WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 (UPI) -- The United States has one year to develop a reconstruction strategy for Iraq that will improve the security situation and win the trust of its people.
Recognizing that most of the positive developments in Iraq are "fragile or superficial," the new policy paper from the Brookings Institution posits that the Bush administration does not have a clear overall strategy for dealing with the two separate but related problems rising from the security vacuum: the Sunni-based insurgency and a governmental architecture which has "essentially collapsed."
Citing opinion polls which show eroding Iraqi support, the paper says that "the United States must therefore approach 2006 as a make or break year in Iraq."
The paper, which presents an alternative strategy for success in Iraq, was authored by Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at Brookings, along with the Iraq Policy Working Group at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
"We have about a year to get it right," said Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman. "The administration has adjusted its tactics but not its strategy. The strategy is wrong -- it's not making the Iraqi people feel safer."
One of the key recommendations of the report suggests that the U.S. military adopt a defensive position against the insurgency, concentrating troop forces in sympathetic population centers around Iraq. In addition, the report calls for decentralization of oil revenues and increased United Nations support. A U.N. presence in Iraq, said Pollack, would give the Iraqi people desperately needed access to foreign non-governmental organizations and reconstruction resources.
Harman added that Congress is getting anxious about the war in Iraq and that the ideas presented in the paper are "far superior to the ideas the White House is putting out."
