The Iraq Study Group

For all the preemptive media hype behind the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group and its report and recommendations on the situation in Iraq, the Group’s actual final product has turned out to be, in all reality, a tasteless joke. Their mandate was to provide a well-deliberated way forward in Iraq. What they actually came up with was almost literally a plagiarization of the current strategy. Among their 79 befuddled recommendations, the Group proposes that American forces "should significantly increase the number of U.S. military personnel...imbedded in and supporting Iraqi Army units" so as to accelerate the training of Iraqi units and hasten the time when "U.S. forces [can] begin to move out of Iraq."

It did not take an independent review of the situation in Iraq from an independent study group to formulate this approach, it is simply a rewording of the current approach, which is and always has been to train Iraqi forces to assume the security of their country so American forces can come home. As the president has been fond of saying, "As Iraqis stand up, we stand down."

The problem is that in the three and half years that have elapsed between the deposition of Saddam Hussein and now, this strategy hasn’t worked, which was why the ISG was commissioned in the first place. We didn’t need James Baker, Lee Hamilton, and company—as venerated as statesmen as they are—to come up with the approach that they ultimately did. Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department had already done so and had put it into practice. For all intensive purposes, the ISG simply nodded towards Donald Rumsfeld and said, "Yeah, what he said."

Aggravating their farce of a plan further, the ISG calls upon "the United States to engage" the neighboring nations of Iran and Syria "constructively." Supposedly, we should employ incentives and disincentives—colloquially referred to as carrots and sticks—to persuade both nations to "influence events within Iraq" because it is in "their interest to avoid chaos in Iraq" just as it is ours.

That flatly is not true. Chaos and failure within Iraq is entirely within both Syria’s and Iran’s self-interest, or else they would not be actively engaged in deliberate efforts to incur both. A constructive dialogue between the United States and Syria and Iran would be completely pointless because our interests and theirs are diametrically opposed.

What is needed in Iraq is a new strategy for achieving the goals we had when we went into the country originally. The ISG was tasked to provide one. Upon that point they failed. Such is the rotten fruit of a commission whose main goal was to present a consensus report, not to present the fresh, cogent, and most of all useful path forward asked of them. The ISG got their consensus, but left us, to borrow from the headline of a recent editorial in The Weekly Standard, "a perfect failure" of a plan.