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?

How to End It

Larry Diamond

In his trenchant analysis, Stephen Biddle ("Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon," March/April 2006) argues that the escalating violence in Iraq is not a nationalist insurgency, as was the Vietnam War, but rather a "communal civil war" and that it must therefore be addressed by pursuing a strategy different from "Vietnamization": if the United States were simply to turn over responsibility for counterinsurgency to the new Iraqi army and police forces, it would risk inflaming the communal conflict, either by empowering the Shiites and the Kurds to slaughter the Sunnis or by enabling a Trojan horse full of Sunni insurgents to penetrate the multiethnic security forces and undermine them.

Biddle is right in many respects. First, Iraq is already in the midst of a very violent civil conflict, which claims 500 to 1,000 lives or more every month. Second, this internal conflict has become primarily communal in nature; as Biddle writes, it is a fight "about group survival." It pits Sunnis against Shiites, in particular, but also Kurds against Sunnis and, more generally, group against group, with smaller minorities coming under attack on multiple fronts. Third, as Biddle warns, the current moderate-intensity communal war could descend into an all-out conflagration, with a high "risk of mass slaughter." Thus the United States cannot in good conscience withdraw from Iraq abruptly -- and doing so would not even be in the United States' national interest -- because that would remove the last significant barrier to a total conflagration.

Washington needs a new strategy, and, as Biddle writes, it cannot simply be "Iraqization" of the conflict. Biddle proposes two bold steps: slowing down the buildup of the Iraqi army and police and threatening to "manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to coerce them to negotiate." But these steps (particularly the latter) are dangerous and unlikely to work, because they follow from an incomplete analysis of the formidably complex, multidimensional nature of the Iraqi conflict.

Although the war in Iraq is mainly a communal conflict, it is not only that. It also contains an important element of nationalist insurgency. One misses an essential piece of the puzzle -- and a reason the conflict is so difficult to contain -- if one does not grasp that many Iraqis (mostly Sunnis) are fighting in some significant measure because they believe they are waging a war of resistance against American occupiers and the Iraqi "traitors" who cooperate with them. Among the score or more of Sunni insurgent groups, both the radical Islamist forces and the secular resistance (which includes Saddam loyalists and surviving Baath Party members) have as one of their principal aims the expulsion of U.S. forces from Iraq. That this goal coincides with the ambition of some to return the Baath Party to power or with the dream of others to establish a Sunni Islamic caliphate -- and with the conviction of all that the Shiite Islamist parties are controlled by Iran or at least stalking-horses for Tehran -- should not obscure the insurgents' dedicated, ideological resistance to the U.S. presence. The communal hatred that extreme Sunni Islamists have deliberately provoked (a cynical tactic in a war of destabilization, eviction, and conquest) has overshadowed the resistance's nationalist dimension but has not removed it.

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The Sunni resistance believes the United States seeks to establish permanent military bases in Iraq in order to control the country and its oil indefinitely. Some of the most ideologically extreme insurgent forces, such as al Qaeda in Iraq, will fight to the death to expel the Americans and achieve their own goal of domination. But since the autumn of 2003, other insurgent groups (accounting for a significant portion of the Sunni insurgency) have sent signals through international intermediaries that they want to talk directly to the United States. Two of these groups' objectives have been to obtain an unambiguous statement from Washington that it will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq and to set up a timetable for a complete U.S. military withdrawal, even if it stretches over two or three years. For more than two years now, Washington has had the opportunity to open negotiations, with the help of international mediators, with these elements of the insurgency and then draw Iraqi government leaders into those talks. The result could have been -- and might still be -- an agreement by key elements of the resistance to wind down the insurgency: Sunni political and religious leaders could send clear messages to their constituencies to suspend the war of resistance and pursue their political interests through the emerging game of peaceful politics and governance instead. In exchange, the United States would need to commit at least to a flexible timetable for the withdrawal of its troops, tied not only to dates but also to facts on the ground and confidence-building measures. Now that the conflict has become "communalized," much more will likely be required to curb the violence. But the need and the opportunity for dealing with the Sunni-based resistance remain.

CURSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

Biddle misses another crucial element of the conflict in Iraq. His proposed strategy of threatening to manipulate the military balance of power among the factions rests on two reciprocal assumptions, both highly questionable. On the one hand, Biddle assumes that the Sunni resistance would be compelled "to come to the negotiating table" if Washington threatened to throw in its lot with a Shiite-Kurdish force. He implies, and other strategists have explicitly argued, that the United States could solve the insurgency problem by backing a joint Shiite-Kurdish military campaign to crush the Sunni resistance. But this threat is not likely to move Sunni forces: many of them believe Sunnis actually represent a majority of the country's population, and all of them would expect and probably receive massive assistance from neighboring Sunni Arab states in any all-out conflict with the Shiites and the Kurds.