March 7, 2007 - It's too early to judge the success of this operation ... But even at this early hour there are some encouraging signs. Iraq's government has kept its pledge to deploy three additional Iraqi army brigades to Baghdad and has lifted restrictions that prevented coalition and Iraqi forces from going into certain areas. We can expect al-Qaida and other extremists to try to derail this strategy by launching spectacular attacks,'' the President told an American Legion convention today. It was as if he was preparing them for the news that nine more US service personnel were killed in combat and more than 100 Iraqi Shia pilgrims had died in suicide bomb blasts in the continuing Iraqi sectarian civil war.

It may be too early to judge whether the President’s expanded commitment of troops in the Iraqi internecine war will tamp down the level of combat but it is not too early to assess the wisdom of the policy that puts an additional 21,500 troops in the middle of an intractable and unmanageable conflict. Last week British and Iraqi forces raided a Iraqi government intelligence office in Basra. They found 30 prisoners some showing the obvious signs of torture. It was not the office of a Ba’athist intelligence operation. The Iraqi Prime Minister promised an investigation and prosecution of those responsible. It was not those who were torturing prisoners in the name of his government at whom he was railing. It was those who organized and conducted what he called the illegal raid that he promised to prosecute. That is the face of the government that President Bush calls a democracy in its infancy. It is hard to distinguish it from the Ba’ath party regime.

We Americans cannot deploy sufficient military power to determine Iraq’s future. Neither 21,000 nor 210,000 more troops can resolve the conflict between the warring factions. The best any foreign force can accomplish in Iraq is to stand between the combatants and keep them apart. Such a mission is in fact the one that the President has made for his surging army. It holds the seeds of its own failure. Of necessity an intervening force must favor one faction or the other, become aligned and earn the eternal enmity of the opposing side. Nor is the ruling faction we installed and control likely to become docile and obedient. America cannot operate as a neutral policeman and referee without alienating both factions. If America chooses a side, as the President appears to have done, it will inevitably alienate both factions. The only feasible course is to withdraw our combat forces from Iraq redeploying one combat ready division in the region as a rapid reaction force and the remainder to Afghanistan where the real war on terrorists is being fought. Open a diplomatic initiative to create a regional military and economic treaty similar to NATO and create a Marshall Plan for the economic development of the region. The President’s surge will only strengthen a more wide spread insurgency than the one that is already uncontrollable.