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Anthony Cordesman on the folly of calling for military escalation without simultaneous political and economic escalation.
post by nick_hardy on 2007-01-06

And how does the United States live with the aftermath in Iraq? We can talk all we want about energy independence. But so far no one has made a dent in reducing a projected rate of increase in U.S. dependency. It’s all been price driven. We’re tied to a global economy, so energy exports to other countries are as critical to us as they are to them. And 60 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves are still in this long, narrow region. Can we get away with a withdrawal? It’s always possible. But that’s true of virtually any form of isolationism or withdrawal. There’s always the possibility it will work.
One thing he has to go far beyond is the so-called “surge” [an increase of U.S. troops for a short period] which has become one of the strangest debates probably in American national security history, because it is almost completely irrelevant. So many people who should know better have focused on it. If a “surge” or any other development is to have meaning, there has to be progress in political conciliation or at least in finding some form of nonviolent coexistence. That is right now the most critical single problem in Iraq. Iraq is not a conflict dominated now by insurgency or by active open civil fighting. It is a struggle for the control of space and resources, which is playing out at a sectarian and ethnic level, not only in the different regions of Iraq, but in each of its major cities.

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