Heading for the Exit

A Roundtable on the Iraq Study Group Report

December 7, 2006

by Stephen Biddle

Stephen Biddle is Senior Fellow in Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Military Power.

The prognosis for Iraq looks bad and is getting worse. If the trend does not improve soon, the United States may have no choice but to cut its losses and get out. Recently, many have looked to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to engineer a change in strategy that might arrest this decline, and the ISG's report does indeed contain some useful ideas and worthwhile recommendations. But on the whole, it offers the political groundwork for a complete withdrawal more than it offers a sustainable solution to the conflict.

The report presents 79 discrete recommendations but puts its emphasis on three crucial points: the need for a regional diplomatic conference involving Iran and Syria; the importance of threatening to withdraw U.S. support if the Iraqis fail to make sufficient progress in "national reconciliation, security and governance"; and the value of shifting U.S. military priorities away from combat and toward training and support.

A regional conference is probably a good idea, but it would be costly and have limited potential for terminating Iraq's civil war. Iran and Syria presumably have more influence with Iraq's warring Shiite and Sunni factions than the United States does, and if they used that influence to its fullest to promote reconciliation, it might make a difference. But Iraq's communal groups see grave risks in the compromises that reconciliation requires, and both Sunnis and Shiites have important internal sources of funding and supply that could enable them to continue hostilities even without external support. Neither Iran nor Syria, furthermore, is likely to help the United States in Iraq without some sort of quid pro quo, and if that means U.S. acquiescence in Iran's nuclear weapons program or Syria's reassertion of its influence over Lebanon, then the price could be high indeed.

The threat to withdraw U.S. support if the Iraqis fail to get their act together is a step in the right direction. As the ISG implies, unconditional promises of assistance reduce the Iraqi factions' incentives to accept risky compromises for reconciliation. Only threats and promises conditioned on cooperation can move recalcitrant parties to compromise. But the ISG's approach is one-sided. Iraqis who want the United States to stay might fear a threatened withdrawal, but those who want it to leave would see such a withdrawal as a benefit not a cost, and so remain intransigent. A two-sided threat would be extremely hard to implement, but at least it would address all the relevant players and have a chance of working.

The ISG's recommendations for U.S. military posture in Iraq are the most problematic of the three sets. The ISG proposes that as many as 17,000 troops be transferred to reinforce the longstanding U.S. effort to train Iraqi security forces. Its associated recommendation that these be the best, highest-qualified soldiers for the job would require that these troops be drawn from U.S. combat brigades. This would divert the equivalent of perhaps 4-5 brigades' worth of combat troops (out of the roughly 15 combat brigades present in the country at any given time) into the training mission. And although the ISG does not mandate this, the report's language clearly indicates a hope that by 2008 all combat brigades can be withdrawn and the U.S. presence limited to training and support.

Yet, there are important limits on the Iraqi forces' military potential that have nothing to do with their exposure to U.S. training. In an ongoing civil war, it is far from clear that Shiite units could be motivated to fight Shiite militias or defend Kurds on behalf of a government that many view as corrupt or inept. Sectarian politicians and ministers could thwart attempts to install apolitical senior officers or structure combat formations on non-sectarian grounds. Redirecting thousands of U.S. combat soldiers into training roles will enable more hours of instruction for Iraqis, but it is not clear that the lack of instruction is the binding constraint here.

It is clear, however, that U.S. combat action is what now keeps the lid on the violence level in Iraq's civil war — and the greater the shift of U.S. forces into training, the less of this there will be. The less patrolling U.S. troops do, in turn, the faster the sectarian death toll will rise, and the less ability Washington will have to control the environment. Iraq is dangerous enough now; if any significant fraction of U.S. troops are pulled off the streets, the situation will get worse. And as it gets worse, the Americans left in Iraq will get more exposed, not less.

To support Iraqi forces logistically, for example, requires resupply convoys to run fuel and cargo to Iraqi units. The lower the U.S. combat patrol intensity, the greater the threat these convoys will face from roadside bombs, as guerillas will find it easier to plant them without U.S. interference or clearance, and the greater the threat the resupply effort will eventually face from ambushes as the initiative shifts to the enemy.

The trainers the ISG would embed in Iraqi small units would be especially vulnerable. At best, it would take a long time for U.S.-trained Iraqi forces to reach anything like U.S. combat effectiveness in large numbers. In the meantime, tiny embed units would be too distributed to be effective as combatants. A reduction in full-strength U.S. combat patrolling, meanwhile, would result in even faster growth in the Iraqi civilian death toll. Many Iraqis already blame the United States for sectarian violence and would prefer that their own army or militia be allowed to suppress the enemy with proper ruthlessness. This view will only gain force as the violence gets worse. And with some reason: a primary mission of U.S. embeds would be to prevent human rights abuses by parent Iraqi units, which means that U.S. trainers would indeed be constraining the ability of Iraqi fighters to confront their rivals with maximum brutality. How long would it be before these tiny penny packets of Americans become special targets? And if the civil war's violence escalates enough, there is likely to be an explicit breakup of the "national" military into its component factions (as happened in Lebanon), which would leave thousands of U.S. embeds distributed around the country in small, exposed, vulnerable handfuls as anarchy descends.

This problem applies to all suggestions that involve "in between" troop levels. Although politically popular among Americans seeking a middle ground between escalation and withdrawal, such proposals create military postures that reduce Americans' potential to control the environment and defend themselves even as they leave plenty of Americans behind to serve as targets. One can make a military case for a posture with the largest troop level sustainable, and one can make a case for total withdrawal. But the options in between are likely to prove militarily unstable, with rising casualty rates that will eventually create pressure for the zero option but only after lives are squandered needlessly in the interim.

Still, the ISG was never intended as a purely substantive undertaking. It was designed to play an important domestic political role, and that it might just do. Its report offers a way for the United States to exit the conflict with something like a bipartisan policy, should the president eventually choose to do so. Even if the ISG's suggestions do not resolve the conflict in Iraq, they could help reduce the domestic fallout from defeat — providing cover for a bipartisan decision to withdraw by shifting responsibility for the failure from the Americans to the Iraqis, who will likely be unable to meet the various milestones set out for them as the price of continued U.S. support. But if the president is adamant about refusing to exit absent success as he defines it, no commission report or interagency review will make much difference.