Today, over at Human Events, IWF’s Yasmine Rassam takes a look at the ISG report including phased redeployment of American troops in Iraq and possible talks with Syria and Iran.  Yasmine asks the important question, “Will the Americans be drawn in the sectarian war if we don’t get help from the likes of Syria and Iran?”  The answer?  Not if we don’t want to:
 
“A gradual redeployment from the major cities in 2007 while simultaneously strengthening the wherewithal and the resolve of the duly-elected Iraqi government (for example, by encouraging the formation of a technocrat government in Baghdad), will allow us to concentrate on our main task: defeating the Baathist-al Qaeda coalition (the so-called insurgency) thus providing a chance for the Iraqis to build a viable, representative government in Iraq. Better still, simultaneously, we should augment our forces to a level that would smash the insurgency to the point when its Sunni Baathist leadership abandons its al Qaeda allies and accept its status as a minority in Iraq. At the same, we should demand from that the Iraqis bear the entire brunt of dealing with the militias that compose the main sectarian retaliatory fuel for Baathist aggression. 
 
“Such a dual policy of clearing and holding the major strongholds of the terrorists, mainly by strengthened American forces, and disbanding and controlling the militias, mainly by Iraqi forces, will lead us to our goal of a viable Iraqi state within two-three years.
 
“If we do any less, we will be condemning our democratization project in the Middle East to failure thus inviting our enemies to pursue us all the way to Washington, D.C. As the Democrats wake up from the euphoria of the elections, they must realize that this is not a simple question of troop withdrawals: Iraq is now the primary battleground of all of the Middle East’s terror networks.”


Read the whole article here.