"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.
Recent developments around the Iraq War are puzzling. Various leading Iraqi parties meet at a Cairo conference and agree they want American troops to leave. They even agree that resistance to the occupying forces is legitimate. Bush and Cheney call people who want to leave immediately various insulting names. A Pentagon leak says the military has presented Rummy with a plan to draw troop levels down below 100,000 early in 2006. Rummy says we're not withdrawing. Condi, Condi says that maybe a deal for a troop phase-out is coming up soon. It's pretty confusing. Even allowing for the fact that the administration wants family conversations over Thanksgiving turkey to have something upbeat to say about the Iraq War.
Here's where I'm guessing the situation stands currently.
The US boosted the number of troops in Iraq to 161,000 in preparation for the December elections. After December, the troop levels will be drawn down to the 135-140,000 number that has been the baseline amount since the occupation began. The administration will advertise this as a significant withdrawal related to an improving security situation.
The Shi'a-dominated government has been happy to have the US troops help them fight their Sunni rivals up until now. But the Shi'a politicians are also wanting to see an end-game for the American troops' presence. Part of that is rooted in patriotic demand for getting the foreign occupiers out. One would assume that many Shi'a leaders, like more and more Americans, are starting to see the American presence as a provocation to the rebels, as muchor more than as a counterforce.
The trend that is already far advanced toward having partisan militias (Kurdish, Shi'a, Sunni) will likely continue and accelerate, much of it under the guise of official security forces.
The Bush administration does not want to leave Iraq any time soon, although they would presumably like to reduce the troop presence to 30-40,000. The administration has never stated that it wants no permanent bases in Iraq. And there have been a number of indications that permanent US bases are a key goal for them in Iraq.
Armed conflict will continue for years at some level. The Sunnis are likely to resist the much increased status of the Shi'a and the Kurds in the best of cases. Areas that mix Sunnis and Shi'a like Baghdad, or Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds as in Kirkuk, are likely to be difficult to govern for a protracted period.
Open civil war could happen. If it does, the current level of sectional and sectarian conflict will probably be seen as its early stages.
The Republicans, and much of the officer corps, will blame the loss in Iraq on back-stabbing civilian politicians and a weak-kneed public without the lust for war of neocon publicists and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders.
It's not at all inconceivable that at some point the Iraqi government will demand that the US troops leave on a faster schedule than the administration wants without being able to leave forces behind on permanent bases. And that the Iraqi government itself would begin to actively support military action against American forces.
Steve Gilliard recently sketched out a not-at-all-implausible scenario (Facing reality The News Blog 11/22/05):
Watching Dick Cheney talk about progress in Iraq, a cognative dissonance not seen since Vietnam, people still are refusing to admit the scale of the disaster. We are no longer talking about withdrawal, but how orderly it will be and if we can take our allies with us.
I don't think even Murtha understands what will happen in the end. Once there is a withdrawal, there will be a complete and total withdrawal, even the Kurds will want us gone, when they realize we will braketheir ambitions for Kurdistan.
No one is going to want their relatives to stay when the rest of the Army is retreating.
My greatest fear, now shared by other people, is that the US would have to fight a Chosin-like fighting withdrawal, which would lead to POW's and high casualities on the road to Kuwait as well as a loss of equipment.
No one wants to state the obvious, there is ONE Iraqi unit we can trust. One.
Here are a few other pieces of information on the current puzzling situation.
Iraqis ask for Withdrawal Timetable by Juan Cole, Informed Comment blog 11/22/05:
Al-Hayat gives the orginal Arabic wording of some articles of the [Cairo] agreement. One provision says, "We demand the withdrawal of foreign forces in accordance with a timetable, and the establishment of a national and immediate program for rebuilding the armed forces through drills, preparation and being armed, on a sound basis that will allow it to guard Iraq's borders and to get control of the security situation . . ."
Sources at the conference told al-Hayat that they envisaged the withdrawal of foreign military forces from the cities within 6 months (i.e. mid-May?). They said that the withdrawal would be completed over a period of two years (i.e. November 2007). This timetable, al-Hayat says, appears actually to have been put forward by the Americans themselves. If that is true, we finally know exactly what George W. Bush means by "staying the course." It is a course that takes us to withdrawal.
The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance list had originally called for an American troop withdrawal as part of its party platform, but that plank was opposed by Ibrahim Jaafari, and was dropped even before the January 30 elections, presumably because of American pressure.
The other surprise of the Cairo conference is that the negotiators accepted the right for Iraqi groups to mount an armed resistance against the foreign troops. The participants were careful to condemn universally the killing of innocent non-combatants. They decried "takfir" or declaring a Muslim to be an unbeliever.
Bob Dreyfuss argues that the Cairo conference was significantly more important than one might conclude from the American press' coverage of it in Peace Talk American Prospect Online 11/22/05. And he also indicates that the position of the Iraqi government is starting to diverge more significantly from that of the Bush administration:
The fact that the United States is not trumpeting the importance of the Cairo peace talks, and the fact that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top-level officials did not attend it, are failures of diplomacy. Not only did scores of Iraqi political leaders travel to Cairo to talk face to face in a manner that could not have happened in Baghdad, but the meeting was also attended by heads of state, including Egypt's President Hosni Mubarakand Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and by the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran. After three days of talks, the attendees decided to convene a full-fledged peace conference in Cairo in late February or early March.
The significance of the meeting is that it brought together Shiite and Kurdish officials with leaders of various Sunni factions, including some of those with close ties to the Iraqi resistance. Waiting in the wings were people representing a spectrum of groups currently battling the U.S. occupation. According to Aiham al-Sammarae, who served in Iraq's 2003-2004 interim government, several leaders of insurgent groups went to Cairo to participate on the fringes of the meeting. Opposition from Iraq's main Shiite parties made it impossible for them to attend the conference itself, but that may be the next step. In a surprising statement after the conference, the attendees condemned terrorism but added that "resistance is a legitimate right of all peoples." The conferees clearly intended to marginalize the forces associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq while encouraging opposition forces led by Iraqi nationalists, Baathists, and former military officers to join the talks.
The conference drew strong support from Russia, from the European Union, whose chief foreign affairs official, Javier Solana, helped organize it, and from the United Nations. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan also helped organize the meeting and sent Ashraf Qazi, his special representative, to the conference itself. The broad support from virtually all of the international community made the cool reception from the United States even more glaring.
And one of the lessons Dreyfuss takes from the Cairo conference is that peace talks to arrange the exit of American troops are starting to look like a real possibility. (See my post of 08/28/05 on Gareth Porter's proposal for a phased exit and peace talks.)
Tom Hayden also has a worthwhile analysis of the signficance of the Cairo conference in
What To Do for Peace Now CommonDreams.org 11/23/05:
Overcoming the initial opposition of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, the conference ended with a call for American withdrawal and an endorsement of "nationalist resistance" to foreign occupation.
The conference will resume in Baghdad in February, where a stronger call for US withdrawal is likely. The February date is consistent with the four-month period that has been established to re-negotiate the Iraqi constitution to accommodate Sunni demands.
It is clear that US proposals for token Sunni inclusion have failed, and that the peace deal emerging consists of incorporating the opposition into a new power-sharing arrangement.
If the deal is brokered, many Baathist officers will likely be incorporated into the Iraqi security forces to protect their populations. The Mahdi Army of Moktada al-Sadr will be accepted as sharing security responsibilities in areas they represent as well.
As previously reported, Iraqi elected officials have demonstrated their demand for withdrawal twice before, in a letter from 100-plus parliamentarians in July 2005 and a unanimous September 2005 report by the regime's committee on sovereignty.
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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