MILITARY QUESTIONING POLITICAL MOVES IN IRAQ

Decapitating a double-​​headed insur­gency in Iraq is the easy part. It’s what comes next the polit­i­cal process that’s hard, cur­rent and for­mer mil­i­tary offi­cers are say­ing.
“With less than three months before the American-​​led occu­pa­tion force hands sov­er­eignty to an Iraqi civil­ian gov­ern­ment, the process for a polit­i­cal tran­si­tion remains unclear,” the New York Times notes. “There are no firm plans yet for who the lead­ers will be on the trans­fer date of June 30.“
“We can beat these guys, and we’re prov­ing our resolve,” one offi­cer tells the paper. “But unless the polit­i­cal side keeps up, we’ll have to do it again after July 1 and maybe in September and again next year and again and again.“
A recently retired, 30-​​year-​​plus Marine Corps vet­eran one who saw action in Iraq, Vietnam, Somalia, and else­where tells Defense Tech a sim­i­lar story.
He’s con­fi­dent that, in Iraq, “the jihadists don’t own the bat­tle­field, we do.“
But he’s mys­ti­fied about what comes after the fight.

What is the end state? That was never made clear to me dur­ing the war and I’m not sure now. For exam­ple, dur­ing the first Gulf War we all under­stood that our end state was to lib­er­ate Kuwait…
I can­not tell you what it is sup­posed to look like in this case, and yes, I don’t think we can expect any help from our NATO or UN “part­ners” either for the same rea­son. You’re not the only one who is con­fused. There [are] a lot of us.

April 12th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.