Iraq: Winning the Unwinnable War

James Dobbins

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005

Summary:  By losing the trust of the Iraqi people, the Bush administration has already lost the war. Moderate Iraqis can still win it, but only if they wean themselves from Washington and get support from elsewhere. To help them, the United States should reduce and ultimately eliminate its military presence, train Iraqis to beat the insurgency on their own, and rally Iran and European allies to the cause.

James Dobbins is Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at Rand. He was a U.S. Special Envoy in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, and Afghanistan.

Yet if keeping U.S. troops in Iraq provokes further resistance, withdrawing them prematurely could provoke much worse: a civil war and a regional crisis of unpredictable dimensions. A middle course is the best option. Wielding the promise of withdrawal, for example, could give Washington valuable leverage, compelling Iraqis, Iraq's neighbors, and much of the international community to look beyond their desire to see the United States chastened and toward their shared interest in Iraq's long-term stability. Thus the Bush administration should carefully modulate two simultaneous messages: a clear desire to leave Iraq and an equally clear willingness to stay until the Iraqi government, with the support of its neighbors and the international community, proves capable of securing its territory and protecting its citizens. Washington should establish that its ultimate goal is the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces as soon as circumstances permit and that it has no intention of seeking a permanent military presence in the country.

PICKING THE RIGHT BATTLE

American forces have lost the support of the Iraqi population and probably cannot regain it. The insurgency can be defeated only by Iraqi forces under Iraqi leadership, and only to the degree that those forces can dramatically reduce their dependence on the United States. Military operations should be governed by a counterinsurgency strategy emphasizing pacification--that is to say, priority should be given to securing the civilian population, not hunting down insurgents. In the end, insurgencies are defeated not by killing insurgents, but by winning the support of the population and thus denying the insurgents both refuge and recruits.

Counterinsurgency campaigns require the close integration of civil and military efforts, moreover, with primacy given to political objectives over military goals. They require detailed tactical intelligence, which can be developed only by Iraqis and is best gathered by a police force in daily contact with the population. Training the Iraqi police and building a counterterrorist "special branch" within it should take priority over all other capacity-building programs, including the creation of an Iraqi military. Given the United Kingdom's superior experience in domestic terrorism and counterinsurgency, Washington should ask London to take the lead in creating special units within the Iraqi police.

No population will support a force that cannot protect it, so enhancing the Iraqi people's security should take priority over other military and civil objectives. Doing so will require freeing the population from intimidation by the insurgents, and that will require military action. Yet if such action is U.S.-led, employs heavy ordinance, produces large-scale collateral damage, and inflicts numerous innocent casualties, it could be counterproductive. In the end, the success or failure of an offensive such as the November assault on Falluja must be measured not according to body counts or footage of liberated territory, but according to Iraqi public opinion. If the Iraqi public emerges less supportive of its government, and more supportive of the insurgents, then the battle, perhaps even the war, will have been lost.

Pulverizing cities to root out insurgents may restore some control to the Iraqi government, but the benefits are unlikely to last long if the damage also alienates the population. Sacrificing innocent Iraqi lives to save American ones is a difficult tradeoff. Using better-calibrated warfare tactics--manpower instead of firepower, snipers and special forces instead of tanks and artillery--could mean saving innocent Iraqi lives at the cost of more U.S. casualties. Of course, the U.S. government must concern itself with American as well as Iraqi public support for the war. But for now, Washington should be especially mindful of the losses it inflicts on Iraqi civilians, because today the lack of support for its efforts among them is a far more immediate threat than the lack of support at home.

Such caution is all the more warranted because, in one important respect, the Iraqi insurgency is very different from the communist and nationalist insurgencies of the Cold War: it lacks unity of command and an overarching ideology. The only factor that unites Muslim fundamentalist mujahideen, secular Baathist holdouts, and Shiite extremists is their desire to expel American forces--a goal that a majority of the Iraqi people seems to share, too. If that rallying cause can be weakened by diminishing Washington's involvement, the Iraqi government should be able to play on divisions among the rebels, steering some of them away from violence and toward the political mainstream, while marginalizing or dividing the rest. Washington should encourage the Iraqi regime in such efforts, including by offering amnesty to those prepared to renounce violence and enter the political process. The United States never sought to try German, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese soldiers for shooting at Americans. Washington is currently backing the Colombian government's plan to offer amnesty to right-wing paramilitaries and should encourage a similar effort in Iraq.

THE NEIGHBORS' BUSINESS

In order to stabilize Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the United States had to work with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, the two individuals personally responsible for the genocide it was trying to stop. In 2001, Washington worked with Iran, Pakistan, India, and Russia to install a broadly representative successor to the Taliban, even though those states had been tearing Afghanistan apart for a generation. Strikingly, however, the United States has marched into Iraq without any underlying strategy designed to secure the support of neighboring states. In fact, insofar as it has cast its occupation of Iraq as the first step toward the democratic transformation of the entire region, its public diplomacy has actively diminished incentives for regional collaboration.