I point out that this is already done, in the sense that the way in which the American forces were able to eventually overthrow al Qaeda in the first case, after the 2003 intervention, was by making a coalition with the Anbar province's locals, called sahwa or the awakening, in 2007.
That was basically getting local tribes, putting an Iraqi uniform on them, paying them salaries, everything that Maliki didn't do, which was.... I have to point out that the Americans did a fantastic job of training and professionalizing this force, but then, when the Maliki government came into power and the Americans left, he basically stripped them of all their stars, stopped their salaries, and told them, “You're a Sunni; go home”.
We need to reverse that tide; that's the simple way.
The national guard model that the coalition has put together is a fantastic one. You just need to move into that phase. We haven't moved into that phase, clearly, because we're focusing only, so far, on the military strategy, from the top down. By that I mean literally through air support and air power, which is needed—without a doubt you need to do that—but we're not moving into the second phase, and I'm afraid we're not going to be able to train them fast enough.
We need to put more resources into the training of those resources and of those forces on the ground that include the Sunni tribes in both Iraq and in Syria. We need to put money and time into that quickly.