Hi KyrosL, <<Stratfor>> ... as always, the situation develops beyond the neat perimeters of previously announced plans, expectations, hopes, wishes, and prayers, and as December approaches, along with Winter freeze, in anticipation of Spring helicopter-clogging sand storms and inter/intra-alley ultra-low visibility.
We might hear pronouncements about 'troops will be back by Christmas', not for this year, maybe after the next deep Summer's heat waves, or the one after that.
No one talks about the end-game and the exit plan, because the time is way too early for both.
I understand the Polish and Japanese soldiers will be on station soon, and I am wondering what the local reception will be like. I do not believe we have to wait too long to find out.
Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, July 3, 2003
Jul 03, 2003
stratfor.biz
The change of command at CENTCOM is scheduled for July 7, the Department of Defense announced today. That answers the question we posed on June 26, when we wrote, "Since our view is that Iraq is now in crisis and that the crisis is intensifying, it follows that an accelerated change of command is in order. If Rumsfeld grasps the magnitude of the challenge -- and by now he would have to be in a coma not to -- he will dramatically speed up the transition at CENTCOM." Clearly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is not in a coma. We can speculate as to why he has chosen to speak about Iraq as he has, but that is no longer all that interesting. The fact is the change of command at CENTCOM will take place at the earliest possible moment, which means Rumsfeld fully understands the severity of the situation, regardless of what he says.
Obviously, it will be left to Gen. John Abiziad to craft the counterinsurgency strategy. However, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, was quoted in the Philadelphia Enquirer as asking for a 33 percent increase in the number of troops in Iraq. A "senior Pentagon official" (also known as Rumsfeld -- we have never quite figured out why Washington officials play these games, but they all do) was quoted by Reuters as saying, "There has been no such request. There are still remnants that are going to try to do harm to our forces. And there are still going to be causalities. The other side is if you put more troops in, you put more targets in there." But you also increase the risk to the guerrillas. Either way, it is clear that a bottoms-up review of U.S. strategy will take place under Abiziad's control, and that review is under way now. Abiziad is in-theater now but will return next week for the change of command ceremony. We expect that he also will be presenting his recommendations to the Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush. It should be noted that there appears to be a decrease in Iraqi guerrilla operations in the last 24 hours, since Operation Sidewinder got into high gear. Therefore, an argument can be made -- and we suspect it will be made -- that more troops mean more Sidewinders -- not that 24 hours means a whole lot.
As if Iraq and al Qaeda weren't enough, it looks fairly certain that the United States will be sending nearly 1,000 Marines to Liberia. There has been an ongoing civil war there, and the country is essentially in a state of chaos. U.N. General-Secretary Kofi Annan asked the United States to send troops to Liberia. U.S. officials badly did not want to get involved there, but Annan was insistent and Washington felt trapped. Having made the case for intervention in Iraq against Annan's wishes, U.S. officials felt hard-pressed to reject Annan's call for intervention in Liberia. The logic is not crisp, but the public relations are. We suspect Annan enjoyed maneuvering the United States into an intervention. As of this hour, the intervention is not a done deal. Washington is hoping for any miracle that would keep them from sending troops into a situation that is both hopeless and not directly related to what the administration sees as core U.S. interests. But the probability is that the Marines will go in -- although the mission and exit strategy are not clear to us at all, and imaginative explanations is what we do for a living.
Japan buckled under U.S. pressure today. The Japanese were moving toward a deal worth $2 billion to develop the Azadegan oil field in Iran. The United States is putting intense pressure on Iran to curtail its nuclear development program and one of the levers is to try to isolate Iran economically. Japan's decision to reconsider its investment is a measure of the intensity of Washington's campaign. Japan imports all of the oil it uses. It constantly is looking for long-term sources of oil as a matter of core national policy. It also has a core national policy to maintain its security relationship with the United States. The two cores collided, and the winner was the United States. The Japanese certainly are not happy to have been put in this position.
Making Japan unhappy is fairly gratuitous these days. What U.S. officials really want to do is make the Iranians unhappy. We suspect that they are quite unhappy with both the pressure and its effectiveness. What we continue to anticipate is the Iranian response. The student rising in Iran has collapsed, but the Iranians continue to regard the rising as an American plot. It is very dangerous to make an enemy feel it is being crushed without actually crushing them. The heavier the pressure on the Iranians, without breaking them, the greater the pressure is for Iran to try to do something decisive -- like stirring up the Iraqi Shiites. The United States is on a tightrope with Iran, which is why the faster Abiziad can get control of the situation in Iraq -- assuming he can get control -- the happier Washington is going to be. |
