Only Connect

A Roundtable on the Iraq Study Group Report

December 7, 2006

by Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Squandered Victory. He was a member of the Political Development Expert Working Group of the Iraq Study Group.

The Iraq Study Group offers a comprehensive strategy to arrest the slide toward chaos in Iraq. The scope of the report is laudable: without a grand strategy to deal with the interlocking political, security, economic, and regional components, Iraq will not turn the corner toward stability. The seduction of a comprehensive approach, however, is that everything can seem equally urgent, and thus priorities may be difficult to discern. The ISG report addresses a dozen different challenges and offers 79 specific recommendations. What matters most?

The overriding imperative is "national reconciliation": a political deal on the sharing of power and resources and the full incorporation of the bitterly alienated Sunnis into the political process. Iraq's major groups must reach a new and more sustainable constitutional settlement, one that each finds rather unpalatable — but less so than continued war.

The ISG recognizes that the core problem in Iraq is political, not military: "U.S. forces . . . cannot stop the violence — or even contain it — if there is no underlying political agreement among Iraqis about the future of their country." The 2005 Iraqi constitution was not a charter of national consensus but a Shiite and Kurdish imposition on the Sunnis. In allowing for the creation of a Shiite super-region spanning the entire southern half of Iraq (with roughly 70 percent of the country's oil and gas wealth), in providing for a referendum by the end of 2007 that would enable the Kurdistan Region to incorporate Kirkuk (with most of the rest of Iraq's petroleum wealth), and in assigning to the regions and the provinces apparent control over the future development of oil and gas fields, the constitution gave the Kurds and the Shiites power and resources while leaving the Sunnis out in the desert. The ISG thus observes: "Unless Sunnis believe they can get a fair deal in Iraq through the political process, there is no prospect that the insurgency will end." And if the insurgency persists, so will the escalation of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing in retaliation.

For Iraq to be stabilized, the ISG notes, the Iraqi government "needs to act now to give a signal" to the Sunnis "that there is a place for them in national life." The constitution must be rewritten to lodge current and future control over oil fields and revenues clearly with the central government. A fair formula must then be fashioned — and, I would add, internationally guaranteed — to share oil revenue among the provinces and the regions, largely on the basis of population. De-Baathification, meanwhile, must be rolled back so that most of the dismissed Baathists and Arab nationalists (other than Saddam's top loyalists) are brought back into government and public service jobs. Amnesty must be offered to most of those who have waged war. And the referendum on Kirkuk should be deferred and the conflict there submitted to international arbitration. The report might have added explicitly that the constitutional provision for a "Shiastan" super-region must be scrapped.

How does the ISG suggest that the items on this ambitious political agenda be accomplished? First, by "build[ing] a new international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region." I agree with this general approach. I also endorse the effort to reach out to all the regional neighbors, including Iran and Syria. But too much of the media frenzy over the report has focused on this one aspect. Iraq is a crisis that affects not just the region but the entire world. The quest for a solution must not simply be regionalized; it must be globalized, with the proposed International Support Group including the European Union, Russia, China, the United Nations, and perhaps several other European and Asian countries as well. Since such a large group could be unwieldy, core diplomatic leadership should come from the United States, the EU, the UN, and the Arab League.

It would help enormously if Iran could be induced to join. But for negotiations with Iran to succeed — as I explain, with Michael McFaul and Abbas Milani, in the current issue of The Washington Quarterly — they must be bold and comprehensive, addressing all the major dimensions of the conflict between the United States and Iran, including the nuclear question. Even if Iran were to agree to talk, such negotiations would take some time, and there is not a lot of time left in Iraq. The "New Diplomatic Offensive" that the ISG recommends must therefore move forward without Iran if necessary — but if it does and draws together a truly global coalition, Iran will end up being isolated.

The United States can no longer go it alone diplomatically in Iraq. U.S. credibility, energy, and leverage are heavily diminished, if not just about drained. An international partnership to mediate the Iraq conflict would bring fresh perspectives and considerably greater diplomatic and financial resources to induce and reward hard compromises. Without such an international full-court press for an Iraqi settlement, the stalemate will continue and the violence will intensify.

There is one big card the United States has left to play, and the ISG acknowledges it. That is the very fact and scope of the U.S. military presence — which is the principal factor now standing between a very bad, bloody situation and much more catastrophic carnage. It would be irresponsible to pull out immediately and leave Iraq to all-out civil war. But it would be foolhardy to think that Washington can prevent civil war simply by staying the course. Militarily, there is no course left that does not carry huge risks. Over the last nine months, the ISG (and many of its advisers, such as myself) came to conclude that "national reconciliation" will probably come, if it ever does, only when the Iraqi parties who have dug in their heels on oil, federalism, and other important issues perceive that the price of their obstinacy is simply too high. The United States must therefore tie its military, political, and economic support for the Iraqi government to progress on national reconciliation and the standing up of the Iraqi security forces. Although that may seem an eleventh-hour gamble to right a failing situation, that is in fact where the United States is in Iraq today.