Confronting Iran

Advocates of Bush Administration policy in the Persian Gulf - throughout Washington and on the campaign trail - fail to point out the thorough strategic success that policy has brought to Iran. Moreover, politicians taunting with outbursts like "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" will only deepen the problems and America's decline in the region. There are far more enlightened and effective ways to deal with the issues. Straus Military Project adviser Col. Douglas Macgregor explains.

These commentaries were released by UPI in a two part series. They can be found at the following links and below:

http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Outside_View_Iraq_realities_Part_1_999.html

http://www.upi.com/Security_Industry/2008/06/30/Outside_View_Iraq_realities_--_Part_2/UPI-15381214841553/
Outside View: Iraq realities -- Part 1

Today, the strategic outcome of that policy is no longer in doubt. Americans are spending $3 billion a week for the privilege of stationing 160,000 troops and about as many contractors on Iraqi soil. Yet, it is Iran, not the United States, that is shaping Iraq's destiny.
by Douglas Macgregor
Washington (UPI) Jun 27, 2008

In his famous work "The Peloponnesian Wars," written more than 2,000 years ago, the classical Greek historian Thucydides argued that states go to war for one or all of three reasons. States fight against threats. States fight for profit. Or, states fight for honor.

Outside View: Iraq realities -- Part 2
By DOUGLAS MACGREGOR, UPI Outside View Commentator
Published: June 30, 2008 at 11:59 AM


WASHINGTON, June 30 (UPI) -- The suppression of violence and the reduction in U.S. casualties in Iraq over the past year and a half was not U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker's or U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus' accomplishment. It was achieved by the Islamic Republic of Iran.



Even worse, the much celebrated "cash for cooperation policy" implemented by Petraeus in the spring of 2007, which currently pays 90,000 of Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgents nearly $300 million a year not to shoot at U.S. forces, is simply the latest chapter in a sad history of reinforcing Iranian strategic dominance by hardening the division of Arab Iraq into Sunni and Shiite states.

It takes little imagination to see that Petraeus and Crocker are presiding over the division of Iraq into a small, impoverished Sunni area, a large, potentially oil-rich Kurdistan and an equally oil-rich Shiite-dominated state encompassing nine of Iraq's largest provinces. This is a strategic outcome that will dramatically extend Iran's influence inside Iraq and across the Middle East.

The danger, of course, is that the Bush administration might begin a new war to reverse Iranian strategic influence in Iraq -- influence that our generals and political leaders unwittingly aided and supported. But this would be pointless. Nothing helps suppress the Iranian theocracy's very real internal opposition as does the present U.S. policy of regime overthrow, isolation, demonization and confrontation.

A wiser U.S. policy demands an understanding of popular dissatisfaction inside Iran with the terrible mismanagement of Iran's energy sector and economy. This understanding should lead to constructive diplomatic engagement, with the goal of extracting concessions the United States needs.

Of course, engagement must also involve prospects for economic cooperation, a carefully programmed end to sanctions, as well as technical assistance for, and joint ventures with, Iran's ailing energy sector. Negotiating with an Iranian leadership that has one foot in the seminary and the other in the bazaar will not be easy, but it is more likely to succeed than brute force.

Whether the United States likes it or not, thanks to culture and history, other than Turkey, Iran is the only state in the region with the tradition, confidence, assertiveness and sense of destiny to be a major player in the Middle East. Meanwhile, America should end the travesty of securing Iraq for Iran and swiftly withdraw its troops, remembering that in the absence of a U.S. military presence in Iraq, Iran will quickly supplant the United States as the Arabs' pre-eminent strategic concern.

--

(Douglas Macgregor is a former U.S. Army colonel and a decorated Gulf War combat veteran. He has authored three books on modern warfare and military reform. His latest is "Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights." He writes here for the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.)



Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
winslowwheeler@msn.com
1 301 791-2397 (office)
301 221-3897 (cell)
All three reasons were used to justify the United States' military intervention in Iraq. Of the three, however, only honor remained when it became obvious in the summer of 2003 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction was limited to restarting Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs if and when sanctions were lifted. What no one in the United States or Iraq knew then was just what it would take to satisfy America's honor.
Today, Americans have a better idea of how great that cost is going to be. U.S. President George W. Bush and his generals turned a limited military intervention to remove the unpopular leadership of a weak, incapable, organized crime state into a tragically destructive war of occupation waged against Iraq's Sunni Arab population.
In a long campaign that cost the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps 3,500 battle casualties, the generals applied the al-Qaida brand name to any Arab opposed to the U.S. military occupation -- killing, wounding or incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs, while driving an additional 3 million Arabs, most of whom are Sunni, out of Iraq.
Conditioned by the U.S. media to ignore Arab losses, for the first few years American public opinion did not constrain the president or his generals as they jointly pursued the destruction of Sunni Arab strength in Iraq without regard for the political consequences that their strategic myopia would produce -- namely, the expansion of Iranian regional influence and the establishment of the first Shiite Arab state in the Middle East since the 12th century.
Today, the strategic outcome of that policy is no longer in doubt. Americans are spending $3 billion a week for the privilege of stationing 160,000 troops and about as many contractors on Iraqi soil. Yet, it is Iran, not the United States, that is shaping Iraq's destiny.
For those Americans who are in denial as to Iran's pervasive and powerful influence in contemporary Iraq, they should consider that whenever cease-fire agreements have been brokered between Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government and the Shiite Arab nationalist Moqtada Sadr, they have never lasted.
Next: How to deal with Iran
(Douglas Macgregor is a former U.S. Army colonel and a decorated Gulf War combat veteran. He has authored three books on modern warfare and military reform. His latest is "Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights." He writes here for the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.)