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| USA Today sez: Fix Iraq by arming (moderate) Sunnis |
| 2007-04-05 |
| Neither President Bush's surge of troops, nor the withdrawal deadline Congress is expected to send to him after the Easter recess, has any hope of stabilizing Iraq. So it is time to contemplate a more radical option: Switch our allegiance from that country's Shiite-controlled government to its moderate Sunni minority, on condition they help us wipe out Sunni extremists in Iraq, including al-Qaeda. This shift would not immediately stabilize Iraq, but it offers the only near-term path to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing a haven and claiming credit for a U.S. withdrawal. In the longer term, restoring an ethno-sectarian balance of power could lay the groundwork for eventual peace. The president's ongoing surge of roughly 30,000 combat forces cannot succeed because it provides too few troops to hold areas after we clear them of bad guys, who simply shift operations elsewhere until we move on. But a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops, as Democrats pushed through both houses of Congress, would backfire by increasing ethnic cleansing, boosting Iranian influence and elevating al-Qaeda's prestige. The third option, partition or federalism along ethno-sectarian lines, cannot satisfy Iraq's Sunnis, who have neither large oil fields nor faith that the Shiites and Kurds would share revenue. Because no option can stabilize Iraq quickly, we should refocus on our greatest achievable objective: preventing al-Qaeda from establishing a haven. This danger arises because Iraq's moderate Sunnis have allied with their extremist Sunni rivals. Why? They're trying to fend off domination and ethnic cleansing by the majority Shiites, who control Iraq's government, army and militias. Indeed, the U.S. strategy of bolstering and training Iraq's Shiite-controlled army drives Sunni moderates into extremist hands. The only way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq is to switch our primary allegiance to Iraq's moderate Sunnis. The prospect of this dramatic shift in U.S. strategy raises several questions, including most fundamentally: Can we identify the moderates? Fortunately, two ready pools are available. First are the Sunni tribes the United States has attempted to recruit with little success. Until now, our offers have been too feeble, but serious military aid could do the trick. The second source of recruits is Saddam's secular Sunni-led party, which was antithetical to al-Qaeda. Admittedly, some former Baathists are attacking U.S. forces and coordinating with Sunni extremists because they view our presence as an obstacle to their return to power, but this could change quickly if we offered to support these former enemies. There is a danger, of course, in arming Sunni moderates because the weapons could end up in the hands of extremists. That's why implementation would be crucial. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the United States outsourced the arming of mujahedin rebels to Pakistan's intelligence agency, which favored the most extreme Sunni rebels and thereby gave rise to al-Qaeda. To avoid replicating this error, we should strive for monopoly control over weapons delivery and training of Iraq's Sunnis, and demand cooperation from Saudi Arabia. The most delicate problem would be managing our existing alliance with Iraq's Shiite-led government. In an ideal world, even as we armed the Sunni moderates to stamp out al-Qaeda, we could continue working with Iraq's Shiites to marginalize their militias, enabling the quick stabilization of Iraq under a moderate inter-sectarian government. But that scenario is improbable. More likely, the moderate Sunnis would use our military aid not merely to quash al-Qaeda but to try to reverse recent ethnic cleansing. Shiite and Kurd militias would retaliate in kind. Iraq's government, dependent on support from militia leaders, including Muqtada al-Sadr, would not dare confront them. So the United States would be compelled to reduce military assistance to the government. The good news is that al-Qaeda would be marginalized, but at least initially, Iraq's civil war would escalate. U.S. forces, needlessly in harm's way, would have to be withdrawn. The exception would be a limited number of special operations troops to arm, train and monitor the moderate Sunni forces, and coordinate airstrikes on extremists, as they did with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance in 2001. Peace would become possible only much later, after our aid bolstered the Sunni moderates and produced an ethno-sectarian balance of power, leading to a protracted stalemate that convinced each side victory was impossible. Americans will be dissatisfied by this strategy because it cannot stabilize Iraq quickly. But no option can accomplish that cherished objective, and at least this plan could stamp out al-Qaeda in Iraq while permitting withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops. Unfortunately, in this war, that is the closest we can come to victory. Alan J. Kuperman is assistant professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, and co-editor of Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention |
| Posted by:Seafarious |
| #10 Alan is a Krapman. Besides, with the Anbar tribes slugging it out with AQ, the so-called "moderate Sunnis" battle is being waged as this asshole prepared this non-sense. |
| Posted by: Captain America 2007-04-05 18:18 |
| #9 Is this idiot allowed out without a minder? |
| Posted by: Mac 2007-04-05 17:38 |
| #8 The voice of the "realists" once again completely undeterred by reality. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-04-05 14:22 |
| #7 As I have written before, the solution is on-going: ethnic cleansing. Muslims do it in every country that they pollute. |
| Posted by: Sneaze 2007-04-05 13:20 |
| #6 Since every Iraqi is currently permitted one AK-47, unless we are planning to arm them with RPGs or tanks I don't see what more we could do in this regard. |
| Posted by: DanNY 2007-04-05 12:21 |
| #5 Utter fantasy based on so many false premises I won't bother to go into them here. Good example of a poorly informed and poorly reasoned bit of Beltway-style academis b.s. (even though the guy's in Texas). AQI is about to "establish a haven"? Huh? Of all the preposterously erroneous nonsense I've been forced to hear and read over the last few years, one of my favorites was how Iraq had become a "haven" for AQ. I see. The place on Earth with the highest concentration of US military (and intel) assets deployed for action, with the elbow room provided by the backing of the sovereign government, in a war zone, is a "haven" for our enemies? Right. Not that we've neccessarily made full use of this permissive environment, but the point is that Iraq is as far from a "haven" for AQ as you can find on the planet. But everyone here already understood that. |
| Posted by: Verlaine 2007-04-05 11:31 |
| #4 Gorb, that's easy. The moderates are the ones that supported Saddam. Hell, isn't that what the Dems have been telling us for years? Saddam was a secular moderate that we should have left in place? A move like this would be an even worse betrayal than Vietnam. We already betrayed the Shia in Iraq once after GW I. Now this despicable troll wants to do so again. I think I need to start laying in the guns and ammo. 8^( |
| Posted by: AlanC 2007-04-05 08:33 |
| #3 OK, who's going to decide who's moderate? |
| Posted by: gorb 2007-04-05 03:10 |
| #2 Iraqis already have a national army. They could create village militias, but there is no guarantee that villages would not defect to the terrorists, as happened in Lebanon in 1983. |
| Posted by: Sneaze 2007-04-05 01:44 |
| #1 RIAN > RUSSIA > Conflict near Russia's border in Central Asia is UNACCEPTABLE to Russia; REGNUM.RU > Iff ISRAEL is involved in any US strike on Iran, IRAN WILL ATTACK ISRAEL; + USA is considering USAGE OF TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS in possible strikes agz Iranian targets. As per REGNUM's first article, IRAN has already made it clear that ANY ATTACK AGZ IT BY THE USA = US-LED COALITION MAY BE CONSIDERED A STRIKE BY ISRAEL IOW, Iran may attack Israel whether Israel participates in any US attack or not. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-04-05 01:03 |