Surge shortsighted, U.S.official says

WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) -- The U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq sacrificed long-term gains for short-term success, a former U.S. national security official said.

Writing in the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs, Steven Simon, a former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration, says the short-term security gains accompanying the U.S. troop surge "come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq."

U.S. President George W. Bush saw the five-brigade troop surge announced in January 2007 as a way to give the Iraqi government room to develop. The surge strategy also embraced the use of the Sunni paramilitary force Sons of Iraq as a means to use homegrown security units to fight al-Qaida forces.

But, Simon writes, the hopes of a unified Iraqi government rising from the new counterinsurgency strategy "quickly faded."

Simon notes that the surge may have contributed to a decrease in overall violence in Iraq, but it has done so by exploiting tribalism, warlordism and sectarianism to provide a temporary respite to the ongoing conflict.

"States that have failed to control these forces have ultimately become ungovernable, and this is the fate for which the surge is preparing Iraq," Simon notes.

U.S. officials should reconfigure the strategy in Iraq to embrace a more vibrant "top-down approach to reconciliation," he writes.

Simon advocates soliciting the help of the United Nations and international partners in the reconstruction of Iraq and setting a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

"This course is risky and possibly futile. Yet it is still a better bet than a fashionable, short-term fix divorced from any larger political vision for Iraq and the Middle East," he concludes.