Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan: A Friendly Critique
Juan Cole
Informed Comment
Barack Obama wants to get out of Iraq by summer 2010 but wants to send 10,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.
Obama's editorial is thoughtful and far more sensible than anything we are hearing from the White House or McCain, and I agree with most of it. But I have one quibble and one major critique. The quibble is that Obama talks about leaving a small American force in Iraq after most of the troops are withdrawn, to continue to fight "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia."
That suggestion is not plausible for several reasons. If there is only a small force in the country, who will rescue them if their helicopter gets shot down or they are ambushed and besieged? Then, how would a small American unit be any good against a terrorist organization operating in remote parts of Sunni Iraq? They don't know Arabic, can't hope for really good intelligence from locals, etc. Wouldn't it be more efficient to let the Special Police Commandos of the Iraqi Interior Ministry take care of this sort of thing? By the way, no one seems to be calling themselves "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" any more on the jihadi bulletin boards. The main fundamentalist vigilante group is the "Islamic State of Iraq."
And then there is the problem that the Iraqis are demanding veto power over US operations in Iraq, a demand that will only grow with time. If they don't concur that a Sunni group is terrorists, the Baghdad government could just keep the US unit cooling its heels. It is precisely over issues such as Iraqi demands that US troops get permission before they act that Karen DeYoung at WaPo says have definitively derailed negotiations between Bush and al-Maliki on a Status of Forces Agreement. Now the two leaders seem likely just initial some quick and dirty executive-to-executive understanding that may not last past Bush's last day in office next January. So the Iraqis are unlikely to want a special forces unit of the sort Senator Obama envisages running around Iraq at will.
(Continued here.)
Informed Comment
Barack Obama wants to get out of Iraq by summer 2010 but wants to send 10,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.
Obama's editorial is thoughtful and far more sensible than anything we are hearing from the White House or McCain, and I agree with most of it. But I have one quibble and one major critique. The quibble is that Obama talks about leaving a small American force in Iraq after most of the troops are withdrawn, to continue to fight "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia."
That suggestion is not plausible for several reasons. If there is only a small force in the country, who will rescue them if their helicopter gets shot down or they are ambushed and besieged? Then, how would a small American unit be any good against a terrorist organization operating in remote parts of Sunni Iraq? They don't know Arabic, can't hope for really good intelligence from locals, etc. Wouldn't it be more efficient to let the Special Police Commandos of the Iraqi Interior Ministry take care of this sort of thing? By the way, no one seems to be calling themselves "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" any more on the jihadi bulletin boards. The main fundamentalist vigilante group is the "Islamic State of Iraq."
And then there is the problem that the Iraqis are demanding veto power over US operations in Iraq, a demand that will only grow with time. If they don't concur that a Sunni group is terrorists, the Baghdad government could just keep the US unit cooling its heels. It is precisely over issues such as Iraqi demands that US troops get permission before they act that Karen DeYoung at WaPo says have definitively derailed negotiations between Bush and al-Maliki on a Status of Forces Agreement. Now the two leaders seem likely just initial some quick and dirty executive-to-executive understanding that may not last past Bush's last day in office next January. So the Iraqis are unlikely to want a special forces unit of the sort Senator Obama envisages running around Iraq at will.
(Continued here.)
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