PS: Bring Back Petraeus and His Team to Advise Our Middle East Policies

Submitted by GWK (United States), Sep 11, 2014 at 11:36

Sure things have changed a lot in iraq since we left, but after a disastrous first 3 years in Iraq (read Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (http://books.google.com/books/about/Imperial_Life_in_the_Emerald_City.html?id=Tz2LT0gL_pYC), which is a credible analysis of what happened those years), the Coalition ground forces in Iraq finally learned to win the locals over to fight Al Qaida in Anbar and the other provinces.

General Petraeus and his team understood that the locals needed to be won over by softer means, and to be convinced of the evils of the violent sectarian islamists. It was the only viable path to success. Unfortunately, when we left Iraq, the forces on the ground were again replaced by efete civilians who could not make the needed connections to the local populations. (Listen to The New York Times Baghdad bureau chief Tim Arango, who has been reporting from Iraq for five years and who has tracked the rise of Islamic State militants on Fresh Air: http://www.npr.org/2014/09/10/347391620/islamic-state-was-fueled-by-epic-american-failure-in-iraq-reporter-says.)

The administration needs to convene the experiences leaders for insights on how to avoid disaster in the Middle East. And they ought to move toward implementing a creation of a new Kurdish nation that is allied with the world's pluralistic-leaning nations.

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