What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable

Larry Diamond, James Dobbins, Chaim Kaufmann, Leslie H. Gelb, and Stephen Biddle

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006

Summary:  Can anything -- international mediation, regional collaboration, decentralization, or constitutional negotiations -- save Iraq from a full-fledged civil war and the Bush administration from a foreign policy fiasco?

By the same token, Biddle is on shaky grounds when he assumes that a U.S. threat to back the Sunnis militarily would be credible or that a U.S. threat to withdraw altogether militarily would necessarily panic the Shiites. Many of the Shiite Islamist parties and Shiite militia factions that constitute the ruling United Iraqi Alliance -- most of all, Muqtada al-Sadr's political movement and his irregular Mahdi Army (which fought two campaigns against coalition forces in 2004) -- are eager to be rid of the Americans and might well call their bluff. At that point, Washington would have to either back down from its threat and surrender its remaining leverage with the Shiites or follow through and watch Iraq descend into just the kind of civil war it has been trying to avert.

Biddle is right to argue that the United States does not have the leverage to achieve needed compromises over the fundamental issues that divide Iraq: the constitutional structure, the distribution of oil revenues, and security. But Washington is not likely to summon that leverage through hollow strategic threats. A better strategy -- perhaps the only remaining alternative -- would be for the United States to accelerate its mediation efforts and do so with international assistance. Washington needs and, at this critical juncture, can obtain the active partnership of the United Nations and the European Union to help the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and other senior U.S. officials broker political compromises.

A combined diplomatic effort by the United States, the un, and the eu, working in close coordination and speaking with one voice, might well engage all the relevant actors and gain the leverage to extract concessions from them on key issues. One crucial actor with whom un or other mediators could talk -- but who will not talk with the U.S. occupiers -- is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, still the most widely revered Shiite religious leader in Iraq and still a vastly underestimated force for moderation and compromise. But there are many others who might respond better to coordinated international appeals and to the financial and political incentives that the United States and Europe could together provide. A critical element of this approach would be for the U.S.-un-eu team to bring into the negotiations, at the right moment, the Arab League, which has developed ties with a number of political actors in the Sunni resistance and thus could offer them credible assurances and induce them to compromise.

U.S. and international mediation must begin by facilitating the work of the Constitutional Review Commission. This commission, which was conceived just before last year's October 15 constitutional referendum but has yet to be formed, is to be appointed by the Iraqi Parliament and given four months to recommend amendments to the constitution; those amendments will then have to be adopted by a simple parliamentary majority and approved by another referendum. This process was established because the current constitution has not been able to garner a consensus and is thus not viable. The document leaves Iraq with an extremely weak central authority. And it implicitly splits control over future oil and gas fields between a new Shiite superregion containing 80 percent of the country's oil and gas resources and a Kurdish region that, once it incorporates Kirkuk, will contain the other 20 percent.

If a constitutional compromise can be brokered, joint mediation might then address the other imperative concern, security, and with the various militias produce a plan, backed by extensive international financing, for the demobilization and disarmament of the various nonstate militias and the reintegration of their members into civilian economic life. Until the militias' control of territory and state structures (including the police) is substantially diminished, Iraq will lack a state with sufficient authority to hold the country together and restore some measure of order.

While intensified efforts at mediation proceed, the rebuilding of the Iraqi police and armed forces must go forward as well. It is true that the penetration of the police (and the Ministry of the Interior) by sectarian militias has been alarming and must be reversed; a new leadership and perhaps the embedding of U.S. forces in some police units could help. The rebuilding of the Iraqi army is one area in which the United States has achieved at least some incremental success. Such efforts must continue: Iraq simply cannot be held together much longer without a national army that can defend the new political order.

A truly international mediation process in Iraq would need to be carefully planned, designed, and coordinated. And there is relatively little time to do this. But there is no better option for achieving the political compromise necessary to stabilize Iraq and prevent it from descending into all-out civil war.

Larry Diamond, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq.