U.S. Troops to Leave Iraq Weeks Ahead of Schedule

After President Obama announced at the end of last month that the U.S. troops in Iraq would be pulled out by the end of the year, the administration is now speeding up the complete withdrawal of approximately 40 000 troops by early December this year. This announcement was met by strong disagreement in the ranks of the Republicans. They fear that the pulling out of the US forces at this point would leave the country prey to Iran and give Al Qaeda a chance of resurgence.

Senator John McCain, who ran against Obama in the 2008 elections, deeply criticized the President's decision to withdraw all US troops by December this year. He expressed his concern that the administration's commitment to the complete withdrawal of US forces from Iraq may have played a crucial role in accelerating the process. However, one of the key issues the US had to face was the refusal of the Iraqi government to grant judicial immunity in case to any remaining US troops.

Nevertheless, Republicans' concern about spreading Iranian influence within Iraq may not be that implausible. Iranian military and political power in the country is now further enhanced by its growing soft power. According to Al Arabiya, cheap goods produced in Iran have flooded the Iraqi markets, while Iranian companies have invested billions of dollars in construction projects throughout the country, including the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala.

In comparison, the Democrats perceive this decision as a relief on the US economy. While a war is always costly both financially and in terms of humanties casualties, sustaining it in a period of economic recession risks the stability of the whole country.

Yet, as the US prepares to pull out its troops, both American and Iraqi analysts are expressing fear of a new surge of Al Qaeda offshoot in the country. With the death of Osama bin Laden, the organization is seeking to assert more power and strengthen its position with its allies. Senior Iraqi analysts are concerned that ties between Al Qaeda and members of the former ruling Baath party may start to reform once the American troops withdraw.

Still it is worth noting that in any circumstances the withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq effectively puts and end to an eight-year war that cost the lives of more than 100 000 civilians and 4000 troops.

Goodye America

So the USA is to pull out of Iraq's cities. I bet that doesn't mean they pull down the wall around that squalid testimony to fear they call the Green Zone. Ah well.

Blair troubled daily by Iraq toll

As well he might be - but with provincial elections just 24 hours away perhaps we will learn at last that Iraq can do better without us:

The former Prime Minister insisted he was not haunted by the decision. But he added: "I reflect on it, and am troubled by it, and feel a great sense of responsibility for it."
Mr Blair told The Times: "The most difficult thing in any set of circumstances is the sense of responsibility for people who have given their lives and fallen - the soldiers and the civilians.
"If I did not feel that, there really would be something wrong with me, and there is not a single day of my life when I do not reflect upon it... many times. And that's as it should be.
"On the other hand, you have to take the decision and I look at the Middle East now and I think, well, if Saddam and his two sons were still running Iraq how many other people would have died and would the region be more stable?"
In total there have been 4,551 coalition deaths - 178 of them British service personnel - as well as civilian casualties estimated at anywhere up to a million.

Iraq better? With three wars going on?

Patrick Cockburn
The Independent

It was gratifying to read that David Cameron has taken my book Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq with him as one of a number of works on current affairs to peruse during his holiday in Cornwall.

It was especially encouraging to learn that Mr Cameron wanted to know more about Iraq at a moment when many are under the quite false impression that the crisis there is at last drawing to a close. "Is it better? Is the surge working?" people keep asking me and in a certain sense, it is "better", but only compared to the bloodbath of 2006-7. American military casualties may be down, but 851 Iraqi civilians and security personnel were killed last month.

As for "the surge", the extra 30,000 US troops sent last year, it is curious that, despite claims for its great success, more American troops are needed to hold the line in Iraq today than before the surge began.

I was asked to write a book on the anti-American Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr by Scribner in New York in the late summer of 2006. After thinking the idea over carefully I turned it down on the grounds that it was simply too dangerous.

But, on reflection, I became more and more attracted by the idea. There have been many books on Iraq since the US invaded and overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, but most are about what Americans did in Iraq. Iraqis appear sporadically and often only as bit players. Yet, if there is one lesson I would like Mr Cameron to learn, it is that the US does not control the political weather in Iraq.

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Winning an asymmetric war

Spectator Magazine

The belief that asymmetric warfare, in which conventional armies are forced to fight ostensibly weaker terrorists who don’t fight by the rules, can only be won by political rather than military means and that therefore states must talk to terrorists, currently commands enormous political support in the west and is to a large extent responsible for the mood of defeatism and appeasement that currently grips its elites. All the more bracing, therefore, to read this fine analysis by Maj-Gen Yaakov Amidror of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which magisterially refutes this counsel of despair. An asymmetric war is certainly winnable against terrorist insurgents, he says, provided certain principles are followed. Unfortunately, this is far from the case at present, not least in Israel, but that’s another matter. Amidror lays down six basic conditions for victory of which the first is:

A political decision to defeat terrorism, stated explicitly and clearly to the security forces, and the willingness to bear the political cost of an offensive.Victory, however, has to be reconceptualised as ‘sufficient victory’ which requires us to rethink our idea of surrender ceremonies, parades and ‘mission accomplished’ declarations. Instead, ‘sufficient victory’ involves a tapering-off of violence to a level with which people can live:

As such, terror is not completely destroyed but is contained at a minimal level, with constant investment of energy in order to prevent its eruption…Amidror dismisses with contumely (and numerous examples) the assumption that terrorism can never be defeated by military means but only by changing the other side’s attitudes (the driving idea of ‘peace processes’). On the contrary, he says, it can only be defeated by military means:

Success on the battlefield led to the destruction of Communist terror’s capability in Greece without a change in anyone’s cognizance. The same applies to the present situation in the West Bank. The current tranquillity was achieved not because someone changed his cognition about the other side, but because the IDF and the Israel Security Agency almost completely liquidated the terror organizations’ capacity for action.

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