A November 28 missive from the Washington Post:
The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military’s mission in Anbar province.
It seems to me that when the U.S. Marine Corps openly admits they’ve found a beach they shouldn’t have landed on, something’s going seriously wrong. Some are suggesting that the U.S. military pull its troops from al-Anbar Province entirely, abandoning it to the Sunnis and their al-Qaeda in Iraq supporters. At lease 90 U.S. soldiers have died in the province since the first of September.
In related news, Wednesday’s “summit” between President Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki devolved into a three-ring circus. Despite repeated denials from both delegations, the summit prompted more questions about U.S.-Iraqi relations than it answered. The most notable event on Wednesday was the “leak” of a Stephen Hadley memorandum critical of al-Maliki. A humiliated al-Maliki subsequently refused to attend a scheduled meeting with Bush and Jordanian King Abdullah, prompting rumors that the president had been “snubbed”. The summit ended with a lukewarm agreement to speed up the process of “bolstering” Iraqi security forces so the U.S. military can “get the hell out of Dodge”.
Following yesterday morning’s more “conciliatory” meeting between Bush and al-Maliki, the President stated that there could be no possibility of a “graceful” withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq (whatever that means). Instead, he insisted that he’s “not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete”. (And I thought he was no longer the “stay the course” guy.) The way I see it, this means that the enhancement of Iraqi security capabilities will have to come at a (continued) grim cost to the U.S. forces assigned to train them.
Technorati Tags: U.S. military, al-Anbar Province, Sunnis, al-Qaeda in Iraq, President Bush, Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, U.S.-Iraqi relations, Stephen Hadley, memorandum, Jordan, King Abdullah, Iraqi security forces, Iraq
Loading ...
0 Responses to “Was al-Anbar the Wrong Beach?”