Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t… So Do it Properly
Listening to: Only This Moment - Röyksopp
Wesley Clark in the Washington
Post
In the old, familiar fashion, mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq have mobilized increasing
public doubts about the war. More than half the American people now believe that the
invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They’re right. But it would also be a mistake to pull
out now, or to start pulling out or to set a date certain for pulling out. Instead
we need a strategy to create a stable, democratizing and peaceful state in Iraq –
a strategy the administration has failed to develop and articulate.From the outset of the U.S. post-invasion efforts, we needed a three-pronged strategy:
diplomatic, political and military. Iraq sits geographically on the fault line between
Shiite and Sunni Islam; for the mission to succeed we will have to be the catalyst
for regional cooperation, not regional conflict.Unfortunately, the administration didn’t see the need for a diplomatic track, and
its scattershot diplomacy in the region — threats, grandiose pronouncements and truncated
communications — has been ill-advised and counterproductive. The U.S. diplomatic
failure has magnified the difficulties facing the political and military elements
of strategy by contributing to the increasing infiltration of jihadists and the surprising
resiliency of the insurgency.
