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?

No Model War

James Dobbins

Stephen Biddle has provided a very useful reminder that history teaches a variety of relevant lessons -- even if official Washington often has difficulty absorbing more than one at a time. In 2003, the Bush administration based its plans for the reconstruction of Iraq on the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan. Its critics have increasingly compared the results to Vietnam. Biddle suggests that the better analogy may be post-Cold War Yugoslavia.

Biddle's choice is apt in many respects. The Bush administration invoked Germany and Japan as models for Iraq's transformation because the occupations of those countries were highly successful and because those successes had nothing to do with Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, or, for that matter, Richard Nixon. But if the administration's choice was politically safe, it was not otherwise very instructive. In 1945, when the United States occupied Germany and Japan, those countries were both highly homogenous societies with first World economies. And they had both surrendered following devastating defeats after years of brutal warfare.

None of these conditions existed in Yugoslavia in the 1990s or in Iraq a decade later. Both these countries had been created in the early twentieth century from the remnants of other empires (the Austrian and the Ottoman) and were established within borders that included disparate ethnic and religious groups that would have preferred not to live in the same state. Neither Yugoslavia nor Iraq ever developed a first World economy, nor had either surrendered.

Had the Bush administration used Bosnia or Kosovo as the model for Iraq, it would have realized that the stabilization and reconstruction of that country was going to require a lot more time, money, and manpower than it had planned. It would have anticipated the security vacuum that was likely to emerge immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. It would have arrived with plans for the orderly disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration into society of sectarian militias and Republican Guard troops, and with blueprints for expanding the police and reforming the army. It would have moved quickly in the aftermath of the invasion -- at a time when U.S. prestige was high, when no significant resistance had emerged, and when the world still assumed that weapons of mass destruction would be found -- to expand international participation in the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq.

But it did none of these things. Instead, a faulty historical analogy led to faulty policy choices. When Baghdad fell, the Bush administration initially seemed to view Iraq as a prize won rather than as a burden acquired. It banned French, German, and Russian companies from reconstruction contracts. President George W. Bush rebuffed Prime Minister Tony Blair's efforts to give the United Nations a central role in the mission. The United States chose to designate itself an occupying power, basing its continued military presence on the laws of armed conflict rather than the UN Charter. All these positions were eventually reversed. But by then, an armed resistance movement had emerged, and with it disappeared any opportunity to draw the rest of the international community into Iraq more deeply.

As the possibility of Balkan-style peace enforcement in Iraq receded, that of Vietnam-style counterinsurgency advanced. Some critics of the administration have used the Vietnam analogy to argue for a withdrawal of U.S. troops. For others, it provides a model for how to redirect U.S. efforts. A number of experts (such as the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack) have drawn on the Vietnam experience to make the case for a step-by-step pacification campaign, in which coalition forces would concentrate on securing a gradually expanding swath of territory and on protecting the local population therein, giving it better government and thereby winning its cooperation in marginalizing violent extremists.

DOING MORE WITH LESS

In his article, Biddle argues against a campaign based on such a "hearts and minds" approach, insisting that Iraqis are not fighting for good government, but for a state dominated by their own group (Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd). However, like some of those employing the Vietnam analogy, Biddle identifies the Kurdish and Shiite militias as the greatest long-term threat to Iraqi unity and urges the United States to shift the weight of its operations in Iraq from hunting down insurgents in the Sunni heartland to establishing secure areas, initially in Baghdad and the Shiite south.