A lot of people forget this, but in 2005, the Center for American Progress was way ahead of the curve on shaping a responsible Iraq policy. They mapped out something called “Strategic Redeployment,” through which U.S. forces would begin a phased withdrawal, keeping forces on the periphery, while redirecting the focus of a smaller special-operations force, emphasizing counter-terrorism operations.
In other words, two years ago, CAP came up with an idea that was controversial at the time, but has since “achieved the status of conventional wisdom in mid-2007.” Not bad.
But while the political world plays catch-up with CAP, the progressive think tank is actually moving beyond its original policy prescription, which was viable in 2005, but less so now. Today, the Center for American Progress unveiled a new policy: “Strategic Reset,” which would withdraw practically all U.S. troops within one year, leave almost no residual force, and most importantly, “phase out its training of Iraq’s national security forces and place strict limits on further arming and equipping Iraq’s forces.”
Training security forces has been one of the main tenets of President Bush’s Iraq strategy…. But Strategic Reset charts a new course, arguing that this approach is actually contributing to the violence in Iraq:
First, the United States is arming up different sides in multiple civil wars that could turn even more vicious in the coming years. Second (and more important to America’s strategic interests) billions of dollars of U.S. military assistance is going to some of the closest allies of America’s greatest rival in the Middle East — Iran. The Shi’a-dominated Iraqi national army and security forces could quite quickly turn their weapons against American troops and allies in the region. […]
Training and skill-building are not crucial for Iraq’s security forces. In fact many of them have more training than hundreds of U.S. soldiers being deployed as part of this surge. Rather, the Iraqi forces’ problems are related to motivation and allegiance. In the past three years, the size of Iraq’s security forces and the levels of violence have both grown steadily, even as the U.S. troop presence remained constant.
I have little doubt that this will generate howls on the right — what about “when they stand up, we’ll stand down” — but “Strategic Reset” gets it right; the training of Iraqi security forces is a failed approach.
Providing the fuel for a civil war doesn’t serve anyone’s interests.
Spending billions to arm Iraq’s security forces without political consensus among Iraq’s leaders carries significant risks — the largest of which is arming faction-ridden national Iraqi units before a unified national government exists that these armed forces will loyally support. Training and equipping Iraqi security forces risks making Iraq’s civil war even bloodier and more vicious than it already is today. It also increases the dangers that these weapons will one day be turned against the United States and its allies in the region.
Matthew Yglesias adds:
The training concept has become, in my view, a kind of psychological crutch for US elites who don’t want to face their own basic inability to improve things. The idea that you could help resolve an ongoing multifaceted conflict by introducing greater quantities of lethal weaponry and better-trained fighters is absurd on its face. At best, we’re in the position of arming several sides in a multi-pronged civil war in the vague hope that whoever prevails won’t notice we were also arming their adversaries and be loyal to us down the road, which seems like a really, really, really stupid bet.
And what of the war supporters’ favorite argument: fighting al Qaeda? As the CAP report explains, smaller numbers of Marines and Special Forces would mount counter-terrorism operations over the next year, and then let Sunni tribes pick up the slack (which U.S. forces have already started to let the tribes do).
Case in point: in early May 2007, Ayman Zawahiri — Al Qaeda’s No. 2 — actually criticized efforts by the U.S. Congress to withdraw American troops from Iraq, saying a bill to set a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would “deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in an historic trap.” Today, Iraq is a quagmire for the United States; leaving Iraq will make it Al Qaeda’s quagmire.
It’s difficult to summarize a detailed war policy in a blog post, so I hope readers will take the time to read the whole report. It’s not only excellent, it should reshape the Democratic approach to Iraq.
Pay special attention to how (whether) Democratic presidential candidates respond, and whether they adapt their own approaches to the war as a result. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest “Strategic Reset” is a game-changer.