It’s Time For A REALLY New Iraq Strategy: A Non-Military One
Last night President Bush went before the American people and asked for more.
Yeah, I noticed the deer-in-the-headlights look, too. Can you blame him? He was asking for 20,000 more of our sons and daughters and $7 billion more of our tax dollars to squander in the black hole that is his monumental Iraq disaster. No, scratch that, he didn’t ask us, he told us:
So I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them — five brigades — will be deployed to Baghdad.
Thanks for keeping us in the loop.
So this is the President’s “new Iraq strategy.” Except there’s nothing new about it. We’ve increased troop levels several times over the past three years, during Ramadan and before the Iraqi elections, for example. We’ve supposedly been embedding U.S. troops in Iraqi units from the beginning. We’ve been “training Iraqi soldiers” from the get-go. I’m not hearing the “new” here, unless it’s the “gated community” idea:
WASHINGTON — The military’s new strategy for Iraq envisions creating “gated communities” in Baghdad — sealing off discrete areas and forcibly removing insurgents, then stationing American units in the neighborhood to keep the peace and working to create jobs for residents.
Baghdad Meade, coming to a war zone near you. Great to know the Administration is finally working with a concept they are at least familiar with.
None of this is going to work, because it didn’t work before. Try as he might to turn it inside out, upside down, and rearrange the pieces, this is still a military strategy. There is nothing new about a military strategy for Iraq, it’s the one we started with, the one they’ve stuck with, the one they keep failing with.
President Bush said last night that “failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.” I’m not entirely convinced of that, but let’s just say he’s right. Then we need a really new strategy for Iraq, one that hasn’t been tried before. We need a regional diplomatic solution, one that involves Iraq’s neighbors and stakeholders–the region’s Sunnis and Shiites in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iran.
Now THAT would be a really new strategy.