Why US Intervention In Iraq Is “Doomed” To Failure

America’s  war with Iraq has been on since 1990. The US has spent trillions of dollars, and was involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. None of those efforts were a success by any stretch.

With that in mind, here are four possible “strategies” that US strategists are implementing for that country, which I predict will not “work as intended”. The intention was never for them to work though.

1. “Trainers” who train nobody

In May President Obama announced a change of course in Iraq. After failing at destroying the Islamic State, the administration will now send in hundreds more military personnel to set up a new training base at Taqaddum in Anbar Province; a base that will join the others in sitting there and not training very many people. After nine months of work, not a single trained Iraqi trooper has managed to make it into a battle.

This might sound like a good idea, but it has failed during the Iraq war, when the U.S. maintained an archipelago of 505 bases in the country. (It also failed in Afghanistan.)

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter asserted recently that the results have been less than expected. By this time, U.S. trainers were to have massed produced Iraqi soldiers, 24,000 of them. The actual number to date is claimed to be some 9,000 uninspiring men. (“The volunteers seemed to range in age from late teens to close to 60. They wore a mish-mash of uniforms and boots, while their marching during the ceremony was, shall we say, casual.”)

Here’s a stunning ratio: a US soldier in Iraq is backed up by at least two American contractors. Currently some 6,300 of them deployed. Trainers who are sent there will bring in additional contractors. Indeed, with all these American soldiers, and poorly armed old men are their only recruits… One wonders if these troops and “contractors” AKA “mercenaries” are gearing up for scenario 2:

2. Boots on the Ground

Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator John McCain is the loudest advocate of sending in U.S. troops. McCain, who witnessed the Vietnam War unfold should know better. Instead he asks for more boots. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, for example has often suggested that he would consider a full-scale re-invasion of Iraq as a viable solution. Similarly, General Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, urged the sending in of many boots.

Among the boots-on-the-ground crowd are also some former soldiers who fought in Iraq in the Bush years, lost friends, and suffered themselves. Blinking through the disillusion of it all, they prefer to believe that we actually won in Iraq (or should have, or would have, if only the Bush and Obama administrations hadn’t squandered the “victory”). Needed now, they claim, are more U.S. troops back on the ground to win the latest version of their war. Some are even volunteering as private citizens to continue the fight.

The more-troops option is so easy to dismiss it’s hardly worth another line: if over eight years of effort, 166,000 troops and the full weight of American military power couldn’t do the trick in Iraq, what could you possibly expect even fewer resources to accomplish? Nothing, or a worsened situation with the entire Muslim world turning on the US.

3. “Partnering” with Iran

The original Obama administration plan was to use Arab, not Iranian, forces as proxy infantry. The Saudis are natural allies, and both the US and SA have been complicit with “accidentally” creating the monster that is ISIS after all- by supporting “moderate” rebels that would accidentally turn into ISIS. However, the much-ballyhooed 60-nation pan-Arab coalition proved little more than a short-lived photo op. Few, if any, of their planes are in the air anymore, as they are wont to strike the very terrorists that they had armed (with US help) to unseat Assad, until Assad is gone. In Mosul, some 2,300 Humvees were abandoned to IS fighters in June 2014; more were left to them when Iraqi army forces suddenly fled Ramadi in May.

Washington has, of course, been in a Cold War-ish relationship with Iran since 1979 when the American-backed puppet the Shah fell and students took over the American Embassy in Tehran. In the 1980s, the U.S. aided Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, while in the years after the invasion of 2003 Iran effectively supported Iraqi Shiite militias against American forces occupying the country. Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, currently directing his country’s efforts in Iraq, was once one of the most wanted men on America’s kill list.

The fact is that Iran is the only force on the ground that has proven capable at stopping the advance of ISIS. The US has to at least pretend to work with them, lest they reveal that their real intention was to arm ISIS to destroy Syria and then Iran.

4. Arm the Kurds

The Kurds are a plucky bunch, willing to fight for their own security. Perfect cannon fodder for the US, at least until ISIS does its job and removes Assad; conservative websites and right-wing pundits constantly pump out propaganda about the Kurds: If only we gave them more weapons, they would kill more Islamic State bad guys just for us.

There is truth in all this. The Kurds have indeed done a good job of pushing IS militants out of swaths of northern Iraq and were happy for U.S. assistance in getting their Peshmerga fighters to the Turkish border when the locus of fighting was the city of Kobane. They remain thankful for the continuing air support the U.S. is providing their front-line troops and for the limited weapons Washington has already sent.

The Real Reason Nothing Is Going to Work

Everything is geared towards solely providing for U.S. aims. The Sunnis need a protector as they struggle for a political place, the Kurds want an independent homeland. The Iranians and Shiites want stability, or a peaceful situation where they remain in control.

For America’s “plan” to work, Sunni tribesmen in Iraq would have to fight Sunnis from the Islamic State in support of a Shiite government backed by Iran. The Kurds would have to fight for an Iraqi nation-state from which they wish to be independent. The Iranians and Assad are already fighting ISIS properly, but the US would not arm the forces that, even mainstream sources are forced to agree, it created ISIS to destroy to begin with.

It can’t work, because none of the players like each other very much. Though perhaps that’s not the intention.

A constant state of chaos in the region, with numerous factions that destroy each other rather than unite to create a larger force that would rival US regional allies, creates a persistent need for US arms. These will be paid for by these allies, or by the US tax payer, and sent to arm one faction (the Iraqis) or another (“moderate” Islamic radicals in Syria, and then the Radical Islamic radicals). It fills the coffers of the Military Industrial Complex regardless. This situation will persist until Americans are fed up, and solution 2 gets the go-ahead: a full-on American invasion that “nobody” saw coming.

This war will fail in the usual ways, fomenting greater chaos and birthing more terrorists from the deaths of innocents, but as with Iraq and Libya, it will succeed in the only way that matters: to unseat a dictator (Assad, if he’s still alive) who is not allied with US interests. And the American Boots On The Ground marches further towards its final goal in Iran.

There is a reason why the thought of arming the only faction that is completely intent on fighting ISIS never crosses the minds of US policy-makers, despite the fact that this might be the only solution that has a chance of success. And trust me, that reason has nothing to do with him being a dictator, or democracy, or freedom.

Source: Common Dreams

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This Article (Why US Intervention In Iraq Is “Doomed” To Failure) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.