Unparalleled Quandary
A response to “Stay The Course”
“Stay The Course” … NO. “Stay” … maybe, but under what circumstances and how long? Being willing and open to change is not a weakness. Being unwilling to change or averse to engage diverse opinion of smart minds, such as those who forewarned of the Iraq quagmire, is delusional and carte blanche is dangerous.
Repeating my words of Oct. 2005: “Our forces have gone beyond the call of duty in a mire of civil strife. If the “terrorist war” is lost it will not be on Iraqi soil – for the war extends far beyond. Iraqis will lose whatever is lost in Iraq, not American forces. Now, after two and a half years, it’s Iraqi’s responsibility to defend their country from a civil war.”
In my statement then and even now I standby, I do not call for an immediate pull out per se; although, it is a strong suggestion that for two years (now 3-years) we were dragged through a problematic conflict, dubious of the true “terrorist war,” but just the same where our American warriors serve proficiently as possible, honorably, and nobly. But more to the point, Iraqis must stand up sooner than later, if any semblance of success is in the cards. That’s the BIG question: can they secure their country from an extended civil war?
Call it what you will: it is a civil war in Iraq; 95% of the strife is Shia and Sunni, sectarian, killing each other. Only about 5% “terrorist against Americans.” Prime Minister al-Maliki is helpless or unwilling to deal with the sectarian militias. As Thomas Friedman said on Oct. 18th: “There are only two reasons now for the U.S. to remain in Iraq: because it thinks that staying will make things better or that leaving will make things drastically worse. Alas, it is increasingly hard to see how our presence is making things better. Iraq, under our nose, is breaking apart into so many little pieces that no political solution seems to be in the offing, because no Iraqi leader can deliver his faction anymore — and there does not seem to be an Iraqi center capable of coming together. While leaving would no doubt exacerbate the civil war, staying in Iraq indefinitely to prevent even more Shiites and Sunnis from killing one another is not going to fly with the U.S. public much longer.” All our options are stark, but my belief a turn of direction is imperative and imminent. If the turn-of-events lead us to an extended or all-out war will the administration ask Americans to make the necessary sacrifices, sacrifices and commitment more commensurate with our military and their families?
The administration keeps rebuffing even the hawkish conservatives who have since changed their minds, while the war becomes more horrific. Financial corruption has been rampant in false starts of an Iraqi government, and 40 to 50% of the oil money is going to the insurgents, as reported last evening on 60-Minutes. The Iraq dilemma is hardly analogous to any other war ever fought by U. S. It is a very complex situation, and one that demands a long past due critical civil discourse among the most brilliant thinking leaders and statesmen, possibly combined with like men of other nations.
America has been a world superpower, but that may be slowly diminishing in actuality as well in broader world perception. What are we, a nation of only 3-hundred million, a national debt of 9-trillion, and a trade deficit with China alone that has grown exponentially in 10-years from 35-billion dollars to now 200-billion $ a year and drastically increasing annually? China has over 1.334 billion population, one of the fastest growing economies, with a purchasing power in 2005 of 9-trillion compared to U. S. 12-trillion. China delivers quality goods in price defiance of American production. Just check the “Made in China” tags in the electronic and apparel stores for proof. Point in fact: China is fast becoming a superpower. Consequently, some kind of world-order, a transformed United Nations, and other multilateral organizations must be used to effectuate diplomacy for peace and a better world understanding to combat and defeat terrorism. The U. S. can no longer afford financially or politically unilaterally going alone on major world affairs. There must be, in the least, a unification of the major countries for world security. America, its leaders, must face reality.
What do we want out of Iraq, at what cost? The Iraqi war debt is approaching .5-trillion, and our best military personnel deaths are escalating daily, to 2,800 and 86 kill to date in October. Will increasing these numbers ever bring a democracy to this conflicted area? Not in our life! The best we can hope for in Iraq is a fighting theocracy or worse another autocratic-tyrant, back where we started from.
Two excellent brief essays, which succinctly sum up the Iraqi quandary, just off the press, are from The Economist, “Between staying and going” and from The New Republic, “War Torn.” To get a better grasp of the situation, I highly recommend these, attached herewith. Let me know what you think.
-------------------------------
Iraq Between staying and going
Oct 19th 2006 From The Economist print edition
A search for new ideas should not blind Americans to the stark choice they face in Iraq
LIKE a hanging, the approaching mid-term elections are concentrating minds in Washington. Republicans and Democrats are racing to find some new idea to rescue America from the quagmire of Iraq. Until now, the policy of George Bush has been to stay the course, come what may. But what if the only alternative to cutting and running is staying and failing?
So far, relatively few influential voices are calling for an immediate withdrawal. But the numbers are growing, and this is a worry. For the likely result of an American flight would be to make the present horrors worse.
From insurgency to civil war
There was a time when most violence in Iraq was the result of a Sunni insurgency against the foreign occupiers. If the occupiers left, or so the argument went, so would the reason for fighting. However, most of the killing is now part of a sectarian war between Sunnis and the Shias. The unpopular Americans are almost the only force keeping this killing under some control, and their going could spark a fight to the finish.
Some people argue that a short and decisive battle for supremacy would in the end cause less suffering than the protracted one now raging under America's nose. But there is no reason to expect such a battle to be short. If America with more than 140,000 soldiers cannot subdue the Sunni minority, why expect the largely Shia government forces to do better? The likelier prospect would be a long war that sucked in neighbours (Turkey, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia are all candidates). That is what happened in Lebanon's civil war, but there the stakes were lower.
Given the unappetising prospect either of staying the course or leaving at once, Americans long for a middle way. Why not split the country into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish statelets? Instead of going right now, why not set a timetable, to galvanise the warring parties to settle their differences before a free-for-all? One far-fetched idea from the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan team looking at alternatives on behalf of Congress, is said to be to withdraw “over the horizon” and control Iraq from a neighbouring country. Another is for America to be less fastidious about establishing democracy, and concentrate on the smaller aim of establishing a government that works.
It is no bad thing to explore new ideas. The trouble is that none of these examples stands up to scrutiny.
Take partition. This is not a mad idea. A case can be made that Britain's creation in the 1920s of a single political entity called Iraq was a failure from the start, and that the only thing that can hold it together is an iron fist like Saddam Hussein's. So if the choice is between another dictatorship or endless civil war, partition begins to look attractive. If not a mad idea, however, partition is a bad idea. It would be neither neat nor bloodless: Kurds, Shias and Sunnis are intermingled in many areas, including Baghdad. And the precedents are awful. In Palestine, India and Yugoslavia partition led not just to war and forced migration but to a series of wars. And there is, again, the complication of neighbours. Independence for the Kurds is anathema to Turkey and Iran. A Shia state on its border, adjacent to where its own restive Shias live, would horrify Saudi Arabia. And what would the Sunnis in Iraq's centre gain once partition cut them off from Iraq's oil riches?
As for America being less fastidious about democracy, this sounds commendably realistic. Iraqis living in daily fear of murder certainly have bigger things to worry about than a low score from Freedom House. The snag is that even if it seemed briefly possible after the fall of Mr Hussein to impose a friendly strongman in his place, that looks out of the question now. Having tasted democracy and voted in their millions, Iraqis will not be so easily cowed again by one man from one group. The present policy—hammering out a power-sharing agreement between elected groups—may be challenging but is more realistic than a belated quest for dictatorship lite.
On closer inspection, in fact, many of the competing ideas masquerading in Washington as big new ideas turn out to be small refinements of the existing policy. One such is the idea for partition lite—a federal arrangement with a weak centre and strong regions. That is pretty much what the existing constitution allows and is already the subject of fierce negotiation between the parties. A more genuinely new idea is for America to seek a reconciliation with its foes in Syria and Iran, in the hope that the active involvement of these powers will somehow stabilise the country. But this smacks of desperation: Iran is already deeply engaged in Iraq, on the side of the Shias. That is exactly what enrages and frightens the Sunnis.
Not wrong, just very, very hard
At the end of the day, the three-pronged policy America is already pursuing in Iraq may very well be the best of a bad lot. Stated briefly, this consists of trying to keep the lid on the violence, build up Iraq's own security forces and prod Iraqi politicians into making a power-sharing deal. Each prong has faced harder resistance than expected. Violence is widespread, Iraq's new police force is riddled with sectarianism (the army is a bit better), and in the political negotiations the Sunni minority and Shia majority have not yet found a way to adjust peacefully to the reversal of their respective political fortunes. If America is willing to stay the course for a few more years, success is still possible—though the policy will continue to be costly in American lives and money.
The only honest alternative is indeed probably just to go, and let one side win. America did that in Vietnam and Britain did it in Palestine. After much suffering, Vietnam turned out well enough, regional dominoes did not all fall, and America went on to win the cold war anyway, not least because communism was a nonsensical and unloved system and the peoples on whom it had been foisted were eager to ditch it. Maybe something similar will happen in Iraq, not least because the rival versions of theocracy on offer from Iran and al-Qaeda are nonsensical too. But just going would be a fantastic gamble, not only with America's global power and prestige but also with other people's lives. Better, still, to stay.
---------------------
War Torn
TNR 10-30-06
In Washington today, there are two debates about Iraq. The first is loud and fake. It consists of flag-draped speeches in which President Bush says things like “The party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.” It looks like a debate about foreign policy, but it’s not. It’s a debate about national identity—about the kind of country we want to be: a country that retreats and loses or a country that fights and wins. The Democrats stand accused of defeatism; the Republicans demand victory. The question, as a recent Weekly Standard cover story put it, is “will we choose to win in Iraq?”
The second debate is quiet and clinical and awful. It starts with these realities: The violence in Iraq is getting worse; the militias are growing stronger; the Americans are growing more hated; and the good guys—the Iraqis who told us their country could be a decent, functioning place—are either dead or back in Dearborn. This other Iraq debate is a choice between last-ditch efforts that will probably fail and simply accepting defeat and mitigating its effects. It’s the choice you face when someone teeters on the edge of death—between aggressive measures that might produce a miracle but could also increase the agony, and letting the patient go, in the hopes that, by bowing to the inevitable, you can at least ease the pain.
The day after the midterm elections, the first Iraq debate will probably end and the second one will truly begin. Republican Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner has already said that, unless Iraq’s government imposes order in the next two or three months, the United States must consider a “change of course.” James Baker, whose Iraq commission will report at about that time, is saying much the same thing. Bush may still try to stay the course, but, if Iraq causes Republicans to lose the House or Senate, Republicans will suddenly become a lot more willing to lose Iraq. When the real Iraq debate begins, it will feature three basic alternatives. The first—call it “do it right”—is the brainchild of military wonks like Kenneth Pollack and Andrew Krepinevich Jr. It starts with a counterintuitive assumption: that, in Iraq, security drives politics rather than the other way around. While most commentators envision political settlements that would allow Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki to disarm his country’s militias, the “do it right” folks say such settlements are a pipedream. Instead, the U.S. military should create facts on the ground that undercut the militia’s appeal. In particular, the United States and its Iraqi allies should pursue a classic counterinsurgency campaign: Rather than chasing terrorists, they should simply park themselves in civilian areas and provide the security for which Iraqis yearn. Once the U.S. and Iraqi armies finally protect Iraqis, sectarian militias will lose their raison d’être. Many people agree that, once upon a time, this would have been a good strategy. But that time may now have passed. For starters, to effectively protect Iraqis the United States would need many more troops. And adding any more would put a brutal strain on an already wheezing U.S. military. Pollack and company believe you can make headway without more U.S. troops, but that requires Iraqi forces to make up some of the gap, and there is no guarantee they can. After all, the more Iraq’s communities turn on each other, the less Sunnis will rely on Shia soldiers for protection. And, even as Iraqis grow more hostile to one another, they are also growing more hostile to us. A recent University of Maryland poll shows that more than 60 percent of Iraqis (and an even higher percentage of Arab Iraqis) now support attacks on U.S. troops, which makes counterinsurgency— a strategy dependent on winning hearts and minds—much harder. All of which may explain why Army Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, has put in place elements of exactly the strategy the wonks are pushing, and yet violence in Baghdad keeps escalating. If “do it right” banks on a new military strategy, “hail Mary” puts its faith in a new diplomatic one. The model is Dayton, where Richard Holbrooke sequestered the leaders of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia at an Air Force base and didn’t let them out until they struck the bargain that ended the Bosnian war. In Iraq, such a bargain would center on oil: guaranteeing the Sunnis some share of it so they stop fighting the Shia-dominated government. Once that happened, the theory goes, the Shia wouldn’t need militias to protect them, and Iraq’s government could gain control.
(Senator Joseph Biden’s “partition” plan—which actually calls for a weak central government that shares oil—is a variant of the “hail Mary.”) The problem with the Bosnia analogy is that Dayton came after nearly four years of civil war, when the parties were exhausted and a rough balance of power had emerged on the ground. In Iraq, by contrast, the killing is just gathering steam. And, while it seems obvious in Washington that Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds can all do better at the negotiating table than they can on the battlefield, it’s not at all clear that most Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish leaders see it that way. Striking Dayton-like deals—never mind enforcing them—requires either a high degree of political trust, which Iraqis clearly lack, or an outside power strong enough to impose a solution, which the United States, tragically, is not. The “hail Mary” plan may still be worth trying, but, to give it any chance of success, the United States would have to threaten to withdraw our troops if the parties didn’t agree. Which brings us to option number three: “Withdraw our troops.” After all, if you believe a Dayton-type deal is impossible— that, even if negotiated, it would quickly unravel—why put U.S. troops in the bloody middle? The optimistic case for withdrawal—that once Americans leave Iraq the Sunni insurgency will lose its rationale, thus making a reconciliation possible—has weakened over the last year, as Sunnis have grown more afraid of Shia death squads than American G.I.s. But the pessimistic case has grown stronger: If Iraq is doomed to hell no matter what we do, why send brave young Americans down with it? It is impossible to know whether that hell is inevitable or whether some change in American strategy might still stave it off. But one thing is clear: For every day that goes by without an honest debate about Iraq, defeat becomes more certain. The good news is that, in a few weeks, that debate will finally begin. And, if we are very, very lucky, it will still matter.
PETER BEINART
A response to “Stay The Course”
“Stay The Course” … NO. “Stay” … maybe, but under what circumstances and how long? Being willing and open to change is not a weakness. Being unwilling to change or averse to engage diverse opinion of smart minds, such as those who forewarned of the Iraq quagmire, is delusional and carte blanche is dangerous.
Repeating my words of Oct. 2005: “Our forces have gone beyond the call of duty in a mire of civil strife. If the “terrorist war” is lost it will not be on Iraqi soil – for the war extends far beyond. Iraqis will lose whatever is lost in Iraq, not American forces. Now, after two and a half years, it’s Iraqi’s responsibility to defend their country from a civil war.”
In my statement then and even now I standby, I do not call for an immediate pull out per se; although, it is a strong suggestion that for two years (now 3-years) we were dragged through a problematic conflict, dubious of the true “terrorist war,” but just the same where our American warriors serve proficiently as possible, honorably, and nobly. But more to the point, Iraqis must stand up sooner than later, if any semblance of success is in the cards. That’s the BIG question: can they secure their country from an extended civil war?
Call it what you will: it is a civil war in Iraq; 95% of the strife is Shia and Sunni, sectarian, killing each other. Only about 5% “terrorist against Americans.” Prime Minister al-Maliki is helpless or unwilling to deal with the sectarian militias. As Thomas Friedman said on Oct. 18th: “There are only two reasons now for the U.S. to remain in Iraq: because it thinks that staying will make things better or that leaving will make things drastically worse. Alas, it is increasingly hard to see how our presence is making things better. Iraq, under our nose, is breaking apart into so many little pieces that no political solution seems to be in the offing, because no Iraqi leader can deliver his faction anymore — and there does not seem to be an Iraqi center capable of coming together. While leaving would no doubt exacerbate the civil war, staying in Iraq indefinitely to prevent even more Shiites and Sunnis from killing one another is not going to fly with the U.S. public much longer.” All our options are stark, but my belief a turn of direction is imperative and imminent. If the turn-of-events lead us to an extended or all-out war will the administration ask Americans to make the necessary sacrifices, sacrifices and commitment more commensurate with our military and their families?
The administration keeps rebuffing even the hawkish conservatives who have since changed their minds, while the war becomes more horrific. Financial corruption has been rampant in false starts of an Iraqi government, and 40 to 50% of the oil money is going to the insurgents, as reported last evening on 60-Minutes. The Iraq dilemma is hardly analogous to any other war ever fought by U. S. It is a very complex situation, and one that demands a long past due critical civil discourse among the most brilliant thinking leaders and statesmen, possibly combined with like men of other nations.
America has been a world superpower, but that may be slowly diminishing in actuality as well in broader world perception. What are we, a nation of only 3-hundred million, a national debt of 9-trillion, and a trade deficit with China alone that has grown exponentially in 10-years from 35-billion dollars to now 200-billion $ a year and drastically increasing annually? China has over 1.334 billion population, one of the fastest growing economies, with a purchasing power in 2005 of 9-trillion compared to U. S. 12-trillion. China delivers quality goods in price defiance of American production. Just check the “Made in China” tags in the electronic and apparel stores for proof. Point in fact: China is fast becoming a superpower. Consequently, some kind of world-order, a transformed United Nations, and other multilateral organizations must be used to effectuate diplomacy for peace and a better world understanding to combat and defeat terrorism. The U. S. can no longer afford financially or politically unilaterally going alone on major world affairs. There must be, in the least, a unification of the major countries for world security. America, its leaders, must face reality.
What do we want out of Iraq, at what cost? The Iraqi war debt is approaching .5-trillion, and our best military personnel deaths are escalating daily, to 2,800 and 86 kill to date in October. Will increasing these numbers ever bring a democracy to this conflicted area? Not in our life! The best we can hope for in Iraq is a fighting theocracy or worse another autocratic-tyrant, back where we started from.
Two excellent brief essays, which succinctly sum up the Iraqi quandary, just off the press, are from The Economist, “Between staying and going” and from The New Republic, “War Torn.” To get a better grasp of the situation, I highly recommend these, attached herewith. Let me know what you think.
-------------------------------
Iraq Between staying and going
Oct 19th 2006 From The Economist print edition
A search for new ideas should not blind Americans to the stark choice they face in Iraq
LIKE a hanging, the approaching mid-term elections are concentrating minds in Washington. Republicans and Democrats are racing to find some new idea to rescue America from the quagmire of Iraq. Until now, the policy of George Bush has been to stay the course, come what may. But what if the only alternative to cutting and running is staying and failing?
So far, relatively few influential voices are calling for an immediate withdrawal. But the numbers are growing, and this is a worry. For the likely result of an American flight would be to make the present horrors worse.
From insurgency to civil war
There was a time when most violence in Iraq was the result of a Sunni insurgency against the foreign occupiers. If the occupiers left, or so the argument went, so would the reason for fighting. However, most of the killing is now part of a sectarian war between Sunnis and the Shias. The unpopular Americans are almost the only force keeping this killing under some control, and their going could spark a fight to the finish.
Some people argue that a short and decisive battle for supremacy would in the end cause less suffering than the protracted one now raging under America's nose. But there is no reason to expect such a battle to be short. If America with more than 140,000 soldiers cannot subdue the Sunni minority, why expect the largely Shia government forces to do better? The likelier prospect would be a long war that sucked in neighbours (Turkey, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia are all candidates). That is what happened in Lebanon's civil war, but there the stakes were lower.
Given the unappetising prospect either of staying the course or leaving at once, Americans long for a middle way. Why not split the country into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish statelets? Instead of going right now, why not set a timetable, to galvanise the warring parties to settle their differences before a free-for-all? One far-fetched idea from the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan team looking at alternatives on behalf of Congress, is said to be to withdraw “over the horizon” and control Iraq from a neighbouring country. Another is for America to be less fastidious about establishing democracy, and concentrate on the smaller aim of establishing a government that works.
It is no bad thing to explore new ideas. The trouble is that none of these examples stands up to scrutiny.
Take partition. This is not a mad idea. A case can be made that Britain's creation in the 1920s of a single political entity called Iraq was a failure from the start, and that the only thing that can hold it together is an iron fist like Saddam Hussein's. So if the choice is between another dictatorship or endless civil war, partition begins to look attractive. If not a mad idea, however, partition is a bad idea. It would be neither neat nor bloodless: Kurds, Shias and Sunnis are intermingled in many areas, including Baghdad. And the precedents are awful. In Palestine, India and Yugoslavia partition led not just to war and forced migration but to a series of wars. And there is, again, the complication of neighbours. Independence for the Kurds is anathema to Turkey and Iran. A Shia state on its border, adjacent to where its own restive Shias live, would horrify Saudi Arabia. And what would the Sunnis in Iraq's centre gain once partition cut them off from Iraq's oil riches?
As for America being less fastidious about democracy, this sounds commendably realistic. Iraqis living in daily fear of murder certainly have bigger things to worry about than a low score from Freedom House. The snag is that even if it seemed briefly possible after the fall of Mr Hussein to impose a friendly strongman in his place, that looks out of the question now. Having tasted democracy and voted in their millions, Iraqis will not be so easily cowed again by one man from one group. The present policy—hammering out a power-sharing agreement between elected groups—may be challenging but is more realistic than a belated quest for dictatorship lite.
On closer inspection, in fact, many of the competing ideas masquerading in Washington as big new ideas turn out to be small refinements of the existing policy. One such is the idea for partition lite—a federal arrangement with a weak centre and strong regions. That is pretty much what the existing constitution allows and is already the subject of fierce negotiation between the parties. A more genuinely new idea is for America to seek a reconciliation with its foes in Syria and Iran, in the hope that the active involvement of these powers will somehow stabilise the country. But this smacks of desperation: Iran is already deeply engaged in Iraq, on the side of the Shias. That is exactly what enrages and frightens the Sunnis.
Not wrong, just very, very hard
At the end of the day, the three-pronged policy America is already pursuing in Iraq may very well be the best of a bad lot. Stated briefly, this consists of trying to keep the lid on the violence, build up Iraq's own security forces and prod Iraqi politicians into making a power-sharing deal. Each prong has faced harder resistance than expected. Violence is widespread, Iraq's new police force is riddled with sectarianism (the army is a bit better), and in the political negotiations the Sunni minority and Shia majority have not yet found a way to adjust peacefully to the reversal of their respective political fortunes. If America is willing to stay the course for a few more years, success is still possible—though the policy will continue to be costly in American lives and money.
The only honest alternative is indeed probably just to go, and let one side win. America did that in Vietnam and Britain did it in Palestine. After much suffering, Vietnam turned out well enough, regional dominoes did not all fall, and America went on to win the cold war anyway, not least because communism was a nonsensical and unloved system and the peoples on whom it had been foisted were eager to ditch it. Maybe something similar will happen in Iraq, not least because the rival versions of theocracy on offer from Iran and al-Qaeda are nonsensical too. But just going would be a fantastic gamble, not only with America's global power and prestige but also with other people's lives. Better, still, to stay.
---------------------
War Torn
TNR 10-30-06
In Washington today, there are two debates about Iraq. The first is loud and fake. It consists of flag-draped speeches in which President Bush says things like “The party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.” It looks like a debate about foreign policy, but it’s not. It’s a debate about national identity—about the kind of country we want to be: a country that retreats and loses or a country that fights and wins. The Democrats stand accused of defeatism; the Republicans demand victory. The question, as a recent Weekly Standard cover story put it, is “will we choose to win in Iraq?”
The second debate is quiet and clinical and awful. It starts with these realities: The violence in Iraq is getting worse; the militias are growing stronger; the Americans are growing more hated; and the good guys—the Iraqis who told us their country could be a decent, functioning place—are either dead or back in Dearborn. This other Iraq debate is a choice between last-ditch efforts that will probably fail and simply accepting defeat and mitigating its effects. It’s the choice you face when someone teeters on the edge of death—between aggressive measures that might produce a miracle but could also increase the agony, and letting the patient go, in the hopes that, by bowing to the inevitable, you can at least ease the pain.
The day after the midterm elections, the first Iraq debate will probably end and the second one will truly begin. Republican Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner has already said that, unless Iraq’s government imposes order in the next two or three months, the United States must consider a “change of course.” James Baker, whose Iraq commission will report at about that time, is saying much the same thing. Bush may still try to stay the course, but, if Iraq causes Republicans to lose the House or Senate, Republicans will suddenly become a lot more willing to lose Iraq. When the real Iraq debate begins, it will feature three basic alternatives. The first—call it “do it right”—is the brainchild of military wonks like Kenneth Pollack and Andrew Krepinevich Jr. It starts with a counterintuitive assumption: that, in Iraq, security drives politics rather than the other way around. While most commentators envision political settlements that would allow Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki to disarm his country’s militias, the “do it right” folks say such settlements are a pipedream. Instead, the U.S. military should create facts on the ground that undercut the militia’s appeal. In particular, the United States and its Iraqi allies should pursue a classic counterinsurgency campaign: Rather than chasing terrorists, they should simply park themselves in civilian areas and provide the security for which Iraqis yearn. Once the U.S. and Iraqi armies finally protect Iraqis, sectarian militias will lose their raison d’être. Many people agree that, once upon a time, this would have been a good strategy. But that time may now have passed. For starters, to effectively protect Iraqis the United States would need many more troops. And adding any more would put a brutal strain on an already wheezing U.S. military. Pollack and company believe you can make headway without more U.S. troops, but that requires Iraqi forces to make up some of the gap, and there is no guarantee they can. After all, the more Iraq’s communities turn on each other, the less Sunnis will rely on Shia soldiers for protection. And, even as Iraqis grow more hostile to one another, they are also growing more hostile to us. A recent University of Maryland poll shows that more than 60 percent of Iraqis (and an even higher percentage of Arab Iraqis) now support attacks on U.S. troops, which makes counterinsurgency— a strategy dependent on winning hearts and minds—much harder. All of which may explain why Army Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, has put in place elements of exactly the strategy the wonks are pushing, and yet violence in Baghdad keeps escalating. If “do it right” banks on a new military strategy, “hail Mary” puts its faith in a new diplomatic one. The model is Dayton, where Richard Holbrooke sequestered the leaders of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia at an Air Force base and didn’t let them out until they struck the bargain that ended the Bosnian war. In Iraq, such a bargain would center on oil: guaranteeing the Sunnis some share of it so they stop fighting the Shia-dominated government. Once that happened, the theory goes, the Shia wouldn’t need militias to protect them, and Iraq’s government could gain control.
(Senator Joseph Biden’s “partition” plan—which actually calls for a weak central government that shares oil—is a variant of the “hail Mary.”) The problem with the Bosnia analogy is that Dayton came after nearly four years of civil war, when the parties were exhausted and a rough balance of power had emerged on the ground. In Iraq, by contrast, the killing is just gathering steam. And, while it seems obvious in Washington that Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds can all do better at the negotiating table than they can on the battlefield, it’s not at all clear that most Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish leaders see it that way. Striking Dayton-like deals—never mind enforcing them—requires either a high degree of political trust, which Iraqis clearly lack, or an outside power strong enough to impose a solution, which the United States, tragically, is not. The “hail Mary” plan may still be worth trying, but, to give it any chance of success, the United States would have to threaten to withdraw our troops if the parties didn’t agree. Which brings us to option number three: “Withdraw our troops.” After all, if you believe a Dayton-type deal is impossible— that, even if negotiated, it would quickly unravel—why put U.S. troops in the bloody middle? The optimistic case for withdrawal—that once Americans leave Iraq the Sunni insurgency will lose its rationale, thus making a reconciliation possible—has weakened over the last year, as Sunnis have grown more afraid of Shia death squads than American G.I.s. But the pessimistic case has grown stronger: If Iraq is doomed to hell no matter what we do, why send brave young Americans down with it? It is impossible to know whether that hell is inevitable or whether some change in American strategy might still stave it off. But one thing is clear: For every day that goes by without an honest debate about Iraq, defeat becomes more certain. The good news is that, in a few weeks, that debate will finally begin. And, if we are very, very lucky, it will still matter.
PETER BEINART
