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?

There is much to be said for the Vietnamese and Balkan models. Today, U.S. troops in Iraq are having to relearn valuable techniques honed in Vietnam but since forgotten. Ethnic tensions in Iraq are reminiscent of those that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia, and they could produce a similar result. The Shiite and Kurdish militias do present a growing threat, if not to U.S. forces, then certainly to the unity of Iraq. Some repositioning of U.S. and Iraqi troops to ensure greater control over Baghdad -- the country's center of gravity and home to 20 percent of its population, where the Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni communities are thoroughly intermixed -- may well be desirable.

It seems unlikely, however, that the United States at this late stage will deploy a force in Iraq large enough to successfully execute either Balkan-style peace enforcement or Vietnam-style pacification. The United States put 500,000 troops into South Vietnam, a country that in 1970 had a population that was little more than half the size of the population of Iraq today. Nato put over 100,000 troops into Bosnia and Kosovo, societies that in combination are around a fifth of the size of Iraq's. Coalition forces are currently not numerous enough even to suppress the Sunni insurgency; they are certainly insufficient to take on the much more powerful Shiite and Kurdish militias as well.

Biddle and those using the Vietnam analogy have made good abstract cases for a deeper, larger, and longer U.S. military role in Iraq. Unfortunately, the political basis for such a commitment is absent in both U.S. and Iraqi societies. U.S. economic assistance to Iraq has already largely dried up. And the U.S. military presence seems likely to diminish over the coming year. If the United States is to avert a wider civil war in Iraq, it must supplement the influence it derives from these two waning assets with a much more deft and active campaign of regional diplomacy.

Holding together ethnically divided societies is hardly a new or unfamiliar task. Similar efforts were required to end the war in Bosnia in the mid-1990s and to install a successor to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001. Iraq is not a more divided society than was Bosnia or Afghanistan. Both of those states were in the midst of open, long-running civil wars when the United States stepped in. What makes Iraq different and a particularly difficult case is that for the first time the United States has tried to put a society back together without securing the cooperation, however grudging, of the principal neighbors of the state in question.

In contrast to the administration's earlier approach in Afghanistan, its approach in Iraq -- especially the way Washington has characterized its objectives there -- has precluded any sort of regional cooperation. The United States did not invade Afghanistan in order to remake that country as a model for Central Asia, nor did Washington announce an intention to subsequently promote the democratization of all of the states neighboring Afghanistan. Had the United States committed itself to such a program, it would never have secured the support of Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan for the war, nor would it have had their help in shaping the subsequent peace.

The United States, however, did invade Iraq with the intention of making that state a model for the Middle East, promising that success in Iraq would be followed by efforts to transform the political systems of Iraq's neighbors. This was not a vision any of those regimes was likely to embrace. Nor have they.

When states disintegrate, the competing claimants to power inevitably turn to external sponsors for support. Faced with the prospect of a neighboring state's failure, the governments of adjoining states inevitably develop local clientele in the failing state and back rival aspirants to power. Much as one may regret and deplore such activity, neighbors can be neither safely ignored nor effectively barred from exercising their considerable influence. It has always proved wise, therefore, to find ways to engage them constructively.

Washington's vocal commitment to regional democratization and its concomitant challenge to the legitimacy of neighboring regimes work at cross-purposes to its effort to form, consolidate, and support a government of national unity in Iraq. Iraqi political leaders will work together only if and when they receive convergent signals from their various external sponsors. The administration's drive for democratization in the region, therefore, should be subordinated (at least for the next several years) to its efforts to avert civil war in Iraq. Unless Washington can craft a vision of Iraq and of its neighborhood that all the governments of the region can buy into, it will have no chance of securing those governments' help in holding that country together. The central objective of U.S. diplomacy, therefore, should shift from the transformation of Iraq to its stabilization, with an emphasis on power sharing, sovereignty, and regional cooperation, all concepts that Iraq's neighbors can reasonably be asked to endorse.

Neither the American nor the Iraqi people are likely to support a larger, longer U.S. military role in Iraq. Neither the Balkan model of peace enforcement nor the Vietnamese model of pacification is open to the United States. Insofar as a future U.S. military role in Iraq is concerned, the more apt analogy would be the counterinsurgency campaigns of Central America in the 1980s, where U.S. military involvement was largely limited to advice and training. In Iraq, however, this reduced military engagement will have to be paired with a much more active U.S. campaign of regional diplomacy if the slide toward wider civil war is to be averted.

James Dobbins directs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation and is the lead author of The RAND History of Nation-Building.