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?

Uniting Iraq by decentralizing it is not likely to make most Iraqis happy, but it is a plan that gives each group most of what it considers essential: re-blessed autonomy for the Kurds, some degree of autonomy and money for the Sunnis, and for the Shiites, the historic freedom to rule themselves and enjoy their future riches. For all of these parties, it is perhaps the last chance to escape civil war.

This plan provides reasonable time for Iraqis to tend to their own security, and its incentives are tangible. It is carefully paced to salvage the honor of those Americans who served and sacrificed themselves in Iraq. And it allows the U.S government both to depart honorably and to leave Iraq to the Iraqis for their own disposition -- as it should be.

Leslie H. Gelb is President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Biddle Replies

It is a privilege to respond to such an august panel, especially when we agree on so much. Larry Diamond, James Dobbins, Chaim Kaufmann, Leslie Gelb, and I all agree that current U.S. strategy in Iraq is unlikely to succeed. Diamond, Dobbins, Kaufmann, and I further agree that Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war, albeit one waged at low intensity for now, and Kaufmann and I agree that "Iraqization" is likely to make things worse.

Perhaps most important, we all agree that if the United States is ever to succeed in Iraq, Washington must help Iraq's communities reach a compromise on a viable constitution that distributes power among them. Kaufmann thinks this goal is impossible to achieve, meaning failure is inevitable. The rest of us believe the United States' current leverage for obtaining such a compromise is limited but propose ways to increase it.

I have argued that the United States' most powerful source of unexploited leverage is military: a U.S. threat to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, realign U.S. support for the parties to the conflict, or reinforce any one of them may be necessary to motivate compromise. Diamond, Dobbins, and Gelb propose a variety of other ways for the United States to increase its leverage. Diamond suggests turning to international mediators, Dobbins seeks regional collaboration among Iraq's neighbors, and Gelb advocates U.S. support for a decentralized Iraqi government and both security and financial guarantees for Iraq's Sunnis. These options are not mutually exclusive, and each merits careful consideration.

But each one also has important drawbacks. International mediation, for example, could be hard to obtain. Intervention by the European Union would certainly be very unpopular with the European public, which overwhelmingly opposes the war. Many Iraqis resent the United Nations for having imposed harsh sanctions on Iraq for a decade. Nor is it clear that either the eu or the un could offer anything to the parties that would outweigh the grave dangers that Iraqis associate with intercommunal compromise.

As Dobbins notes, for regional diplomacy to be effective, the United States must retreat from its initial aim of turning Iraq into a democracy in the near term, because pursuing this goal threatens the political stability of Iraq's neighbors and makes them unwilling to assist. As I argued in my original essay, deferring this project may be necessary anyway. But it would be a bitter pill to swallow for a president who repeatedly cites democratization as the United States' chief interest in Iraq. And it would sacrifice important U.S. interests, at least temporarily. Moreover, regional concord could be difficult to achieve. Iraq's neighbors are as divided over sect and ethnicity as is Iraq itself, and so satisfying their conflicting desiderata could prove far from easy.