"Stay the Course" ... No Way!!!

Over at the UPC, Shamanic raises a serious issue for liberals and all others serious about the Iraq war.

None of the options are good - and setting aside politics - what is the best approach for America.

The way I see it, there are basically three options: (1) stay the course; (2) bring the troops home; or (3) dramatically change our policy by increasing our commitment in Iraq.

Shamanis favors the first course of action and I think that's the worst course of action. Obviously, this is an issue that will be much discussed over the coming months and which I plan to develop more fully through this discussion. For now, here are my initial thoughts as posted in the UPC comments section:

“Stay the Course” … I couldn’t disagree with you more.

The current course has been completely disastorous and will remain so. It is based on a misconception that we are going to be able to train integrated Iraqi Security forces that will “shortly” relieve our military of providing the little security that currently exists. In fact, as I posted about here, the training of Iraqi forces is going horribly. There is no integrated Iraqi security force even close to being on the horizon. In the meantime, the sectarian groups are consolidating their power by building up their militias and strengthing their grip over particular geographic areas through maltreatment of other ethnicities within the area of which control is sought (e.g. the Kurds extra judicial kidnappings and torture of Arabs from Kirkuk).

The two other choices are to get out now or to make a dramatic change in policy and strategy. The first option carries a high risk of civil war but it forces the Iraqis to face up to these inevvitable sectarian divides immediately and takes away one impetus for the continuing violence - an American presence. We also no longer have the daily death toll of American soldiers who have been charged with the Sisyphean task of holding off the inevitable sectarian discord.

The second choice would have to begin, as PSoTD notes, with the canning of Rumsfeld. In my view the dramatic strategic changes would require a dramatic increase in troop strength, a demand that the sectarian militias be ended and that those troops be melded into an integrated force, and end to the exclusion of the entire foreign community in the contracts of rebuilding Iraq with the reciprocal committment that those countries participate in an international security effort inside Iraq. This option would entail hundreds of billions more of the U.S. taxpayers money and a true “generational committment” militarily. We may then get to a fully free, democratic Iraq that respects minority rights and abhors extra judicial sectarian activities.

Unfortunately, I honestly don’t think the will exists, either in America or internationally, for this third option. Maybe we threaten the pull-out option in an attempt to get Iraqis and the international community to get on board the third. If that were to fail, I say go with the pull-out as its the best of all the horrible options.