"Twelve Republican Senators demanded hearings on the administration’s ending of negotiations with the Iraqis — for now at least — on the continuation of American training and on counterterrorism efforts in Iraq.
“As you know, the complete withdrawal of our forces from Iraq is likely to be viewed as a strategic victory by our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime,” the senators wrote Wednesday in a letter to the chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee" NY Times
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Surely these senators know better than this. The Bush Administration negotiated the agreement under which the Maliki government has effectively demanded complete American withdrawal. Obama did not end negotiations for modification of that agreement. The Iraqis did that because Maliki's coalition includes several groups that want us out. That being the case, the fact that the non-Kurdish population wants an end to occupation was decisive. What was Obama to do in that context? Should he have staged another "surge" to satisfy those who never understood that we had not conquered Iraq and could not keep it?
Social Security is 46 bilion dollars in the red this year in the US. That is a small amount of money in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. The US needs to re-structure its forces to deal with real threats rather than the shiboleths which many generals and admirals are fond of because they maintain traditional types of forces within which generations of people like me have prospered. In my view, we need airforces, but maybe a lot less in the way of manned aircraft. We need naval forces to hold the seas open for us and keep trade moving. We need SOF forces to pursue irregular enemies on the direct action side and on the SF side to work with the locals in ways that worked well in Libya.
What we do not need are ground forces as big as the ones we have now. Both the Army and Marine Corps should be restructured and made smaller in their armor, infantry and artillery forces. These should not be done away with but they should be smaller, less expensive and tailored to a a foreign policy that is less clearly imperial with all this talk of "exceptionalism," etc.
A tripwire in Kuwait? I have argued for that since the First Gulf War. IMO something like a composite division of ground troops and an air wing would probably be appropriate. pl
