Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar Assad (AP)
The United States alone cannot repair all the gashes within Iraq or maintain the various loosely stitched fixes. This would be true if the surge could be sustained for years on end; it is all the more true since the five extra brigades that constituted the surge are due to leave by this summer, and neither the U.S. Army nor the Marine Corps has any troops ready to replace them.
And, right now, the United States is pretty much alone. The "coalition of the willing," long a paltry and motley crew, is on the verge of folding. Britain, its second-largest contingent, is pulling out half of its 5,000 troops. Most of the other 23 non-U.S. members contribute only a few hundred, in some cases a few dozen, personnel; many of them are forbidden to engage in combat; most of the others are incapable of doing so.
To keep the sectarian violence from spreading beyond Iraq’s borders, and possibly to keep it from doing too much harm within, the United States has no choice but to embark on a campaign of creative regional diplomacy involving all the states of the region. Access the full article>>