Johns Hopkins Professor Eliot A. Cohen and Reagan-era Defense official Bing West have
jointly written an article that offers a prescription for success in Iraq so difficult to achieve as to imply the Bush-led effort is doomed:
President Bush . . . can opt for an offensive, nonsectarian strategy. Its core operational concepts must be neutralizing criminals -- which include the Sunni insurgents, the Shiite death squads and the criminal gangs -- by imprisonment, deterrence, or death; and constructing Iraqi security institutions [free] of sectarian taint.
Iraq is now a police war and we need to treat it as such. . .Our weakest links are leaving the Mahdi Army off-limits, not selecting [our own] Iraqi security leaders and refusing to arrest and incarcerate the criminals (insurgents, death squads and thugs). If the president's new strategy does not aggressively rectify these three defects, then surging more American troops will buy time but not alter a war we are losing because we are not winning.
Johns Hopkins Professor Eliot A. Cohen and Reagan-era Defense official Bing West have jointly written an article that offers a prescription for success in Iraq so difficult to achieve as to imply the Bush-led effort is doomed:
1 comment:
The problem is precisely that two experienced, hard-headed realists, who still believe the US can achieve the objective in Iraq, also believe that this will be extremely difficult to do. The questions, then, are whether the Bush administration has the political will to tell it straight to the American people, and if their representatives in the Democrat-controlled Congress are willing to give it a try (however grudgingly). If one or both conditions are not fulfilled, then your implied conclusion -- that the Bush-led effort is doomed -- will be correct.
RBaker
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