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?

Decentralization, which Gelb advocates, would amount to a form of partition. Various partition proposals have been floated since 2003, ranging from a hard division of the country into three separate ministates (one for Shiites in the south, another for Kurds in the north, and a third for Sunnis in the center-west) to variations on federal systems, with a weak central government and more or less autonomous regions. The problem with hard partition is that the Sunnis will not accept it: as an independent state, the Sunni heartland would not be economically viable. The Sunnis would rather fight than accept such impoverishment; hard partition would therefore not end the war. But a softer form of federalism might well offer a basis for constitutional compromise. The problem is not a shortage of ideas on how to divide oil revenues or protect the rights of different regions; it is getting the Iraqis to agree on one of them. Anything they accept would surely satisfy U.S. interests. But to date they have been unwilling to make the needed compromises. Breaking the parties' intransigence will require not so much a new proposal for softer or harder partition, but a new source of leverage over the parties.

Of course, military leverage, too, has many shortcomings. As I noted in my article, to use its military leverage effectively, the United States might need to keep its forces in Iraq for longer than the troops could endure or than U.S. voters would tolerate; a realignment of U.S. positions would be hard to sell domestically; and both Sunni political development and clear-eyed rationality on all sides would be needed before a successful compromise could be reached (and yet these are two elements that may be unavailable given the emotions the war has triggered and Iraq's cultural complexity). Because there are no easy options for Iraq -- all proposals have important disadvantages, and none can guarantee success -- a combination of imperfect initiatives may be needed. And Washington must consider using in such a combination every major source of unexploited leverage at its disposal, including the threat that the United States will realign itself militarily.

Is this threat likely to be credible or effective? Neither Diamond nor Kaufmann thinks so. Kaufmann thinks it is too similar to current U.S. policy to succeed; Diamond thinks it is too different to be credible. In fact, it is neither. A threat of military realignment would add a missing military dimension to the current U.S. policy of brokering a compromise by pressuring each side to negotiate. Realignment already is U.S. policy, but today that policy excludes military threats from the realignment tool kit. If anything, current U.S. military policy actively undermines Washington's bargaining leverage: it aims to build an indigenous Iraqi military as quickly as possible, regardless of the parties' behavior in negotiations, and then to withdraw U.S. forces whether the war is over or not. This policy promises to get U.S. troops home as soon as possible, but in the meantime it is undermining the prospects for settlement by discouraging the parties from compromising. The Shiites and the Kurds will be protected until they can fight their own war, whether they bargain or not, and the Sunnis will face a U.S.-armed opponent whether they bargain or not. So why should any of them compromise? Rather than pursue a military policy that undoes its diplomacy, the U.S. government should coordinate its military and political strategies by deliberately using contingent military threats to create bargaining leverage.

Skillfully conveyed, such threats could be powerful levers. So far, the United States has actively restrained Iraq's security forces, which are dominated by Shiites and Kurds, granting them only light weapons of limited firepower. If it were to remove such constraints and provide the security forces with liberal quantities of modern tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, body armor, night-vision equipment, armed helicopters, and fixed-wing ground-attack aircraft, the capacity of the Kurds and the Shiites to commit mass violence against the Sunnis would increase dramatically -- and very visibly. Threatening such a change could provide an important incentive for the Sunnis to compromise.

Conversely, a U.S. threat to cease backing the Shiites, coupled with a program to arm the Sunnis overtly or in a semi-clandestine way, would substantially reduce the Shiites' military prospects. Iran might provide more aid to the Shiites to compensate them for some of their loss, but the United States' military potential so far outstrips that of Iran that rational Shiites could hardly welcome the prospect of being abandoned by Washington and having to confront U.S.-armed Sunnis.

This threat could be made credible to the combatants. The Shiites are very attentive to signs that the United States might abandon them or realign itself against them. Many of them already charge that even Washington's limited tilt toward the Sunnis in the ongoing political negotiations amounts to a "second betrayal" (the first one being the United States' failure to support the Shiite uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991). An official U.S. threat of military realignment would be hard for the Shiites to ignore. On the other side, some Sunnis already view the United States as a potential protector against Shiite violence, as the fighting in Tal Afar last spring suggests.

Effective leverage need not take the form of clumsy ultimatums, which risk forcing the United States into corners, or the kind of blunt expositions that analysts like me put forward in the interest of clarity. Diplomats enjoy a rich palette of subtler signals with which they can indicate incremental movement in one direction without irrevocably committing to a maximum use of force.

Ideally, Washington would combine any threat with an inducement: the promise to keep U.S. troops in Iraq as long as would be necessary to protect the parties who cooperate. Does the U.S. government have enough political capital at home to accomplish this? Perhaps not. Recent polls of U.S. public opinion are not encouraging. On the other hand, public opinion is not independent of government policy, and voters might have a higher tolerance for casualties if they thought both that the stakes of U.S. involvement in Iraq were high and that Washington's policies there were feasible. The stakes certainly are high. But the American public currently lacks a reason to think that the Bush administration's policies can succeed.

Some analysts, however, believe that the war is already lost, whether or not the Bush administration can get the American people to rally behind it. Kaufmann, for example, argues that communal tensions in Iraq have already passed the point of no return. Calming the situation is now impossible regardless of U.S. policy, and so U.S. forces should withdraw, tarrying only long enough to escort Iraqi refugees to new homes.

He may be right. But he overstates his case by ignoring any contradictory evidence. Although Kaufmann sees no hope of intercommunal accommodation, both the Shiites and the Sunnis, when under sufficient pressure from the United States, have made important concessions to ethnic rivals over the past year. Last fall, the Shiites agreed to the Sunnis' demands for more permissive procedures for amending the constitution; in deference to the Sunnis and the Kurds, the Shiites withdrew Ibrahim al-Jaafari as a nominee for the prime ministership of the permanent government last April; and the Sunnis accepted Nouri al-Maliki, a staunch Shiite, for the prime minister's post even though they clearly preferred other candidates. These concessions were made grudgingly and slowly, and they required heavy U.S. pressure. Much heavier pressure would probably be needed to reach a lasting agreement about issues as important as the constitution. But is there really no chance for a compromise solution, as Kaufmann claims, even if the United States uses all the leverage it has?