Patience has paid off in South Korea. It could work in Iraq, too if we let it.
President Bush declared in 2003, “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. A bit prematurely, it turned out. President Obama declared Iraq “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” in 2011 as he pulled American troops out of Iraq without a status of forces agreement. A bit prematurely, it turned out.
It’s an ugly world out there — too ugly to fit into nice, preconceived, American notions about how long nasty people can undermine American interests, about how long wars should take. The US has had thousands of troops in South Korea for some 70 years. They’ve done an admirable job of defending American interests (though unable, alas, to stop North Korean genocide).
So now it turns out that the nastiest of the nasty have taken over some one-third of Iraq, threatening to destroy Iraq as we know it, to form a radical Islamic state out of Western Syria and Eastern Iraq, and to destabilize the entire region — Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE.
That would be a direct threat to the security and energy interests of the US. We need to rethink our position in Iraq for our own interests. The US and the Iraqi government, however inadequate it has been, share a common enemy.
It is necessary for the US to resummon its will and its leadership — to implement the precise strategy outlined by Secretary of Defense Hagel when he announced a radical cut in American armed forces a number of months ago. He said that the US must be prepared for a new kind of war, for swift deployments, for special operations — precisely what is needed in Iraq today.
Without recommitting combat troops in Iraq, the US needs to, and can: (a) restore Iraq’s intelligence services so that its superior forces can locate and defeat the astonishing smaller number of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) fighters; (b) supply planners and advisers, again to streamline and give potency to Iraq’s superior forces; (c) provide air power to disrupt ISIS supply lines, communications and troop movements. Iraq has no air force. ISIS now operates with impunity — and so could our air power.
We have been blinded by terminology. “Boots on the ground” does not necessarily connote combat troops. The threefold military assistance outlined above meets Sec. Hagel’s vision of the new US military — and is adequate to stop, if not necessarily roll back, ISIS.
We did nothing in Syria in March, 2011. We left Iraq unilaterally. Now, it is the eleventh hour, still time to turn the tide — if we have the will. If not, the consequences for US security will be dire.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
