The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.
It's "back to the future" with concepts from the 1990s, as one officer noted. And as I noted a couple weeks ago:
We'll need to rely on prepositioned equipment to be able to rapidly reinforce Iraq (and Kuwait, for that matter). We have Army brigade sets in Kuwait, the UAE, and afloat in the Indian Ocean, and a Marine set near there as well. Plus we have a parachute brigade in Italy and Germany that could be flown in rapidly. Hopefully, we put a couple brigade sets inside Iraq guarded and maintained by private contractors. Backed by air and naval forces in the region, this will have to do. It isn't ideal. But we can only help the Iraqis as much as they agree to our help. Perhaps the pro-Iranian factions can be marginalized yet to gain that permission.
Against an Iraqi military weakened by defeat in 1991, this worked during the 1990s. Against an Iran still weakened by the revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and sanctions, this should also work. We'll also increase naval forces in the region, including "considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region." I'm not sure what that means. It doesn't sound like simply deploying more ships to Central Command. It sounds more like making sure that ships going to or returning from the western Pacific transit the Central Command area. That way, additional forces would be nearby in an emergency. But that would certainly be a challenge to the logistics. Or will we keep ships in the Atlantic fleet and have them deploy to the western Pacific rather than have those ships in the Pacific fleet? Or maybe it means something else entirely.
Still, there is no reason to panic over our ability to maintain force able to confront Iran. We can do it. And over time, Iraq will gain the capacity (with our training and help) to confront Iran. Plus, as the Washington, D.C. bombing plot showed, Iran wasn't deterred by close to 150,000 American troops on the ground near their borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. I worry more at this point about our absence on the ground inside Iraq and the effects on Iraqi domestic politics. Our presence on the ground has been a reassurance that Iran can't meddle too much and that Iraqi parties can't resort to force to settle political differences. Without our presence, I worry some Iraqi faction will resort to violence to achieve their goals--even if it is just our of fear that another faction will do so first. Our presence reduces that fear factor.
I hope that the Iraqis reconsider their confidence about taking the training wheels off so soon. I hope the Obama administration listens if the Iraqis rediscover the wisdom of our presence on the ground.
UPDATE: Of course, we need to have the reputation of reliability to rely on this method. Will we have that reputation when it seems as if the Obama administration wanted negotiations with the Iraqis over our post-2011 presence to stumble? Starting talks late, insisting on getting immunity for our troops first before talking about troop numbers and roles, insisting that Iraq approve an agreement by submitting it to parliament (when the existing one was not, and many others around the world are not), low-balling our proposed troop presence (which may have led the Iraqis to think the political risks of accepting too few troops to be effective were not worth it), and boasting that President Obama would "end" the war, rather than "win" it could hardly boost confidence, eh?
