The New York Times this morning reports that Marine officers say we can’t leave Fallujah now that we’ve cleared out the insurgents, because then the insurgents will come right back. Which is both true and obvious. And while our military is tied down in Fallujah, the insurgents will operate elsewhere, as we have seen in Mosul, Baquba, Ramadi, and Baghdad this past week. We don’t have enough soldiers to occupy the entire country, and we don’t want to be there forever anyway. But the insurgents, who are mostly local people fighting the occupation, are going to keep fighting as long as we are there.
I don’t see an easy way out of this for the U.S. and our military. I don’t see that the situation is going to calm down. We’re trying to train a local Iraqi security force. But when you train a Sunni force, they will refuse to fight against Sunni insurgents. And if you instead bring in Kurdish forces, as we have been doing recently, you risk inflaming sectarian hatred that may lead to full civil war.
If it’s true that the Sunnis are largely going to boycott the January elections, then we’re looking at a permanent insurgent force. Drawing the various factions into the political process is Iraq’s only real hope for stability. But we haven’t been doing too well on the hearts and minds front recently.