Responses to "What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable"

Web Exclusive (posted July 11, 2006)

by Kevin Drum

Kevin Drum is a contributing writer for The Washington Monthly and author of the blog "Political Animal" at www.washingtonmonthly.com.

In strictly military terms, America's biggest failure in Iraq has been a persistent refusal to give more than lip service to counterinsurgency and peacekeeping. This has been folly of an extraordinary order. Still, Stephen Biddle does us a favor by reminding us that at this point the issue is useful for little more than recriminations and score settling. The conflict in Iraq might once have been a classical insurgency, but no longer. It's now a low-grade sectarian civil war, and the counterinsurgency techniques that would have been effective in 2003 are probably not worth haggling over today.

Biddle also suggests that the current Bush administration plan — "as they stand up, we'll stand down" — won't do anything to stop the fighting. I think this is correct: The Iraqis who are standing up are mostly members of thuggish, sectarian militias that are far more likely to keep the civil war boiling than they are to turn down the heat. Unfortunately, he and his fellow participants in the roundtable don't agree on what to do about it.

Biddle himself proposes that the United States should threaten to pull out as a way of coercing the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to negotiate a political settlement in good faith, but this is little more than desperation talking. Nobody would find such a threat credible, and even if they did, there are far too many parties on all sides who would be perfectly happy to see the Americans leave for such a threat to carry much weight.

The other suggestions are no more comforting. Larry Diamond and James Dobbins put their faith in redoubled diplomatic efforts, differing mostly in the relative importance they place on internal actors vs. external ones. Chaim Kaufmann and Leslie Gelb, by contrast, favor map-drawing exercises. Gelb proposes a sort of Middle Eastern Belgium, with Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish regions coexisting more-or-less amicably, while Kaufmann foresees a hellish version of Switzerland, with Iraq effectively divided into dozens or hundreds of militarized cantons. Unfortunately, none of these sound much more convincing than the diplomatic plan John McCain offered to a group of potential donors in New York a few weeks ago: "One of the things I would do if I were president," he told the assembled worthies, "would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit.'"

McCain aside, does anyone really think that the Bush administration has either the desire or the ability to pull off a complex, multiparty diplomatic effort that will find a magic formula for peace? Even the most committed internationalist would have a hard time making this work, and George W. Bush is the farthest thing imaginable from a committed internationalist.

And breaking up Iraq? It might happen of its own accord, but what makes us think we have the leverage to help it along? Gelb suggests that a form of weak federalism "would be in the interest of all parties," but that's wishful thinking. It might be in the best interest of the Kurds, who will probably end up with their own semi-autonomous region regardless of what else happens, but there's little reason to think that any of Iraq's Arabs, whether Shiite or Sunni, will buy into this plan for the rest of the country. They've certainly provided no serious indication of interest in the past.

If these proposals were simply unlikely to work, it might be worth trying them. But the dangers go beyond that. It's true that a full-blown Iraqi civil war now seems increasingly inevitable no matter what course we take, but that's not the worst that could happen. The worst that could happen is a full-blown Iraqi civil war with the U.S. military caught in the middle. At that point, our options would be to either take sides and become a tacit party to a near genocide, or stand by helplessly while Iraqis slaughter each other in our presence. That would be devastating not just for Iraq and the Middle East but for America's prestige and its future freedom of action as well.

Sometimes there's simply no good answer, and at this point, staying in Iraq is doing far more damage to our standing in the world than a careful withdrawal ever would. Withdrawing from Vietnam didn't destroy America's standing in the world, withdrawing from Algeria didn't destroy France's standing in the world, and withdrawing from Lebanon didn't destroy Israel's standing in the world. It was staying too long that did the damage.

It's time to put away our egos and start taking the war on terror seriously. This means figuring out a prudent and sensible way to leave Iraq. It may not be a good answer, but it's nonetheless the best answer we have.