Michael brings up excellent points about Senator Barack Obama's vague plans to keep a measure of combat troops in Iraq. Saying an unspecified number of troops will be kept somewhere in the Middle East to tackle an unspecified problem is far from a clear policy. There are two more things to consider with this "plan" which appears to shift the US mission in Iraq from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism.
First, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq released in August 2007 stated that a shift from a counterinsurgency role to a counterterrorism and support role, or "strategic redeployment" as its known in Democratic nomenclature, would squander the progress of the past year and lead to further instability in Iraq.
"We assess that changing the mission of Coalition forces from a primarily counterinsurgency and stabilization role to a primary combat support role for Iraqi forces and counterterrorist operations to prevent [al Qaeda in Iraq] from establishing a safehaven would erode security gains achieved thus far. The impact of a change in mission on Iraq's political and security environment and throughout the region probably would vary in intensity and suddenness of onset in relation to the rate and scale of a Coalition redeployment."
Second, one must question the reason for shifting US forces outside of Iraq to "deal with potential problems that might take place in the region." The fact is we are directly engaged with al Qaeda inside Iraq. You don't have to look hard to find evidence of this. I was on the scene of a devastating al Qaeda suicide attack at Combat Outpost Inman in Mosul on March 23. US forces have killed several Saudi-born al Qaeda operatives with experience in the Afghan camps in Mosul in late February.
To fight al Qaeda effectively, the US must perform both a counterinsurgency and a counterterrorism mission. The Iraqi security forces and the US Army and Marines are fulfilling the COIN role which drives intelligence. The hunter-killer special operations teams of Task Force 88 are conducting the counterterrorism mission. Ceding the initiative in one area will severely harm the efforts in the other.
