Iraq: What Do We Do?

Again, let me preface this by saying: like I have a clue. But, since you people keep reading, I'll keep writing.

Bush and Cheney have stated that the United States will remain in Iraq "until the job is done". But what's the job that we want done? A stable, enduring democracy? Recall that we fought a civil war about seventy years after we wrote our constitution. An end to the insurgency? There's a good possibility that we'll never really see the end of the insurgency, as long as enough Sunnis continue to feel so thoroughly hostile to the government. Countries as varied as Colombia, the UK, Spain, and India are all democracies which have suffered long-running terrorism-utilizing insurgencies, and all of them continue to go about their business without too much success in ending their rebellions. Some of these have been going on for thirty years or more, with no end in sight - is this how long we'll be in Iraq?

I hope not, because as I mentioned in my last post, I have a feeling that the continued US presence is part of the reason that something like 30,000 Iraqis have joined the insurgency in the last ten months.

Justin Logan points to this article from The New York Times:

Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.

A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.

"There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

The nationalist insurgent groups, "are giving a lot of signals implying that there should be a settlement with the Americans," while the Jihadists have a purely ideological agenda, he added.

The last line is interesting, but that's the first I've heard about anyone wanting a settlement with us, so I don't have much to say about that.

What is important from this article is the recognition that there are multiple components of the insurgency. We have some pretty nasty al Qaeda types, who seem to be predominantly foreign and cause a lot of trouble out of proportion to their small number. But we also have something much more dangerous in the long run, the Sunni nationalist segment. There's nothing quite like a foreign occupier to rally the people, even if the leadership is repugnant to them. This is the sort the Nazis learned in the Soviet Union, when Stalin rallied the Russian people to his Great Patriotic War, or when the Vietnamese people fought to the death, not so much for Ho Chi Min or communism but for their country. We're seeing it now as the Sunnis, who believe they have or will lose everything under the new system, continue to join the insurgency in large numbers, regardless of how many we kill or capture.

In other words, we can kill a thousand every day, but if a thousand and one are joining the insurgency every day, we can't win. And as we get better at fighting them, they get better at fighting us - ensuring that we'll always be playing catch-up.

We invaded Iraq with enough troops to overthrow Saddam, but not to secure the country. By "secure" I mean that we didn't have enough troops to provide the basic security that could have brought law and order to Iraq, prevented the massive looting that occurred right after the war, and prevented the formation of the insurgency in the months that followed - whether by engaging it militarily while it was in its infancy, by projecting enough power to dissuade people from joining, or by guarding weapons caches and denying the insurgents the weapons they need to fight. Or, probably most importantly, we could have provided that security and stability necessary for Iraq to begin forming a government which provided basic services like sewage and electricity, a functioning economy, and local democracy - the factors that would have meant that the insurgency would have a much smaller appeal to many fewer people. We started to have all those things, at first, but because we didn't have enough troops to provide security, we have lost a lot of these things - unemployment stands around 50%, electricity production has gone down, oil exports and revenue are down, water and sewage projects have no funding, and many local governments disbanded or are under siege - the conditions needed to piss off a lot of people, and to make sure they have no hope for the future under the current system. By not providing security, we have ensured the conditions for a disgruntled population - especially the Sunnis who feel like and are the big losers after Saddam's fall - to be attracted to an armed insurgency.

But, as I said, we missed our chance. If we poured tens of thousands of more troops into Iraq, maybe we could provide security from this point forward, but from where will they come? From other countries? Nope. From our armed forces? Not enough left. From a draft? It would take a year at least to draft, train, equip, and ship them.

So, if we stay, we continue to piss off enough people that the insurgency grows, despite killing or capturing thousands of them. The longer we stay, the better they get at fighting us. And we don't have any reinforcements to send that might tip the balance in our favor.

What should we do? Well, eighty-two Iraqi parliamentarians have already asked us to leave. Maybe we should be thinking about that.

But not just a "well, we'll be seeing you!" style withdrawal, but something along the lines of "if you're good and achieve some things we want you to achieve, then your reward will be us leaving". I keep hearing that we shouldn't talk about withdrawal because this will embolden the terrorists. You know, the same terrorists who routinely assassinate government officials, who have made it impossible of Americans to leave the Green Zone, and who have increased the number of suicide attacks in the last few months? How much more emboldened can they get?

We could, however, start thinking about emboldening the Iraqi people. We're not too popular with very many of them these days. Before the elections, Sunni leaders came to us and said, basically, "we'll participate in the elections if you give us a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq". They wanted us out. They were willing to give us something in return. If we want the Iraqis to achieve certain things, let's give them an incentive: an end to the occupation.

Matt Yglesias has been leading the charge on this:

The trouble is that the "emboldening" factor isn't going to go away. The purported non-emboldening alternative to leaving on a high note is to stick around until the war is won and the insurgency is defeated. This, however, is not an especially realistic goal. As you see in places like Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain, and to some extent even France where you have minority groups whose goals can't be achieved through the rules of the electoral game, you can have terrorist bombing campaigns that go on essentially forever. Latin America is littered with examples (Mexico, Peru, Colombia, to some extent even Brazil) of governments in good standing that don't exercise a monopoly of force throughout 100 percent of the territory under their nominal control.

Nor is it really in the power of the United States to guarantee that the post-election Iraqi government maintains its democratic character for the long run. There are so many ways that emerging democracies can go awry, and to a large extent it simply depends on what Iraqi figures plan on doing.

Just leaving at some arbitrary moment while an enemy's still in the field is always going to be an unappealing, potentially emboldening thing to do. So if we miss our chance, the result is likely to be the establishment of a semi-permanent protectorate-type situation.

This isn't about an immediate withdrawal that would basically destroy Iraq. The Iraqi armed forces, which will take more years to fully develop than we're really willing to wait, cannot stand on its own right now. But would offering an incentive - say, when X number of units are combat ready (really combat ready, not Cheney-pretend-combat ready) and when the constitution is written, we'll be out of here. Fair trade?

Yglesias, again, links to an article by Spencer Ackerman which you should read, and has this to say:

Obviously, there can be no guarantee that a post-withdrawal Iraqi government would steer through the shoals successfully. Doing so, however, essentially requires sound and moral political judgment on the part of Iraqi leaders, something we can't provide no matter how many troops we put in the field. Indeed, one can plausibly make the case that our open-ended military commitment encourages brinksmanship and maximalism on the part of Iraqis "inside" the political process rather than the spirit of "hang together or hang separately" that the situation requires.

It should also be said that getting our forces out of the field on a reasonable timeline neither does nor should preclude us from offering the sort of assistance we would normally offer any emerging decent regime being challenged by violent extremists. We can give financial and diplomatic assistance, intelligence cooperation, etc., etc. And, indeed, one would hope that other governments around the world would do the same. The insurgency is composed of really bad people which should not be forgotten. But for now, clouds of distrust stemming from the US presence, its uncertain future, and the shaky pretenses for having introduced it in the first place make it hard to rally international support for the new government.

Juan Cole thinks we should try to hand it off to the UN, but I can't imagine anyone at the UN wanting the responsibility or the danger of Iraq.

So, that leaves me with: withdrawal-as-incentive-for-progress. Plus it would, you know, mean that our troops would stop exploding, as they are currently wont to do.

Plus, the Bush administration totally said that the insurgency was in its last throes, and that we'd stay until the job gets done and not a moment later. So we'll be withdrawing soon anyway, right?