arms of the insurgency.

[......]

When was the last time that an al-Qaeda operative was captured in Afghanistan by US forces? Is that really what US troops are doing there, looking for al-Qaeda? Wouldn't we hear more about it if they were having successes in that regard? I mean, what is reported in the press is that they are fighting with "Taliban". But I'm not so sure these Pushtun rural guerrillas are even properly speaking Taliban (which means 'seminary student.') The original Taliban had mostly been displaced as refugees into Pakistan. These 'neo-Taliban' don't seem mostly to have that background. A lot of them seem to be just disgruntled Pushtun villagers in places like Uruzgan.

[.....]

Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.

I too am beginning to think that Afghanistan is a waste of US lives and treasure. Now Obama and his advisors may know some or all of these things and this is nothing but politics.  But if so it's dangerous politics.

Comments

[RAM]

As near as I can tell from what actual news coverage there is these days from Iraq, the main mission of U.S. forces is force protection. Exactly how is force protection to be maintained in the absence of forces? Maybe Obama ought to read an account of the Fort Dearborn Massacre.

[jeff in chicago]

The question is 'how' to deal with Afghanistan. It's true that militaristic tactics create a local population that's willing to support an underground. So we can't keep charging in with the airforce and so forth. I think a focus on development should be the main goal.