It’s been the linchpin of the Bush war policy in Iraq: “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” By one count, White House officials have used the phrase publicly over 125 times, not including media interviews. It’s the key principle that will lead U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq.
Or rather, it used to be.
Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.
Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. “We are just adding another leg to our mission,” Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.
But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq.
So, we’re sending more U.S. troops, and extending their tours, while at the same time downplaying the very idea of training Iraqi troops to defend their own country. “The goal was to put the Iraqis in charge,” said Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The problem is we didn’t know how to do it.”
As Swopa concluded, “‘As the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down’ now joins the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner and ‘Plan for Victory’ signs on the rhetorical junkpile.”
And what are we left with? Plans A through E failed, so now attention turns to Plan F, which is basically having more U.S. troops fight the insurgency without help from an ineffective Iraqi security force.
Philip Carter explains in Slate why this new strategy will meet the same fate as the first five.
[W]e’ve seen at least five major strategies implemented in Iraq, and all have failed, creating a legacy of bad blood that undermines our continuing efforts. Much of this failure owes to the naive belief that we can impose our will on the Iraqi people through our strategies, or win their support with a combination of security and reconstruction.
Gen. Petraeus and his brain trust have devised the best possible Plan F, given the resources available to the Pentagon and declining patience for the war at home. But the Achilles heel of this latest effort is the Maliki government. It is becoming increasingly clear to all in Baghdad that its interests—seeking power and treasure for its Shiite backers—diverge sharply from those of the U.S.-led coalition. Even if Gen. Petraeus’ plan succeeds on the streets of the city, it will fail in the gilded palaces of the Green Zone. Maliki and his supporters desire no rapprochement with the Sunnis and no meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Indeed, Maliki can barely hold his own governing coalition together, as evidenced by the Sadr bloc’s resignation from the government this week and the fighting in Basra over oil and power.
Plan F will fail if (or when) the Maliki government fails, even if it improves security. At that point, we will have run out of options, having tried every conceivable strategy for Iraq. It will then be time for Plan G: Get out.
As Kevin Drum put it, “This is a ‘slow bleed.'”