The Obama administration is moving ahead with the sale of nearly $11 billion worth of arms and training for the Iraqi military despite concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is seeking to consolidate authority, create a one-party Shiite-dominated state and abandon the American-backed power-sharing government.
The military aid, including advanced fighter jets and battle tanks, is meant to help the Iraqi government protect its borders and rebuild a military that before the 1991 Persian Gulf war was one of the largest in the world; it was disbanded in 2003 after the United States invasion. ...
“The optics of this are terrible,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on national security issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a critic of the administration’s Iraq policy.
The optics are bad? That's ridiculous. Why would we keep Iraq more vulnerable to Iranian pressure by prolonging their lack of conventional combat capability? And why would we--before Iraq is locked into American equipment (that requires a relationship with us to maintain)--compel Iraq to look to Soviet or Chinese arms that would diminish our ability to influence Iraq through military ties?
What are the optics of looking like an unreliable ally? What are the optics of selling 5-1/2 times as much to Saudi Arabia (including F-15SA--is that a typo and they are getting F-15SE, Silent Eagle with frontal stealth attributes?), which oppresses its Shia minority and hasn't progressed to levels of democracy that Iraq has regressed to in this crisis, just because the Shia majority might be treating the Sunni Arabs high handedly?
I will not complain about selling weapons that Iraq needs to resist Iranian pressure. The sooner Iraqis feel secure versus Iran, the sooner the natural divisions can win out over Iraqis' fear of Iran and give Iraq the confidence to root out subversive Iranian influence.
Somehow, we need to find out ways to guarantee to the Shias that we won't allow the Sunni Arabs to take over in a coup (and the pro-Iranian Sadrists for that matter) and guarantee the Sunni Arabs that we will make sure that they have the protections of rule of law in Iraq under a Shia-majority state.
I think that we should return to Iraq in force. Remember that in mid-1950, we had but a single infantry division in West Germany. But the post-war situation was not what we hoped it would be, so to defend West Germany (and the rest of Western Europe), by the end of the Korean War--even as we built up our armed forces to fight there--we increased our Army in West Germany to five divisions. And we reassured our German friends that we'd defend forward in West Germany rather than consider West Germany expendable as we retreated to the more defensible Rhine River barrier.
Sell Iraq arms. Get them to invite our troops back. And support Iraq even as we work to make sure rule of law takes hold in Iraq. Poisoning our position and influence in Iraq because Maliki may be acting out of unsubstantiated fear of plots within the Sunni Arabs inside the government us plain stupid
