The war in Iraq rages without us:
Officials in Iraq are growing increasingly concerned over an unabated spike in violence that claimed at least another 33 lives on Thursday and is reviving fears of a return to widespread sectarian fighting.
Authorities announced plans to impose a sweeping ban on many cars across the Iraqi capital starting early Friday in an apparent effort to thwart car bombings, as the United Nations envoy to Iraq warned that "systemic violence is ready to explode."
Government efforts better get moving, because the death toll is returning to wartime levels when we fought the terrorists and insurgents:
More than 1,000 people were killed in violence in Iraq in May, making it the deadliest month since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07, the United Nations reported on Saturday, stoking fears of a return to civil war.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in the last two months as al Qaeda and Sunni Islamist insurgents, invigorated by the Sunni-led revolt in Syria and by Sunni discontent at home, seek to revive the kind of all-out inter-communal conflict that killed tens of thousands five years ago.
And it gets better:
"Shi'ite militant groups have largely stayed out of recent violence. If they are behind bombings of Sunni mosques, that suggests that they are being drawn into conflict," said Stephen Wicken, at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.
The Shias haven't responded in kind yet.
Remember, the real bloodletting in Iraq didn't start until late summer 2006 when the Shias started really dishing out murder on a large scale to counter the al Qaeda-led killings of Shia that they announced with the bombing of the important Shia mosque in Samarra.
From August 2006 to August 2007, civilian casualties in Iraq were over 1,000 per month (often much more) until our surge offensive and the Awakening broke the Sunni Arab violence. The April 2008 Iraqi offensive at Basra that broke the Shia Sadrists witnessed casualties decline even further after that.
Civilian casualties remained low throughout the rest of our presence in Iraq. Sure, plenty of people insisted that casualties could only be snuffed out if we eliminated the cause of the continued violence--our troop presence--but that was a ridiculous charge. Now it should be obvious that we were the solution and not the problem.
But no, our president couldn't bust a gut to come to an agreement with the Iraqis to keep an American presence in Iraq to hunt down the remnant al Qaeda who now can be called resurgent. Oh yeah, the State Department army would do the job.
All I wanted was a presence of 25,000 US troops to help the Iraqis finish the job. The president keeps unfurling the "mission accomplished" banner wherever we fight jihadis. In reality, we need to return our CIA, special forces, drones (mostly for surveillance), and anti-IED people to Iraq again. Because God help us, it really might still be low tide in Iraq. As I wrote 2-1/2 years ago in that post:
It would be the height of folly to fail to put the resources into Iraq needed to exploit and defend what we've won already at the price we've paid.
It's a funny thing. Our president can pretend that a war ends by stopping our part in it. But it doesn't mean the war actually stops--or is won.
UPDATE: A private report's author says that Afghanistan will need a "bridging force" above our long-term post-2014 small commitment to carry the Afghan military through the transition by providing needed capabilities:
Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen co-authored a report that says the U.S should consider a “bridging force” to help support the Afghans after the end of 2014. ...
“For two to three years after 2014, the United States may need an additional force package of several thousand personnel to help the Afghans finish building their air force, their special operations force and certain other enablers in the medical realm, in counter-IED capability and in intelligence collection,” the report said.
I'm sure he's right. I want more troops for Afghanistan than we plan for the immediate post-2014 missions.
But I think we could use a bridging force for Iraq, too.
