SeekerBlog

For those seeking better understanding of the Iraq policy options, there are some very useful resources released in the past two weeks.

The AEI has published the final version of the Kagan/Keane study. A conference was held 5 January to discuss the study, including reports from Iraq by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. Here’s the audio of the conference [MP3], 2 hours 25 minutes.

There are three related articles which approach the policy options from slightly different but harmonious perspectives:

[1] Our Only Hope, by Eliot A. Cohen and Bing West

[2] The Consequences of Failure in Iraq, by Reuel Marc Gerecht

[3] Mr President, herewith my ten tips to deal with Iraq, by Iranian journalist Amir Taheri

I had thought to attempt a synthesis of all this, but by delaying I’ve been rewarded by superior work, Is a Democratic Iraq Still Attainable?, by Richard Fernandez.

In both West’s and Gerecht’s expositions the key missing ingredient in Iraq is not so much more force — though that is needed — but strategic clarity. The problem both these proposals face is that while the path they trace out may be right, perhaps neither has a political constituency which will adopt it. In Gerecht’s view President Bush’s key strength was that he never quit trying to win; though unfortunately he never figured out how to do it. And given that track record, his latest efforts may turn out to be similarly ineffectual. On the other side of the aisle the situation is bleaker. The Democrats are not only equally clueless about how to win, they have no interest in learning how to win at all. In the end all these wonderful strategic proposals based on experience America has gathered over the last three years of war may be thrown on the pile marked “unsold”. Never was a nation so profligate with lessons so dearly learned.

I have little to add to all of the above. I believe the central thrust of the Kagan/Keane plan is correct. I will note that there are three simultaneous wars going on:

#1: in Iraq where some Sunnis have not yet surrendered and still hope to regain control, aided by Al Qaeda; and where Iran & client Syria hope to destroy American influence in the region, taking effective control of the Iraq government.

#2: in America [and Britain and Australia] – a war to destroy political will, spearheaded by the media elites;

#3: in Washington, D.C.

The enemy are shrewd combatants, knowing they cannot possibly win #1, they have been very effective at manipulating the elites to win wars #2 and #3 and thence #1.

For what I think is realistic perspective on what it will look like if wars #2, #3 are lost, here’s Reuel Marc Gerecht:

What would be the consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq? Trying to wrap one’s mind around the ramifications of a failed Iraq–of an enormous, quite possibly genocidal, Sunni-Shiite clash exploding around American convoys fleeing south–is daunting. In part, this is why few have spent much time talking about what might happen to Iraq, the region, and the United States if the government in Baghdad and its army collapsed into Sunni and Shiite militias waging a battle to the death. Among its many omissions, the Iraq Study Group’s stillborn report lacked any sustained description of the probable and possible consequences of a shattered Iraq.

Before embarking on such an inquiry, a few remarks are in order about American attitudes and about the continuing reasons for hope in Iraq. Americans, for whom foreign policy has always been loaded with moral imperatives and ethical restraints, don’t like staring into a bloody moral abyss that we largely dug. The growing bipartisan endeavor to blame the mess in Iraq on the Iraqis is, among other things, a human reaction to screen out all ugly incoming data. For most of Washington, if not the country, Iraq is already Vietnam–no possibility of success, thousands of wasted lives, a grim conviction that it would be best to let the ungrateful, pitiless foreigners take their country back. As the pro-war New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently: “Adding more troops makes sense only if it’s to buy more time for positive trends that have already begun to appear on the horizon. I don’t see them.”

…If we leave Iraq any time soon, the battle for Baghdad will probably lead to a conflagration that consumes all of Arab Iraq, and quite possibly Kurdistan, too. Once the Shia become both badly bloodied and victorious, raw nationalist and religious passions will grow. A horrific fight with the Sunni Arabs will inevitably draw in support from the ferociously anti-Shiite Sunni religious establishments in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and on the Shiite side from Iran. It will probably destroy most of central Iraq and whet the appetite of Shiite Arab warlords, who will by then dominate their community, for a conflict with the Kurds. If the Americans stabilize Arab Iraq, which means occupying the Sunni triangle, this won’t happen.