Troop surge in Iraq will prove counterproductive
GHULAM ASGHAR KHAN
Thursday, JUNE 07, 2007
Last month, President George W Bush said publicly what his top aides had been discussing privately for weeks. It was a talk about a transition to a different configuration after the recent troop-surge in Iraq.
America is a country known for plans A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 and so on depending upon the strategic failures at the global levels. When pressed if he was talking about plan-B of the post-surge strategy, he referred to the Baker-Hamilton Report (BHR) whose authors were earlier ridiculed by the New York Post as “surrender monkeys.”
The same BH plan now seems to be official White House policy. The plan briefly envisaged the training of Iraqi army, US Special Forces missions against al-Qaeda, and a diplomatic opening to Iran that would ultimately facilitate the reduction of US forces in Iraq. The big question is whether the BHR could regain the bipartisan ground on which the Iraq Study Group framed its recommendations last December.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told The Financial Times that though he favoured a plan for eventual withdrawal of US troops, immediate pulling out would lead to chaos and civil war. Syrian foreign minister Moallem expressed similar views.
The trouble with Bush is that he knows little, but he thinks that he knows everything, and that has unfortunately been the hallmark of his political career. Had the BHR been taken seriously when it was submitted, the Bush administration would not have faced the dilemma, because now a vast majority of the Americans is for an immediate withdrawal.
Against all these deliberations the US Defence Department notified on May 8, 2007 that a big posse of 35,000 soldiers would be sent to Iraq for the upcoming round of deployments with a view to protracting the surge for quite sometime. The evolution of surge into an escalation is uncalled for and predictably fatal for the US troops in Iraq.
When Bush announced this surge in January, many saw it as a bold, and perhaps the last attempt to snatch the initiative in Iraq. In a bid to control a dismal situation, Bush put himself on the same escalation treadmill as President Johnson had done during the Vietnam War. Their logic is the same; although the US occupation of an alien country had brought only a deepening conflict with absolutely no prospect of success.
As the Iraq war goes on with no end in sight, there are frequent comparisons with the Vietnam war that ended in 1975 with the victory of the Vietnamese and humiliating retreat of the Americans, lifted by helicopters from the roof of US embassy in Saigon.
The new conventional wisdom is that Bush, however grudgingly, has now accepted key recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG); there is a growing conviction that continued deployment of US troops at current levels through 2008 is no longer politically viable. Perhaps, Washington does not realise that the downfall of “civilised” states tends to come not from direct assaults of foes, but from internal decay combined with the consequences of exhaustion in long drawn wars.
While the escalation in Iraq might have its internal logic, the external reality is that it is counterproductive. Since the implementation of the surge plan, the US forces have not been able to quell the attacks on US as well as the coalition forces, nor has it eliminated the sectarian divisions.
In fact, the move now threatens the US national security and is a contributory factor in the US failure in Iraq. The military readiness for US ground forces is at an all time low; so low that serious questions have been raised about the US ability to conduct any other ground operations beyond those to which they now are already committed. Even with US Secretary Defence Robert Gates extension of deployments to 15 months, the current deployment’s timeline cannot possibly be maintained.
Strategically, a troop increase is not necessarily a successful tactic to bring stability to Iraq. During the first three months of the surge there has been a substantial increase in the number of attacks against the US troops. The suicide attacks and other violence have increased. The month of May saw the death of 127 American soldiers, the third highest monthly total since the war began in March 2003. The only higher casualty months were April and November when 135 and 137 were killed in Fallujah. There are no hopeful signs in the Month of June, when 16 soldiers fell in the first 3 days.
Despite that, Bush administration officials maintained this week that the US presence in Iraq could last decades, drawing an analogy with South Korea where the US troops have been stationed for more than half a century.
Never has an administration reached for its dictionaries more regularly to redefine reality to its own benefit. Speaking at a press briefing on Wednesday, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that President Bush believed that the situation in Iraq and the larger war on terror were going ‘to take a long time’ and that a long-term US presence in Iraq would be required, even after the Iraqis took over the major security functions. Snow added that the president thinks the US shall have to maintain an “over-the-horizon” support role to react quickly to major challenges and crisis in the region.
White House has often denied existence of any plan-B for Iraq, but it turned out that Pentagon has thought about what to do if plan-A, the ‘surge’ didn’t work. Plan-B would involve retaining a series of military bases around Iraq with some 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers. It would have them stay for decades under the excuse that they would train Iraqi troops and deter neighbouring countries like Iran and Turkey from sending their armies into the country.
This hardly is a new idea. For the last many years, the neocons have advocated the establishment of American bases in Iraq to police the region and make the area safe for Israel. Apparently, the US administration jumped into the Iraqi quicksand with a dual purpose, securing Israel and controlling the vast oil wealth in the Middle East. Presently, the US has major military installations in Saudi Arabia that have generated considerable opposition among the Saudis and in the rest of the Arab world.
This implies that, if the US maintains a strong military presence in Muslim countries, it would continue to generate hatred and terrorism that have already devoured the world peace. Permanent or long term bases in Iraq will only bring more fire and the brimstone to the world. The only way to avert the looming catastrophe is to leave the Middle East to the Middle Easterners.
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