The Iraqis came here to discuss ways we can help Iraq:
"Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his visiting delegation from Iraq earlier today in Washington, D.C. During the hour-long meeting, both leaders reiterated their commitment to the United States and Iraq defense and security relationship.
"Secretary Hagel and Prime Minister Maliki discussed the political and security situation in Iraq, reviewed regional cooperation activities, and considered ways to strengthen U.S.-Iraq strategic cooperation given the challenges in the region. Secretary Hagel stressed the important role that Iraq has in maintaining regional stability. Prime Minister Maliki thanked Secretary Hagel and Gen. Dempsey for the sacrifices made by U.S. troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2011."
Good, I hope we respond positively to these requests:
"We know we have major challenges of our own capabilities being up to the standard. They currently are not," Lukman Faily, the Iraqi ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We need to gear up, to deal with that threat more seriously. We need support and we need help."
He added: "We have said to the Americans we'd be more than happy to discuss all the options short of boots on the ground."
"Boots on the ground" means military forces. The U.S. withdrew all but a few hundred of its troops from Iraq in December 2011 after Baghdad refused to renew a security agreement to extend legal immunity for Americans forces that would have let more stay.
At the time, the withdrawal was hailed as a victory for the Obama administration, which campaigned on ending the Iraq war and had little appetite for pushing Baghdad into a new security agreement. ...
Al-Maliki is expected to ask Obama for new assistance to bolster its military and fight al-Qaida. Faily said that could include everything from speeding up the delivery of U.S. aircraft, missiles, interceptors and other weapons, to improving national intelligence systems. And when asked, he did not rule out the possibility of asking the U.S. to send military special forces or additional CIA advisers to Iraq to help train and assist counterterror troops.
I did not hail total withdrawal as victory, of course. I practically begged on these pages for some force to be left even as the environment eroded so much that I mused over how to make even small levels of force as effective as possible.
Amazingly, given all the ridiculous "tide of war receding" talk they once peddled, the Obama administration seems to be tilting toward re-entering the fight for Iraq by declaring the al Qaeda surge as a direct threat to us:
Al Qaeda's violent resurgence in Iraq and expansion into Syria now represents a "transnational threat network" that could possibly reach from the Mideast to the United States, according to the White House.
The teaming of al Qaeda's Iraqi cell and affiliated Islamic militant groups in Syria into the new Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has developed into "a major emerging threat to Iraqi stability . . . and to us," a senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday.
"It is a fact now that al Qaeda has a presence in Western Iraq" extending into Syria, "that Iraqi forces are unable to target," the official said.
That growing presence "that has accelerated in the past six to eight months" has been accompanied by waves of bombings and attacks that threaten to throw Iraq into a full-blown civil war.
Keeping ISIS from destabilizing the Iraqi government and expanding into other areas in the region is a "major focus" of this week's visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to Washington.
I hate to get my hopes up, but signals from the White House seem to be matching the urgency of the reality on the ground.
Even now, I understand that American combat units will not return to Iraq. So we have to work with what is possible to defend what we sacrificed to achieve.
We did sacrifice many troops--more than four and a half thousand. But they won. While COIN 101 is that you eventually turn over security to locals, the enemy was too strong compared to the local Iraqi security forces to cope with.
So our surge was designed to have our forces take the lead in local security while reducing the enemy with direct combat and the Awakening that stripped Sunni Arabs from the enemy ranks. With reduced violence, domestic deals to end the sectarian violence could be made.
General Petraeus discusses our surge in Iraq:
The surge had many components. The most prominent, of course, was the deployment of the additional U.S. forces committed by President Bush -- nearly 30,000 of them in the end. Without those forces, we never could have achieved progress as quickly as we did. And, given the necessity to make progress by the hearings anticipated in September 2007, improvements before then were critical.
As important as the surge of forces was, however, the most important surge was what I termed "the surge of ideas" -- the changes in our overall strategy and operational plans. The most significant of these was the shift from trying to hand off security tasks to Iraqi forces to focusing on the security of the Iraqi people. The biggest of the big ideas that guided the strategy during the surge was explicit recognition that the most important terrain in the campaign in Iraq was the human terrain -- the people -- and our most important mission was to improve their security. Security improvements would, in turn, provide Iraq's political leaders the opportunity to forge agreements on issues that would reduce ethno-sectarian disputes and establish the foundation on which other efforts could be built to improve the lives of the Iraqi people and give them a stake in the success of the new state.
To turn over security duties to Iraqis, the Iraqi security forces had to be stronger than the insurgents and terrorists. Unable to build up Iraqi quickly enough to allow them to take over the duties, we had to reduce the enemy to make the Iraqi security forces strong enough relative to the enemy. It worked.
It can work again as al Qaeda violence surges and Iraqi Sunni Arabs waver under the stress of this surge:
As Iraqi leaders consider the way forward, they would do well to remember what had to be done the last time the levels of violence escalated so terribly. If Iraqi leaders think back to that time, they will recall that the surge was not just more forces, though the additional forces were very important. What mattered most was the surge of ideas -- concepts that embraced security of the people by "living with them," initiatives to promote reconciliation with elements of the population that felt they had no incentive to support the new Iraq, ramping up of precise operations that targeted the key "irreconcilables," the embrace of an enhanced comprehensive civil-military approach, increased attention to various aspects of the rule of law, improvements to infrastructure and basic services, and support for various political actions that helped bridge ethno-sectarian divides.
The Iraqis cannot afford to have the Sunni Arab Awakening reverse itself. But the Iraqi government--while it has justifiable worries about Sunni Arabs who want to return to power--must give Sunni Arabs the security and incentive to stay "Awakened." If they see no benefit to accepting the new Iraq--or if they are too afraid of strenghening al Qaeda terrorists who threaten their lives if they don't support al Qaeda--they will "de-Awaken" and return to opposing the new Iraq.
And a de-Awakening is possible if the Shia death squads--who are stirring again--start attacking Sunni Arabs even as Sunni Arab jihadis attack Sunni Arabs for not turning against the Iraqi Government:
Iraq does not want a civil war between Shia and Sunni, mainly because this would be seen by outsiders as a genocide by the Shia majority against the Sunni minority. Many Iraqis Sunnis want to avoid this as well, but the Iraqi Islamic radicals will not negotiate and are increasingly violent against Iraqi Sunnis who do not cooperate with the terrorist campaign against the Iraqi Shia. But the only solution may be another round of vigilante violence by Shia against Sunnis in Iraq. That’s what halted most of the Sunni terrorism in 2007. Back then terrorist deaths went from 29,000 in 2006 to 10,000 in 2007 and kept falling until 2011 (when there were 4,100 deaths). Then came Arab Spring and the Sunni uprising against the Shia minority government in Syria. This energized Sunni radicals and led to a big jump in Sunni terrorism in both Syria and Iraq. At the rate things are going this year, 2013 will have twice as many terrorist deaths as 2011. The Shia majority is growing more enthusiastic about unleashing (or just tolerating) the Shia death squads again. This would mean Shia killers would go after any Sunnis they could find and kill them while the Shia run security forces would stand aside. Back in 2006 the Americans brokered an end to this by convincing Sunni tribal chiefs and politicians to turn their followers against the terrorists. That worked, but since the Americans left in 2011 the guarantees have been largely violated by the Shia dominated government and it has proved very difficult to revive the original deal.
Remember, the Awakening was possible because our large troop presence and commitment to beating al Qaeda and Iranian-supported Shia death squads (in the military portion of the surge) reassured the Sunni Arabs that it was safe and advantageous to switch sides. Whatever we do to help Maliki must not just be more weapons that won't be effectively used to fight the jihadis to keep the Sunni Arabs who flipped safe and to eliminate the motivation for Shia death squads to go after Sunni Arabs for revenge.
So I hope that we send more CIA to Iraq to help with intelligence operations and drone strikes on identified targets. I hope we accelerate delivery of appropriate weapons. I hope we also send special forces which should be freed up as we draw down in Afghanistan. I know, they've been distracted from the fight against al Qaeda in Iraq as we fought the Taliban in Afghanistan. But it isn't too late to defend our gains in Iraq.
Or even expand our gains. In light of the short-term problems of the Arab Spring in finding an alternative to the choice long given to Arabs of living under autocrats or Islamists, the sight of a democracy in the Arab world working through its problems successfully (at least more successfully than autocrats or jihadis can achieve) is very important in the long run to win the Long War.
I also hope we beef up conventional forces around Iraq to partially make up for not having troops in Iraq--even as a non-combat garrison with symbolic and training roles. Make sure we have a robust afloat Marine presence in CENTCOM. Make sure we have a heavy brigade rotating through Kuwait at all times. Make sure we have prepositioned equipment in high states of maintenance in the region. And keep our Europe-based paratrooper and Stryker brigades (one each) ready to dispatch elements to Kuwait rapidly for deployment into Iraq to help our CIA and special forces advisers and direct action forces if they get in trouble.
These forces will also help to reassure all parties in Iraq that we are interested in Iraq and want Iraqis to resolve differences through the governing and electoral systems.
And for goodness sake, work to reduce Iranian influence in Iraq. I don't think Iraq is an Iranian ally, but you can't blame Maliki for cooperating with Iran:
Shunned by America and shattered by half a century of tyranny, a weak Iraq had to look for allies.
Surrounded by Sunni-majority nations hostile to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, Iraq was forced to look to Iran.
Iraq is in a difficult position with an aggressive Iran next door and a passive America far away. If we abandon our passive attitude and engage for the fight for Iraq, we can win. Iraqis don't want to be in Iran's orbit, common Shia religion or not. Iraqis are Arabs and not Persians. Only a minority of Shias want Iranian dominance (and that influence extends back to the Iranian revolution and wasn't caused by our 2003 invasion--Iranian influence was one reason Saddam invaded Iran in 1980, after all).
As we re-engage in Iraq (if we do), make sure we spread the word that we will help end violence in Iraq as we did in 2007, and in contrast to Iran's absolute failure to do the same despite their growing influence in the absence of America.
We sacrificed and won in Iraq (and really, what achievement would you choose to reverse if it was a mistake and not a victory?). It is beyond me that some cannot see that an imperfect Iraqi democracy is far superior to Saddam's aggressive and hostile house of horrors that we defeated (twice, in 1991 and 2003--three times if you count the COIN campaign against his Baathist thugs).
Make the goddamn effort to win this war (again) and defeat al Qaeda.
