Fareed Zacharia, most familiar from his role as a Newsweek foreign affairs columnist, was a hawk on the Iraq War, although he has been critical of the Bush Administration's failure to win more international support. In Tuesday's Washington Post, he discusses some of the very real practical problems of a rapid shift to using Iraqis for counterinsurgency.
Iraq, everyone agrees, is not Vietnam. In Vietnam the United
States lost dozens of troops for every one it is losing in Iraq. The Viet Cong
guerrillas had broad popular support. They were being supplied by great powers.
And so on. But there is one sense in which the analogy might hold. Frustrated by
the lack of quick progress on the ground and fading political support at home,
Washington is now latching on to the idea that a quick transfer of power to
local troops and politicians would make things better. Or at any rate, it would
lower American casualties. It was called Vietnamization; today it's called
Iraqification. And then as now, it is less a winning strategy than an exit
strategy. ...There are no shortcuts out. Iraq is America's problem. It could
have been otherwise, but in the weeks after the war the administration, drunk
with victory, refused to share power with the world. Now there can be only one
goal: success. The first task of winning the peace in Iraq is winning the war --
which is still being waged in the Sunni heartland. And winning it might take
more troops, or different kinds of troops (send back the Marines). It might take
a mixture of military force and bribes -- to win over some Sunni leaders. But
whatever it takes, the United States must do it. Talk about a drawdown of troops
sends exactly the wrong message to the guerrillas. In the words of one North
Vietnamese general, "We knew that if we waited, one day the Americans would have
to go home."
Zacharia and other war supporters got the war they wanted. Now they're finding that what they were cheering for is a lot different than the "cakewalk" some of the war's more zealous supporters predicted. Getting off the tiger is a lot more difficult than getting on.
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