Officers Question Visibility of Army in Iraq (washingtonpost.com): "The new argument against 'presence' as a military goal was put most strongly by Keith W. Mines, a former Special Forces officer who served a tour last year as the U.S. occupation authority's representative for Al Anbar Province in western Iraq. 'The presence of foreign security forces is provoking the very instability that must diminish in order for the process to work,' Mines, who is now a State Department diplomat, wrote in an essay published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a pro-defense think tank that tends to espouse mainstream Republican views. 'Coalition forces are not only not stopping most of the violence, they are the active force which is provoking it.'
In a follow-up internal cable sent last month on the State Department's formal 'dissent channel,' Mines also argued for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, with a reduction from dozens of bases now to just seven in January, followed by a complete pullout in the spring.
... Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in western Iraq for much of the past year, said he generally endorses the idea of putting Iraqi security forces at the fore while U.S. troops move to the background. The problem, he said in a talk in Washington last month, was that the U.S. aid program has been too sluggish to put that theory into practice."
- posted by geoff @ #