The US risks being pulled into Iraq’s raging sectarian conflict and has lost the ability to impose its global agenda, one of Britain’s leading think tanks said on Wednesday.
The International Institute of Strategic Studies said that President George W Bush’s push to regain the initiative in Iraq had too few troops and too little support from the government of Nouri al-Maliki.
“We can’t control a government that wants ethnic cleansing and we don’t have enough troops on the ground to enforce a peace,” said Patrick Cronin, director of studies at the institute. “That’s an extraordinarily uphill battle.”
Presenting The Military Balance, its annual survey of the world’s armed forces, the institute’s staff added that pressure would build for a US strike on Iran if Tehran expanded its nuclear facilities as expected later this year and that Nato’s fight in Afghanistan was entering a critical phase.
“US power is strong enough to establish an agenda for international activity but is too weak effectively to implement that agenda globally,” said John Chipman, the institute’s chairman. He added that the rest of the world was “strong enough to resist an American agenda” but not to establish an alternative.
Mr Cronin said that the Bush administration’s plans to dispatch 21,500 extra troops to Iraq fell short of the numbers required by either classic counterinsurgency or peace enforcement doctrine.
While the plan will boost the number of US soldiers in Baghdad to 32,000, it would take 300,000 troops to secure the 6m strong city according to the proportions recommended by the new US Army and Marines field manual on counterinsurgency.
Mr Cronin added that in current circumstances one of the biggest dangers was the risk that the US would participate in attempts by the Iraqi authorities to clear areas of particular ethnic groups.
“There’s a twenty to forty per cent chance” that the surge in US forces and the attempt to take Baghdad “can make any meaningful progress in the next 12 months,” he said.
In a further example of the limited capacity of either the US or its opponents to determine events, the institute’s staff underlined that the chief constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme were technical.
Mark Fitzgerald, a non-proliferation expert at the institute, said that lack of supplies meant that Iran would not be able to assemble more than 3,000 centrifuges to enrich uranium and that it had still not been able to make two smaller “cascades” of 164 centrifuges function smoothly.
