Iraq War: The best we can do?

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

Gareth Porter has developed his own proposal for extracting the United States from the Iraq War: The Third Option in Iraq: A Responsible Exit Strategy by Gareth Porter Middle East Policy Fall 2005.

Porter pitches his idea as a middle way of sorts between an "out now" urgency and the "stay the course" option now being publicly advocated by Dear Leader Bush.  But I read it more as a description of what is probably the very best the US can reasonably hope to achieve in Iraq at this point.

Essentially, he proposes the the US negotiate a phased military withdrawal based on a mutual agreement with the main Sunni resistance groups and the Shi'a parties that dominate the Iraqi national government.  Ideally, there would be a political link to the military agreement, one which would provide meaningful power-sharing and on-going political processes based on mutual respect between Sunni and Shi'a groups.

He warns that agreement with the largest Sunni guerrilla groups would not stop all violence against US forces and the Shi'a government.  (He identifies four Sunni groups he has in mind as the Army of Muhhamad, the Army of Freedom Fighters, the Islamic Army and Ansar al-Sunnah, all of whom have proposed "conditions for ending their armed resistance.")  But he arguest tht if an agreement satsifactory to the Sunnis is concluded, then Sunnis would be more willing to collaborate in exposing the foreign jihadist groups and running them out of the country.

Porter doesn't write much in this article about the particular problems of "Kurdistan".  Presumably that's because he's focusing on how to extract the US from the war.  And he thinks the Sunni-Shi'a conflict is the central one that has to be addressed for that purpose:

Thus the official definition of the problem in Iraq as a conflict between a democratic nation and an anti-democratic insurgency is a dangerous fiction. In fact, it is a struggle between two rival sectarian communities over the distribution of power in post-Saddam Iraq. Each side is using the means available to it to defend its interests in that power struggle. The more the United States insists on ignoring that central fact and treats the insurgency as an enemy allied with the forces of global Islamic terrorism, the more it alienates the Sunni population, widens the rift between the two communities and accelerates the momentum toward a Sunni-Shiite civil war. (my emphasis)

And, although it may be somewhat buried at the end of the piece, Porter also describes it as "critical" that the US declare publicly its willingness "to withdraw its forces much more rapidly if the two sides [Sunni and Shi'a] continue to head toward sectarian civil war."

For those in the reality-based community who have been following the news from the Iraq War, the problems in achieving those three goals are immediately obvious.  Dear Leader's administration has no intention of setting a withdrawal date.  The civil war may be unavoidable now; it may be underway already. And the jihadist bases probably can't be eliminated complete until Iraq has a fully-functioning national government with sufficient security forces, a process likely to tak at least five years even under optimal conditions.

In other words, the point at which the US could have had a good outcome in Iraq is now long past - if it was ever there at all.  The fact that a long-shot proposal like Porter's now looks like the best possibile outcome is a sign of how narrow the real existing possibilities are.

In the process of describing his proposal, Porter makes a number of valuable factual and analytical observations:

US political barriers to withdrawal

This popular opposition [by Americans] to continued occupation might be dangerous for the administration, but two factors tend to muffle its political impact. First, the divide in the country is highly partisan: Republicans still support the president by a 3-to-1 margin; while Democrats disapprove 7-to-1 and independents 2-to-1. This gives a Republican president plenty of room for maneuver.

Movement toward an exit strategy, moreover, is still resisted by a large majority of the political elite. In the first clear test, on May 26, an amendment calling on President Bush to devise a plan for withdrawal from Iraq was defeated in the House of Representatives 300 to 128. Thus Congress is far more supportive of a long occupation than is the populace. This has enabled the Bush administration to act as though it were immune to the polling data, declaring that it has a "victory strategy" rather than an "exit strategy."

On the leverage of pulling out troops

Shiite leaders are unlikely to agree to this kind of compromise unless the United States makes it clear that it cannot maintain troops for a transition period without Shiite willingness to offer a reasonable formula on minority rights.

The two main Shi'a parties and militias

Keep in mind that these parties are Our Side.  More-or-less.  For the moment.

The Baathist ideology that undoubtedly still strongly influences the Sunni elite is dismissive of liberal democracy, but the two main militant Shiite parties are hardly more committed to liberal ideology. The Dawa party waged armed resistance to Saddam's regime based on Leninist organizational methods, and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its armed militia, the Badr Corps, were born on Iranian soil under the tutelage and protection of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Even taking into account doctrinal differences between Iraqi Shiite ayatollahs and their Iranian counterparts, the ideology of the Iraqi Shiite political movement has far more in common with that of the clerical establishment in Iran than it does with liberal democracy.

However, he also writes that the new Iraqi mukhabarat (secret police) was staffed, at the CIA's insistence, with many former officials from Saddam's secret police.  One reason is instructive:

The administration's motive in staffing the agencywith ex-Baathists was to have reliable allies in the Iraqi state structure with whom it could collaborate against Iran - a state with which the Shiite government clearly intended to have friendly relations.

Sectarian conflict

It is my understanding that the Sunni/Shi'a/Kurdish divisions were not so severe in March 2003 (the invasion date) as American officials assumed.  But asssuming that such conflicts were already severe has become a self-fulfilling prophecy:

While the administration has continued since those elections to portray the conflict in Iraq as part of a global struggle between the forces of democracy and terrorism, the Shiite government and the Sunni opposition have been sliding into sectarian civil war. Before the elections, the Shiites had held their own use of violence in check. Once they had control of the interior ministry, however, violence between the two communities began to spiral out of control. One cause of the vastly increased tensions has been the seizure of Sunni mosques, especially in Baghdad, by Shiites who claim they were taken from them during the Saddam regime.

Porter stresses that because the Shi'a dominate the national government, American support of the government is also in fact (as well as in the perception of the Sunnis) support for the Shi'a faction against the Sunnis in an increasingly violent sectarian conflict.  Speaking of how partisan Shi'a militias have been adopted as official government paramilitary units in Sunni areas, he writes:

There is now credible evidence that such paramilitary operations have involved mass arrests, torture and in many cases, killing of Sunnis, all outside any legal framework.

Porter notes that the Iraqi regime does not currenly consider itself strong enough to defeat its sectarian Sunni rivals and therefore "believe they need at least a few more years of reliance on U.S. occupation forces." (my emphasis)

Foreign jihadists

Porter points to the possibility that the Bush administration has more-or-less-consciously decided to allow Iraq to be a base for jihadist groups for the forseeable future:

In a little-noticed public statement in June, Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chiefU.S. military spokesman in Iraq, conceded that "this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and terrorism in Iraq is [sic] not going to be settled, through military options or military operations." It could only be settled, he said, through political agreement.

This conclusion puts in sharper relief the question of whether the administration has essentially conceded al-Qaeda its terrorist haven in Iraq for many more years to come. In this regard, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made a highly revealing statement in a late June press briefing that "insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, ten, twelve years"[.]  It can reasonably be inferred that Rumsfeld and other key policy makers have decided to accept continued war and a "terrorist haven" In Iraq for the indefinite future. (my emphasis)

War, the Republican Party way.  Nothing quite like it.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05