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

Web Exclusive (posted July 11, 2006)

by Marc Lynch

Marc Lynch is an associate professor in the department of political science at Williams College and the author of Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today. He writes the blog "Abu Aardvark" at www.abuaardvark.com.

Stephen Biddle does an excellent job of explaining the situation in Iraq today as a communal civil war. His analysis of the dangers of Iraqification under such polarized conditions is spot on, as are his assessments of the logic of communal violence. Larry Diamond is right to point out that Biddle neglects the "resistance to occupation" dimension of the insurgency, but I think that in general Biddle makes a convincing case for the "communalization" of the conflict.

Adopting Biddle's understanding of the problem from the beginning might have helped Washington avoid many of its mistakes. But alas, analysts today don't have the luxury of channeling the farmer who, when asked by a lost traveler for directions back to town, replied, "I wouldn't start from here." Biddle himself doesn't really offer an adequate treatment to the problems he has identified, nor do the other participants in the roundtable.

Biddle's proposal of threatening the creation of a Shiite-Kurdish army while working to bring the Sunnis on board depends on a level of control and micromanagement simply beyond the ability of the United States to muster at this point. We didn't have the troops on the ground to impose order after Saddam's fall, and we don't have them, or the other resources necessary, there now to make Biddle's plan work. As James Dobbins points out, in fact, such resources are likely to decrease rather than increase in coming years — a constraint that any realistic plan must take into account. Iraqis, who are quite capable of scrutinizing the American domestic landscape for signals about the future, know this and are likely to tailor their strategies accordingly.

Even if Washington could somehow muster the necessary resources, moreover, Biddle's plan would still be flawed because of the ease with which local spoilers could torpedo progress. In an insecure environment, it takes only a small number of highly motivated actors willing to use violence to generate ethnic/communal hostilities even if such identities weren't important previously. Biddle assumes that "the underlying interests of all local parties would be far better served by a constitutional compromise than by an all-out war." Perhaps. But it would take only a few violent, recalcitrant spoilers to undo such broader conceptions of community interest — and Iraq today has more than enough of them.

The iron logic of communal violence has repeatedly defeated attempts at management. De-escalation is much, much harder than the initial construction of communal hostility, as the hatreds created by each massacre snowball into revenge, fear, and fury; as the expectation of insecurity pushes people to take matters into their own hands; and as the state itself (as Biddle effectively demonstrates) falls into the hands of communal actors. The biggest flaw in Biddle's analysis is that he underestimates the agency of those same "communal entrepreneurs" who drove the initial escalation. They will not sit back passively and watch Washington help put Humpty-Dumpty back together.

Finally, even if Biddle's plan worked to perfection, coaxing the Sunnis and Shiites into a power-sharing agreement and providing credible security guarantees, the jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda — with or without Zarqawi — have every incentive to keep the conflict going. For al Qaeda, Iraq has been a godsend. This is not because its strategists really expect to create a new caliphate based in Baghdad, or because of any pre-existing commitment to Saddam's regime. It is because the steady stream of images — of brutal Americans, suffering Iraqis, and resisting jihadists — has become the lifeblood of its propaganda videos and rhetoric. Every day that the violence continues — with Americans as the targets — al Qaeda wins. (In this light, Zarqawi's passing might actually be a boon to bin Laden and his colleagues, because he complicated their agenda with his attacks on the Shiites and on Iraqi civilians.) A gradual American withdrawal from Iraq, in contrast, might well be a disaster for al Qaeda rather than a victory, because conflict in Iraq helps its cause only as long as Americans are the villains and the targets.

If Biddle's suggestion about manipulating the communal balance of power is unlikely to succeed, what about the other options? Chaim Kaufmann and Leslie Gelb offer variations on partition as an exit strategy. Kaufmann has long been a proponent of such partitions as the only viable response to entrenched communal conflicts, and there is a powerful logic behind his position. But in this case the logic unfortunately runs aground on the rocks of practicality and morality. The wide-scale movement of peoples which would be required in order to create ethnically homogenous regions in Iraq would itself cause immense human suffering, and compensating the displaced would require resources far beyond anything currently on offer. There is also something vaguely nausea-inducing about accepting the logic of a Milosevic and making a virtue of ethnic cleansing. A partition, moreover, would inevitably raise a plethora of problems — not just the perennial questions about what to do with the cities or how to divide oil revenues, but new ones about the incentives for all the local actors to create brutal "facts on the ground" in advance of a settlement. Gelb's decentralization scheme is less extreme than Kaufmann's call for partition, but like Biddle's proposal it depends on unrealistic assumptions about the motivations of local actors and underestimates the capacity of small groups of spoilers to undermine even a generally popular plan to advance the common good.

What about a timetable for withdrawal, until recently the official policy of the current Iraqi government? Larry Diamond and James Dobbins each foresee a reduced American role, for Dobbins as a matter of simple reality (given declining American commitment of resources) and for Diamond as a way to help reassure the Sunnis about American intentions. While I myself am not an advocate of a withdrawal, I did feel that the roundtable didn't do justice to the arguments in favor of it. Many observers (including not a few Iraqis) have argued that the American presence has inflamed the conflict as much as it dampens it down; that it allows Iraq's leaders to avoid making hard choices and stops them from coming up with a constitutional agreement that reflects the real balance of power inside the country; and that it makes Iraq attractive to the jihadists of al Qaeda. These are strong selling points, even if any timetable for withdrawal would create the same kinds of perverse incentives as a move towards partition, encouraging all actors to orient their strategies toward the timetable, with potentially explosive results.

So what, then, should we do? Hey, look at that . . . 1000 words already? What a pity . . .