Iraq War: Are the prospects for peace slip-sliding away?

"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.

Jimmy Carter's hawkish national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who sounded like a Reagan Republican on foreign policy during the 1980s, has emerged the last few years as one of the toughest critics of Bush's preventive war in Iraq.  Brzezinski was an enthusiastic advocate of the funding of the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of that country.  It was that Afghan experience and international recruitment network that morphed into what we call today Al Qaeda and the international jihadist movement.

In a recent op-ed, he advocated that Bush essentially adopt a more modest definition of victory, claim a win and negotiate an exit from Iraq for American troops, with perhaps "some residual U.S. military presence" left behind: The real choice in Iraq Washington Post 01/08/06.

He makes a couple of points that are important in the current public debates.

One is, the US can't win in the sense of completely putting down the insurgency.  Not without many more American troops on the ground and a vastly improved performance by Iraqi security forces:

Victory, as defined by the administration and its supporters - i.e., a stable and secular democracy in a unified Iraqi state, with the insurgency crushed by the American military assisted by a disciplined, U.S.-trained Iraqi national army - is unlikely.

Another is, there's a lot more to making decisions about the war than figuring out who will look like they have the biggerquantity of testosterone.  Or which side has the bigger God than the other side:

Moreover, neither the Shiites nor the Kurds are likely to subordinate their specific interests to a unified Iraq with a genuine, single national army. .... Continuing doggedly to seek "a victory" in that fashion dooms America to rising costs in blood and money, not to mention the intensifying Muslim hostility and massive erosion of America's international legitimacy, credibility and moral reputation.

In other words, forget that talk about the US forces "standing down" as the Iraqi forces "stand up".  He argues:

The real choice that needs to be faced is between:

An acceptance of the complex post-Hussein Iraqi realities through a relatively prompt military disengagement -- which would include a period of transitional and initially even intensified political strife as the dust settled and as authentic Iraqi majorities fashioned their own political arrangements.

An inconclusive but prolonged military occupation lasting for years while an elusive goal is pursued.

In other words, the choices left are between getting out soon with bad results, or getting out later with even worse results.

There have been some hopeful indications that negotiations with the Sunni insurgents have been making progress.  See Robert Dreyfuss, More Reports of Dialogue with Iraq's Resistance 01/09/06 and Juan Cole, The Guerrillas Who Came In from the Cold, Informed Consent blog 01/09/06.

But Garrett Porter warns that the position of the Shi'a parties doesn't bode well for a more peaceful evolution of events in the immediate future: Shiites Escalate Conflict with US Over Sunni Strategy Inter Press Service 01/09/06.  He writes:

The new Shiite strategy thus appears to be aimed not only at excluding or limiting Sunni participation in the government, but at striking back at the demand by Khalilzad last month thatSCIRI and the Badr Brigade give up their control over the Interior Ministry, which has been responsible for paramilitary operations that include death squads and systematic torture of Sunni detainees.

Until the Karbala bombing, the SCIRI had not responded publicly to U.S. pressure, but it had clearly been waiting for the right opportunity to blast a U.S. strategy they regard as favoring their enemies.

Although the Shiite counteroffensive may be intended in part to strengthen their hand in bargaining in the formation of the new government, it also reflects fundamental Shi'ite sectarian beliefs about the nature of the conflict with the Sunnis.

Militant Shiites regard all Sunni political leaders and the main organisation of Sunni clerics, the Association of Muslim Scholars, as being aligned with the Sunni insurgents. They frequently insist that all Sunni insurgents are "terrorists" and do not differentiate between them and followers of Abu Musab al Zarqawi's network in Iraq.

The new SCIRI line has already been transmitted to Shiite clerics. Imam Hazim Araji at Baghdad's Khadimiya mosque declared before 5,000 worshippers on Saturday, "Terrorists are pampered in Iraq."

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

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