Monday, November 3, 2003
Fareed Zakaria warns against a too-quick Iraqification process. He has some excellent points, and the article is worth reading. Sadly, I doubt whether America has the staying-power to go the ideal path. That's just a sad fact of life. It's an imperfect world.
When we speak of sending “Iraqis” on raids into the Sunni Triangle, who would these soldiers be? Sunnis? They might not want to hunt down Baathists, or might easily be bought off. Shiites and Kurds? That would galvanize the Sunni populations in support of the guerrillas. If the goal is to stabilize Iraq, fomenting intragroup violence might not be the best path.
If the American footprint is reduced, it will not make the guerrillas stop fighting. (“Hey, Saddam, we’ve scared the Americans back into their compounds. Let’s ease up now and give them a break.”) On the contrary, the rebels will step up their attacks on the Iraqi Army and local politicians, whom they already accuse of being collaborators. Iraqification could easily produce more chaos, not less...
We won't be there forever, eventually the Iraqis will have to take over. Further, one of the big complaints has been that we don't understand the Iraqis as well as the Iraqis themselves do, so we should have involved them more. But it's true, an ill-trained, ill-prepared force is less than usefull. There's a balance in there somewhere, and hopefully Bremer, et al are finding it. I have my fingers crossed from a great distance.
