A lot of reporting is being devoted to trying to figure out what the U.S. strategy in Iraq will be going forward. We discussed at length yesterday the report in The Guardian about the President’s “last big push.”
In an op-ed today in the LA Times, Laura Rozen outlines an internal Administration debate over whether U.S. policy in Iraq should tilt in favor of the Shiite majority:
A U.S. tilt toward the Shiites is a risky strategy, one that could further alienate Iraq’s Sunni neighbors and that could backfire by driving its Sunni population into common cause with foreign jihadists and Al Qaeda cells. But elements of the administration, including some members of the intelligence community, believe that such a tilt could lead to stability more quickly than the current policy of trying to police the ongoing sectarian conflict evenhandedly, with little success and at great cost.
. . .
To do so would be a reversal of Washington’s strategy over the last two years of trying to coax the Sunnis into the political process, an effort led by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. It also would discount some U.S. military commanders’ concerns that the Al Mahdi army, a Shiite militia loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, poses as great a threat to American interests as that presented by the Sunni insurgency centered in western Iraq’s Al Anbar province.
So what’s the logic behind the idea of “unleashing the Shiites”? It’s the path of least resistance, according to its supporters, and it could help accelerate one side actually winning Iraq’s sectarian conflict, thereby shortening the conflict, while reducing some of the critical security concerns driving Shiites to mobilize their own militias in the first place.
Laura has more at her blog.
There are other policy options on the table, but so far “the last big push” and “the tilt” are the two we’ve seen most publicly articulated.
Are the lame names for these strategies indicative of how poor the policy options are?
