Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon

Stephen Biddle

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

Summary:  Most discussions of U.S. policy in Iraq assume that it should be informed by the lessons of Vietnam. But the conflict in Iraq today is a communal civil war, not a Maoist ''people's war,'' and so those lessons are not valid. ''Iraqization,'' in particular, is likely to make matters worse, not better.

Stephen Biddle is a Senior Fellow in Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Military Power.

If Washington fails to implement this plan, it will continue to have only limited leverage over the parties, each of which sees compromise as risky. The groups fear that if their rivals gain control of the government, they will face oppression, impoverishment, or mass violence. Compromising means ceding some power to rivals, and a miscalculation that cedes too much power could result in the enemy's seizing the rest later, with catastrophic results. In contrast, an ongoing low-intensity war does not look so bad: as long as U.S. forces patrol Iraq, the country will not break up and the conflict will not descend into all-out chaos. The parties' refusal to compromise may be an obstacle to real peace, but it is also a way to avert mass violence.

The only way to break the logjam is to change the parties' relative comfort with the status quo by drastically raising the costs of their failure to negotiate. The U.S. presence now caps the war's intensity, and U.S. aid could give any side an enormous military advantage. Thus Washington should threaten to use its influence to alter the balance of power depending on the parties' behavior. By doing so, it could make stubbornness look worse than cooperation and compel all sides to compromise.

Today, however, Washington is doing just the opposite. Washington's stated policy is to field an ethnically mixed Iraqi military as quickly as possible in order to replace U.S. troops, with or without a stable constitutional deal in place -- an approach that forfeits Washington's primary source of leverage with all three local factions. The Sunnis have little to fear from the plan, for if it succeeds, they will have been saved from a powerful U.S.-trained Shiite-Kurdish army without having had to make any concessions. The prospect that the United States' policy could fail, thus leaving the Sunnis on their own, may frighten them, but since the likelihood of that happening is unrelated to their willingness to make political compromises, they have little reason to negotiate. Iraqization gives Washington no more sway with the Shiites or the Kurds, because it involves keeping U.S. troops in Iraq until these groups can defend themselves, regardless of whether they negotiate seriously in the meantime. So the only way out of this problem is for Washington to postpone Iraqization and make it contingent on the parties' willingness to bargain.

This shift in strategy will require changes in other current policies, too. For example, Washington will have to suspend its campaign against the Sunni insurgent leadership, former senior Baathists, and Sunni tribal leaders. If the key to success is a negotiated communal compromise, Washington needs negotiating partners who can make a deal stick -- in other words, leaders with authority among their own people and combatants. But many of the Sunnis with such stature are now fighting in the insurgency, are in hiding, or are banned from politics because of their Baathist pasts; others are excluded by Washington's reluctance to reinforce a tribal loyalty system based on graft and patronage. The result is a weak Sunni political leadership lacking both the legitimacy and the power to negotiate a settlement. Since such weakness could be fatal to the prospects for ethnic compromise, Washington should consider trying to accelerate the emergence of a credible Sunni leadership by endorsing a wider amnesty for former Baathists and insurgents and learning to tolerate nepotistic tribal leaders.

Washington should also avoid setting any more arbitrary deadlines for democratization. Pressure to reach demanding political milestones can further polarize factional politics, and the parliamentary elections in December 2005 may already have hardened communal divides. In a people's war, early electoral deadlines can make sense; in a communal civil war, they are dangerous. Democracy is the long-term goal in Iraq, of course, but getting there will require a near-term constitutional compromise whose key provision must be an agreement to limit the freedom of Iraqi voters to elect governments that concentrate ethnic and sectarian power. Resolving the country's communal security problems must take priority over bringing self-determination to the Iraqi people -- or the democracy that many hope for will never emerge.

BACK ON TRACK

Putting such a program in place would not be easy. It would deny President Bush the chance to offer restless Americans an early troop withdrawal, replace a Manichaean narrative featuring evil insurgents and a noble government with a complicated story of multiparty interethnic intrigue, and require that Washington be willing to shift its loyalties in the conflict according to the parties' readiness to negotiate. Explaining these changes to U.S. voters would be a challenge. Washington would have to recalibrate its dealings with Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds with great precision, making sure to neither unduly frighten nor unduly reassure any of the groups. Even the most adroit diplomacy could fail if the Iraqis do not grasp the strategic logic of their situation or if a strong and sensible Sunni political leadership does not emerge. And the failure to reach a stable ethnic compromise soon could strain the U.S. military beyond its breaking point.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to think such a plan could work. Most important, the underlying interests of all local parties would be far better served by a constitutional compromise than by an all-out war. The losers would have to pay the butcher's bill of combat and bear the oppressor's yoke in the aftermath; even the winners would pay a terrible price. Since no side today can be confident that it would come out on top in a war, the prospect of losing should be a powerful motivation to compromise. The December 2005 round of negotiations in Baghdad suggested that the parties may have started to understand these stakes: the willingness of the Shiite negotiators to yield to the Sunnis' preferences on the procedures for amending the constitution indicates that compromise may be possible. The current U.S. strategy in Iraq makes this compromise less likely by shielding Iraqis from the full consequences of their stubbornness and thereby weakening Washington's potentially formidable leverage over the military balance of power. But if that changes -- and it can change -- the chances for success will be significantly increased.

At a minimum, Washington should stop making matters worse. Understanding the war in Iraq as a communal civil war cannot guarantee success, but without this understanding failure is far too likely. Whatever the prospects for peace, they would be considerably better if Washington stopped mistaking Iraq for Vietnam and started seeing it for what it really is.