Agence France-Presse, 24 July 2006
A top Iraqi military officer drew a dark picture of the security situation in his war-torn country while on a visit to Washington and said the current US strategy lacked vision and had failed.
"The DIME (diplomacy, information, military, economy) concept has failed in Iraq," said General Nasier Abadi, deputy chief of staff of the Iraqi army.
He said the current security approach lacked foresight necessary to predict such developments as radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr leading a powerful insurgency in Iraq.
"One aspect was missing" from the US strategy, Abadi said, "and that is the brain to be able to get all these together. I'm proposing to add an S for the DIME, and the S is for 'sound prediction,' that would forecast what is coming to happen in the future."
He said the current accumulation of threats was preventing the US-led coalition on the ground in Iraq from seeing "light again at the end of the tunnel."
Abadi crticized the United States for failing to recognize that a powerful figure such as Sadr had to be either won over or appeased for long-term stability to be gained on the streets.
"He started small, but he had the support of the people," Abadi said of Sadr.
"Had we had the foresight and gained Moqtada on our side, most of the chaos that we're having now would have been avoided with the strongest of the militias on our side."
The United States should have also thought of appeasing Syria by starting to build an oil pipeline to Iraq's neighbor to help its struggling economy and avert its isolation and militancy toward the United States, the Iraqi army chief said.
"Syria has a bad economy and is supporting the insurgency," Abadi said
"Had we thought of this earlier, we could have at least started a pipeline from Iraq to Syria, and with the benefit that Syria would get, I think they would have protected the pipeline themselves."
His critical comments came one day before Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was to meet US President George W. Bush in Washington to discuss overhauling security in Iraq after the failure of a crackdown in Baghdad.
US officers have already unveiled plans to beef up the US military presence in the Iraqi capital in the wake of what one senior Bush adviser called Maliki's "disappointing" security thrust there.
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Citation: "Senior Iraqi army officer criticizes US security approach," Agence France-Presse, 24 July 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060724/pl_afp/usiraqmilitary
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