|
Note: This is a Text only archive. Go directly to the real forum.
New Strategy for War Stresses Iraqi Politics...
- Click HERE to go to the original thread with graphics
banner
| New Strategy for War Stresses Iraqi Politics...
- Click HERE to go to the original thread with graphics
|
| Fdubya247 |
_
New Strategy for War Stresses Iraqi Politics
U.S. Aims to Oust Sectarians From Key Roles
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 23, 2007; A01
Top U.S. commanders and diplomats in Iraq are completing a far-reaching campaign plan for a new U.S. strategy, laying out military and political goals and endorsing the selective removal of hardened sectarian actors from Iraq's security forces and government.
The classified plan, scheduled to be finished by May 31, is a joint effort between Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American general in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. More than half a dozen people with knowledge of the plan discussed its contents, although most asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it to reporters.
The overarching aim of the plan, which sets goals for the end of this year and the end of 2008, is more political than military: to negotiate settlements between warring factions in Iraq from the national level down to the local level. In essence, it is as much about the political deals needed to defuse a civil war as about the military operations aimed at quelling a complex insurgency, said officials with knowledge of the plan.
The groundwork for the campaign plan was laid out in an assessment formulated by Petraeus's senior counterinsurgency adviser, David J. Kilcullen, with about 20 military officers, State Department officials and other experts in Baghdad known as the Joint Strategic Assessment Team. Their report, finished last month, was approved by Petraeus and Crocker as the basis of a formal campaign plan that will assign specific tasks for military commands and civilian agencies in Iraq.
The plan anticipates keeping U.S. troop levels elevated into next year but also intends to significantly increase the size of the 144,000-strong Iraqi army, considered one of the more reliable institutions in the country and without which a U.S. withdrawal would spell chaos. "You will have to do something about the sucking noise when we leave," said a U.S. officer familiar with the plan.
The plan has three pillars to be carried out simultaneously -- in contrast to the prior sequential strategy of "clear, hold and build." One shifts the immediate emphasis of military operations away from transitioning to Iraqi security forces -- the primary focus under the former top U.S. commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. -- toward protecting Iraq's population in trouble areas, a central objective of the troop increase that President Bush announced in January.
"The revised counterinsurgency approach we're taking now really focuses on protecting those people 24/7 . . . and that competent non-sectarian institutions take the baton from us," said Kilcullen, offering an overview of the campaign plan.
In contrast, he said, U.S. operations in 2004 and 2005 "had the unintended consequence of killing off Iraqis who supported us. We would clear an area, encourage people to sign up for government programs, but then we would have to leave and those people would be left exposed and would get killed." The plan recognizes that there are too few troops to protect all of Iraq's population, and so focuses on critical regions such as greater Baghdad.
Next, the plan emphasizes building the government's capacity to function, admitting severe weaknesses in government ministries and often nonexistent institutional links between the central government and provincial and local governments. This, too, is in contrast with Casey's strategy, which focused on rapidly handing over responsibility to Iraq's government.
Such a rapid transition "was derailed as a strategy," said one person involved with the plan. Instead, he described the focus of the next 18 to 21 months as "a bridging strategy" to set the necessary conditions for a handover.
Finally, the campaign plan aims to purge Iraq's leadership of a small but influential number of officials and commanders whose sectarian and criminal agendas are thwarting U.S. efforts. It recognizes that the Iraqi government is deeply infiltrated by militia and corrupt officials who are "part of the problem" and are maneuvering to kill off opponents, install sectarian allies and otherwise solidify their power for when U.S. troops withdraw, said one person familiar with the plan.
"For the surge to work, Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus have to identify the Iraqi nationalists and empower them, while minimizing" two other groups -- namely, "the militant sectarians . . . and the profoundly, personally corrupt," said Toby Dodge, a Middle East expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who recently returned from Iraq. Dodge, one of the assessment team members, was speaking in his capacity as an Iraq expert and declined to comment on anything about the plan.
"The focus has to be on abusive sectarian actors" involved in orchestrating sectarian killings and also obstructing key political legislation and financial reforms, agreed a U.S. official involved with the plan. "You will never eliminate sectarian tendencies, [so] you want to go after those who are abusive. You have to focus on setting some examples, but you need good evidence to support that," he said.
"We try to gather evidence in conjunction with the Iraqis, that convinces the Iraqis that they need to act. . . . We are not running our own death squads or vigilante activity," a senior official in Baghdad said. One officer familiar with the plan said: "For us to do it would be horrible. But for the Iraqis to do it would be hard."
Indeed, one source of pessimism about the plan is whether the Iraqi government has the means and willpower to weed out sectarian officials and commanders, in an atmosphere complicated by rumors and ambiguous intelligence.
"Very often you won't get ironclad information. Very often they cover their tracks," said Stephen Biddle, a member of the assessment team and military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, who spoke in his capacity as an independent analyst.
While saying they are confident that the United States is making headway in improving security, several officials involved with the plan expressed doubt in the Iraqi leadership. "I have less confidence about . . . the Iraqi government and whether they will be able to modify their behavior in the time we have available because of the U.S. political cycle," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said.
A primary element of Petraeus's strategy of placing U.S. troops with Iraqi army forces and Iraqi police in the same outposts is to monitor for sectarian abuses. The quality of evidence will determine whether the United States will pressure the Iraqi government to fire the wrongdoers -- by withholding military or economic aid or threatening to expose them in the news media -- or to target them for capture and criminal punishment.
The problem, officials said, is that the U.S. drive to make Iraqi forces independent has already limited U.S. leverage. "We've surrendered a lot of levers that we need," the senior official in Baghdad said.
Also part of the plan is reaching out to grass-roots groups such as tribes, religious leaders and provincial administrators that are moving forward on reconciliation efforts, said Kilcullen, noting a tribal agreement in Babil province last week to end violence and a tribal movement in Anbar to oppose al-Qaeda. "We should not restrict our view of what a 'political' settlement is, solely to the Iraqi government -- civil society also has a really key role to play."
Efforts at negotiated settlements brokered by U.S. and Iraqi officials will extend to a broad spectrum of Iraqi groups, including some that have killed U.S. troops -- a source of consternation for some U.S. officers. But they will exclude groups such as al-Qaeda that are considered "irreconcilable," officials said.
The plan is also designed to shore up Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, even though some U.S. commanders regard him as beholden to narrow sectarian interests. But they support Maliki for pragmatic as well as political reasons: As pressure mounts in Congress for a troop withdrawal, time lost reorganizing the government could mean losing the war, officials said.
"Maliki is the chosen vehicle; he's the one-trick pony," Dodge said in an interview from London. "Everyone recognizes that the success or failure [of U.S. policy] would be delivered through the office of the prime minister" and there is no discussion in Baghdad of removing him, he said.
The campaign plan upholds Bush's long-term goal of creating a stable and unified Iraq that is a partner against terrorism. Yet because of uncertainty over Maliki's intentions, the plan lowers medium-term expectations for reconciliation in Iraq. Instead, it aims for bargains to curb sectarian violence.
"Our notion of 'reconciliation' . . . is not necessarily where Iraqis are at right now," said Kilcullen, explaining that the word has no equivalent in Arabic. "The tribal and community leaders I talk to are more pragmatic and are looking for a compact or a settlement that brings an end to the violence. Restoring relationships is separate."
The campaign plan is being formulated by a Joint Campaign Plan Redesign Team, which includes members of the JSAT as well as other military planners and civilian officials. The final document will be signed by Petraeus and Crocker.
The plan is a thick tome with more than 20 annexes on topics such as policy on Iraqi security forces, detainees, the rule of law and regional diplomatic engagement, one participant said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...ml?hpid=topnews |
|
|
| Fdubya247 |
Four More Months?
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, May 8, 2007; 1:04 PM
After four years of perpetually kicking the can down the road, President Bush may finally be facing a deadline in Iraq that he can't ignore. This one is from his own party. It would force him to either show signs of success in Iraq in four months -- or admit failure. And unlike so many of the previous, ever-shifting deadlines, this one has a proper noun associated with it: September.
For many American politicians and pundits, "the next several months" have always been make or break in Iraq. But the actual moment of truth never seemed to come around.
The ubiquity of those ever-postponed reckonings has even led some bloggers to use the term "Friedman Unit" to represent a six-month period. Liberal blogger Duncan Black (Atrios) coined the phrase about two Friedmans ago, inspired by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's revelation that New York Times columnist and talking head Thomas L. Friedman had been making six-month do-or-die forecasts about Iraq ever since November 2003. dKosopedia has a list of other's use of the Friedman unit.
But this timetable could be for real.
Jonathan Weisman and Thomas E. Ricks write in The Washington Post: "Congressional leaders from both political parties are giving President Bush a matter of months to prove that the Iraq war effort has turned a corner, with September looking increasingly like a decisive deadline. . . .
"'Many of my Republican colleagues have been promised they will get a straight story on the surge by September,' said Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.). 'I won't be the only Republican, or one of two Republicans, demanding a change in our disposition of troops in Iraq at that point. That is very clear to me.'
"'September is the key,' said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), a member of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds defense. 'If we don't see a light at the end of the tunnel, September is going to be a very bleak month for this administration.' . . .
"House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who has taken a hard line in Bush's favor, said Sunday, 'By the time we get to September, October, members are going to want to know how well this is working, and if it isn't, what's Plan B.' . . .
"'There were always two debates in the debate over timelines to end the war,' said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.). 'George W. Bush is hellbent on January 20, 2009, when he walks out of the door, leaving a box stamped 'Iraq' for the next president. The Republicans are hellbent on not going through the next election with Iraq tied to their ankles. All Boehner said publicly was what Republicans have been saying privately for months.'"
What's so special about September? As Weisman and Ricks explain, "political pressures in Washington will dovetail with the military timeline in Baghdad. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, has said that by then he will have a handle on whether the current troop increase is having any impact on political reconciliation between Iraq's warring factions. And fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1, will almost certainly begin with Congress placing tough new strings on war funding."
In the meantime, Carl Hulse writes for the New York Times: "House Democrats may push ahead this week with a new war spending bill that would provide money for combat operations through midsummer, with the rest of the funds sought by President Bush withheld until commanders in Iraq provide a report on conditions there. . . .
"Aides and other officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the proposal was still being vetted, said it would provide about $40 billion of the $95 billion sought by the administration. The proposal would require Mr. Bush to report to Congress in July on events in Iraq.
"Congress would then vote a second time and could presumably put new conditions on the remaining money if lawmakers were not satisfied."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...ml?hpid=topnews
=====================
The Cost of War, Part I
Lori Montgomery writes in The Washington Post: "The global war on terror, as President Bush calls the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and related military operations, is about to become the second-most-expensive conflict in U.S. history, after World War II.
"Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress has approved more than $609 billion for the wars, a figure likely to stand as lawmakers rework their latest spending bill in response to a Bush veto. Requests for $145 billion more await congressional action and would raise the cost in inflation-adjusted dollars beyond the cost of the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
"But the United States is vastly richer than it was in those days, and the nation's wealth now dwarfs the price of war, economists said. . . .
"And this time, the war bill is going directly on the nation's credit card. Unlike his predecessors, Bush is financing a major conflict without raising taxes or making significant cuts in domestic programs. Instead, he has cut taxes and run up the national debt. The result, economists said, is a war that has barely dented the average American's pocketbook and caused few reverberations in the broader economy."
The Cost of War, Part II
Nancy A. Youssef writes for McClatchy Newspapers: "With much of their equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, state National Guards face profound shortages in responding to natural disasters, particularly as they get ready for the hurricane season, which begins June 1. . . .
"The potential impact of the equipment shortages became apparent over the weekend when a tornado devastated Greensburg, Kan. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said Monday that the state's National Guard couldn't respond as quickly as it should have because much of its equipment is overseas. . . .
"'Fifty percent of our trucks are gone. Our front loaders are gone. We are missing Humvees that move people,' Sebelius told NBC's 'Today' show. 'We can't borrow them from other states because their equipment is gone. It's a huge issue for states across the country to respond to disasters like this.'"
Jennifer Loven writes for the Associated Press that White House press secretary Tony Snow said this morning that Sebelius was to blame.
The Cost of War, Part III
Maria Cheng writes for the Associated Press: "The chance that an Iraqi child will live beyond age 5 has plummeted faster than anywhere else in the world since 1990, according to a report released Tuesday, which placed the country last in its child survival rankings.
"One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, according to the report by Save the Children." |
|
|
|
|
|
