Good Politics, No Strategy

A Roundtable on the Iraq Study Group Report

December 7, 2006

by Leslie Gelb

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

The Baker-Hamilton report is both more and less than meets the eye. It's good bipartisan politics, a courageous analysis of the bleak situation in Iraq, and a compendium of useful policy steps. But because it doesn't face up to the full consequences of its own pessimistic analysis and because it dodges the central question of political power-sharing among Iraqis, it leaves the United States without an overall strategy — which will put the country in the position of having to confront the tough decisions all over again six months from now.

The Iraq Study Group's aim was both to establish a needed bipartisan consensus in a Washington torn asunder by politics and to shake up Iraq policy. It accomplished both, which wasn't easy, and its members should feel proud of their achievement.

The report's assessment of where things stand in Iraq — along with the recent testimony of the CIA director and leaked memos by the national security adviser and the departing secretary of defense — destroys the credibility of the "we are winning" White House school of thought and opens the door to an honest consideration of policy. The report concludes that "the situation is grave and deteriorating," that "sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability," and that "current U.S. policy is not working." For the last two years, people uttering such obvious truths have been vilified; now, thanks to the ISG's frankness, the American public and its leaders can start working from the same realistic facts.

One might think that, after painting such a gloomy picture, the ISG would have urged some hard-hitting policy changes. Here, however, it seems to have settled for political compromises instead.

First, the report recommends beginning the difficult process of withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. It argues for shifting the U.S. military's mission from combat to support by 2008, withdrawing the combat brigades (about 70,000 troops) and apparently using the remaining 70,000 troops for training Iraqi forces (without explaining why that would work now when it hasn't before), embedding advisers in Iraqi units (which is incredibly dangerous), and force protection. This shift would send two messages: The United States is leaving, and it's staying. The proposal was a way of splitting the difference between the Republican members of the group and their Democratic counterparts. Implementing it would mean that neither Americans nor Iraqis would know which way the United States was really going. It would have been better to have set out a plan for full withdrawal and redeployment within about two years, but with a movable end point.

Second, the report calls for intensive regional diplomacy to help the Iraqis settle their internal differences and bring about regional peace. One element of this is to hammer out Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, most of which the Israelis have already offered. The report says little about hammering the Saudis and others in the region to prepare their own peoples to live in peace with the Jewish state of Israel.

Another element is talking with Iran and Syria, a move long overdue and also long opposed by President George W. Bush. But while the report talks about the strategic goodies that Washington can offer Iran and Syria, it says little about how and why Tehran and Damascus should help in Iraq. All it really says is that they have an interest in preventing chaos there. If so, then why aren't they helping already? The fact is that right now, they don't have such an interest, and there's nothing serious in the ISG's bag of tricks about creating a viable political deal in Iraq that might make these neighbors likely to change their mind.

The third element is getting the present Iraqi government to shape up by establishing milestones. If it cannot meet the targets, the ISG argues, Washington should punish it by reducing aid. On the other hand, if it meets the terms, Washington will still withdraw troops and scale down aid. The ISG's members reached this interesting compromise because they fully realized that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki cannot, in fact, meet the demands made upon it (break up the militias, stop corruption, and bring about sectarian reconciliation). The ISG's members knew they had no real hope of settling things down in Iraq without a political power-sharing arrangement, and yet they rejected the decentralizing plan that Senator Joseph Biden and I advanced (on the grounds that federalism means partition) and didn't offer any plan of their own, save to ask Maliki to do the impossible. Thus, the ISG's members ended up with a contradiction and set themselves and everyone else up for failure at some point down the road.

This failure could ultimately be used for two ends: either to blame Maliki and the Iraqis and grease the skids for full withdrawal, or to halt the whole withdrawal process and put the United States back in the very same strategic box it is in today. The result is likely to be the latter. Six months or a year from now the ISG's report will be a memory and the ball will be back in the hands of the man who got the United States into the quagmire to begin with: the decider in the White House. At that point, Bush is likely to revert to his gut and heart, and decide not to be the president who lost Iraq. That honor he will pass on to his successor.

The ISG has taken Americans to the border of the promised land. To enter, we needed a clear-cut damage limitation strategy; instead, we got the best of Washington: a temporizing one.