The Guardian <\/p>\n
The Guardian's portrait of Chelsea Manning. <\/p>\n
The simmering debate about the evolving US military strategy in Iraq and Syria has been joined by an unlikely pundit: Army Private Chelsea Manning. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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\". <\/p>\n
KEVIN LAMARQUE \/ Reuters <\/p>\n
FACING JUSTICE: Private Chelsea Manning at her sentencing in August 2013. (The Army began providing her gender identity treatment this past July.) <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\"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.\" <\/p>\n
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