From prison, Manning offers punditry on Iraq

The Guardian

The Guardian's portrait of Chelsea Manning.

The simmering debate about the evolving US military strategy in Iraq and Syria has been joined by an unlikely pundit: Army Private Chelsea Manning.

Manning, a former US intelligence analyst convicted last year of leaking classified US information to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, argues in a new piece for the Guardianthat the United States cannot defeat the Islamic State militant group by bombing them, and should focus on containing them instead.

The piece says only that the writer, who joined the Army as a man known as Bradley Manning, was "in Fort Leavenworth," and does not mention her conviction or passing of military secrets. In a separate piece, the Guardian reports Tuesday that "Manning wrote the Guardian article in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is in military custody".

KEVIN LAMARQUE / Reuters

FACING JUSTICE: Private Chelsea Manning at her sentencing in August 2013. (The Army began providing her gender identity treatment this past July.)

Manning's piece was published as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared on Capitol Hill for a hearing on the USstrategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Dempsey said that US military advisers could find themselves involved in ground combat missions if needs dictate it.

Conversely, Manning argues in her piece that the Islamic State should be allowed to set up its own region to control. Doing so is a stated goal for the militants, who want to establish a caliphate, a state under the control of strict Islamist law.

"Let Isis succeed in setting up a failed 'state' - in a contained area and over a long enough period of time to prove itself unpopular and unable to govern," Manning argues. "This might begin to discredit the leadership and ideology of Isis for good."

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From prison, Manning offers punditry on Iraq