What Will Bush Do About Iraq?

Thomas Powers writes on intelligence and has an interesting Op-Ed in today's New York Times. It points to the past stubborness of presidents faced with bad war options like Johnson in Vietnam. It points to Robert Gates' role in facilitating the secret war against the Contras even after Congress had passed the Boland amendment trying to stop it and how Gates proved a loyal CIA soldier for two presidents. Powers concludes:

Today the choice facing Washington is not quite as stark as the one that confronted Lyndon Johnson in 1965, but it is close. Mr. Gates has spent the last nine months working as a member of the Iraq Study Group, whose much awaited recommendations will be revealed next Wednesday. Getting out is the simplest remedy, but no one wants to shoulder the blame for what follows. Staying the course has already been rejected by the president. That leaves only some kind of altered or renewed effort to postpone the day of reckoning. Defeating the insurgents is only half of the challenge; harder will be finding some way to restrain or disband the Shiite militias without bringing them into the war against us. Down that road would lie a spiraling conflict as protracted and unwinnable as the war in Vietnam. The Republicans may have lost the midterm elections, but to my ear, on the subject of Iraq, the president has never sounded ready to accept anything that might be called defeat. Iraq is not Vietnam, but we are the same. We find ourselves, at a parallel moment, militarily committed to a policy on the verge of conspicuous failure. The American people, now as then, are unsettled by the phrase “cut and run” and reluctant to put their judgment ahead of the president’s. Above all, American presidents are the same. Bad news from Baghdad and opposition at home may point to a lowering of expectations, at the very least, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Presidents take failure personally, can lift their voices above the din of opponents, and can use the immense power of their office to force events in the directions they choose. The verdict of the elections was clear. The public wants to let Iraqis handle their own troubles from here on out, while we start bringing our soldiers home. But that’s not what President Bush has said he wants, so there will very likely be a series of fights over Iraq that will extend to the president’s last day in office. Robert Gates is smart, quiet, dogged and loyal: a well-considered choice for defense secretary by a president determined to bring home that “coonskin on the wall,” to borrow a phrase made memorable by an earlier president in a similar fix, Lyndon Johnson.

I agree with Mr. Powers that this is indeed the most likely outcome. The one possibility I hadn't thought of is that our actions might bring the Shia into the war against us; oh my, and I thought I was pessimistic.

General Abizaid's Testimony

While scrounging around trying to find a transcript of Abizaid's testimony I find Juan Cole has already made the primary point I wanted to make:

Here's how I interpret the contretemps Wednesday between Gen. John Abizaid and Republican Senator John McCain.. McCain wants to send another division, about 20,000 US troops, to Iraq. Abizaid told him: 1) that would produce only a temporary improvement since the US doesn't have a spare division to send to Iraq for the long term and 2) Increased US troop levels are counterproductive because they remove the incentive for the Iraqi government and army to get their acts together and fight the guerrillas and militias effectively and 3) If Iraq is going to come back to better days, it will have to be primarily with Iraqi troops and 4) Iraqi troops are not now doing the job, so if more US troops are sent to Iraq it should be as trainers and units available for joint patrols, not as independent combat troops. I'd just like to point out that most of Abizaid's arguments could also be deployed for a phased withdrawal, which he opposed. My senator, Carl Levin supports the phased withdrawal idea, and so do I. What if it isn't just an increased US presence that would remove the incentive for Iraqi leaders to compromise and/or fight effectively? What if *present* troop levels do that? I say, let's take out a division ASAP (20,000 men) and make it clear that we're never putting a division back in to replace it. Then let the Iraqis try to fill the resulting vacuum themselves. Give them armored vehicles, tanks, helicopter gunships, and a nice wood-panelled room where they can negotiate with one another. And then after a couple of months I would pull out another US division. Such a phased withdrawal is not guaranteed to succeed. It has a better chance of succeeding than the current policy.

This is very important: the arguments Cole cites Abizaid as making support a phased withdrawal. 1) Abizaid says we haven't got the extra troops and they would only be a temporary aid. 2) Abizaid says more troops would remove Iraqi incentive to do it themselves. If this principle is accepted then why doesn't it increase Iraqi incentive to begin a phased withdrawal?? Obviously we must be concerned about maximizing Iraqi incentive to protect themselves, make compromises with one another, disarm militias, etc. Beginning a phased withdrawal or at least serious negotiations to begin such a withdrawal increases such incentive. 3) Ditto re Iraqi troops too. 4) If we can increase U.S. trainers without them being in combat then this may be a good idea.

My impression is that these "Hearings" are pretty sterile affairs because Congresspeople don't ask very tough questions or follow up on important issues. Abazaid said the next 4-6 months are crucial. Will anyone hold him to this or will he be back in six months again saying 'Trust me,success is just around the corner'? (This is 'deja vu all over again' if you're old enough to remember Vietnam.) Abizaid said a withdrawal timetable would limit the military leadership's flexibility (and this was the headline for a million news accounts so it got immense publicity). Did anyone ask "flexibility to do what?" "How would it limit your flexibility?" "What benchmarks of progress can we look at in six months to see if your 'flexibility' led to desired results?" Instead of just accepting these platitudes is anyone asking any tough questions?

How to Get Out of Iraq, Part 2

I'm not a military or civil affairs expert so I can't produce my own ideas about how to get out of Iraq, but I can collect and organize the ideas of others. I will continue to do this in my blog. My initial post was How to Get Out of Iraq.

One of the most serious problems facing a withdrawal of U.S. troops is the problem of Baghdad. As Peter Galbraith wrote in The End of Iraq (p. 203), Baghdad is "a city that is 60/40 percent Shiite-Sunni (a rough estimate that excludes significant Kurdish and Christian minorities) and is the front line of Iraq's civil war. Under the constitution, Baghdad may not join any other region, but can become a region on its own. It is hard to see how this resolves the sectarian divide in what is by far the world's most dangerous capital city." And on p. 222-3: "Theoretically, the United States has the power to provide some level of security in Baghdad. U.S. soldiers would have to become the city's police, manning checkpoints, confiscating weapons, arresting criminals as well as terrorists, and disarming powerful militias, including those within the police and army. It would mean a radically different mission, require many more troops, and result in many more casualties. And it may not work. U.S. troops, operating without necessary language skills and local knowledge, and rightly concerned with protecting themselves, are not a good substitute for reliable Iraqi policemen.... The alternative is to recognize that there is not much that the United States is able and willing to do to stop the bloodshed in Baghdad. Once they get started, modern civil wars develop a momentum of their own."

The U.S. invasion has unleashed a sectarian war. Baghdad is apparently the largest concentration of Sunnis and Shia living in close proximity. Baghdad has a population of approximately seven million people. Were American troops to withdraw one can only assume that the current rate of over 50 deaths per day would increase dramatically. Either a viable plan to mitigate this is developed or we leave and let the Iraqis evolve their own solution. While this is a terrible outcome to contemplate our continued occupation is not stopping the killing and it puts American troops in the crossfire. According to The Nation of November 27, one option being considered by the Iraq Study Group "calls for stabilizing Baghdad while the U.S. Embassy works for an accomodation with the insurgents."

I think the key to any of these plans is the U.S. encouraging Iraqi initiative by negotiating a phased withdrawal of troops which places the responsibility for solutions upon Iraqi leaders and hopefully encourages them to come to a compromise between Shia and Sunni representatives. The first step in any plan must begin with the setting of a date for phased troop withdrawal (or redeployment out of combat zones); this is essential to demonstrating that Iraqis must take responsibility for their own country and either make the necessary compromises or accept the consequences of a continuing sectarian war.