Slate's Bizbox
war stories: Military analysis.

In Search of a Political MissionAre the Democrats and Bushies playing good cop/bad cop with the Iraqis?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2007, at 6:05 PM ET
George Bush. Click image to expand.

The House Democrats' latest proposal for linking war spending to troop withdrawals could serve both parties' interests in the debate on Iraq. In fact, if the Bush White House were more strategically shrewd, or if it enjoyed closer ties with Congress, I'd almost wonder if the idea were a jointly planned ploy—a game of good cop/bad cop designed to push the Iraqi leaders into a political settlement.

With the Democrats' original timetable for withdrawal predictably vetoed, the new idea calls for Congress to approve half of President Bush's request for emergency war funding—enough to last through September—but also to require a report, by July 13, on how well the Iraqi government is progressing toward political stability and military self-reliance. Upon receipt of that report, Congress would vote on whether to free up the second half of funding or to begin preparations for a pullout.

Presumably, if things are going well, American troops might be allowed to stay longer; if things aren't going well, it might be time to cut losses and leave.

The argument that withdrawing means surrender—or that those in favor of withdrawal are defeatists—has always been a canard. Many critics have argued from the beginning of the occupation that the Iraqi political factions would have no incentive to reconcile their differences as long as they're assured that the American armed forces will remain indefinitely—and that, therefore, the only way to rouse the factions from their infantilized complacence is to make clear that those forces might really leave.

I won't pretend to know what Vice President Dick Cheney is telling Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the other Iraqi leaders during their talks in Baghdad today. But one thing he might—and should—be telling them is that things are quickly slipping out of his (yes, even his) control and that, if the factions don't meet at least a few of the political benchmarks that President Bush himself laid out just four months ago, a large U.S. military presence cannot be sustained.

A clear message of countless news stories is that, while almost all of Iraq's political players bitterly oppose the American occupation, almost none of them want the American troops to go home just yet—in most cases, not till some stability is restored.

The Democratic proposal spells out the rewards and penalties: Get your house in order, and we'll keep funding the operations; don't, and we'll figure that you simply can't—that our mission is futile—and we'll cut the funding off.

It is extremely doubtful that the Democrats and the White House are in cahoots on this gambit. This White House isn't into gambits; Bush and Cheney have made it very clear (and they're worth taking seriously on this) that, as long as they have any say in the matter, there will be no withdrawal, and no option papers for withdrawal, from Iraq.

Yet, regardless of its roots and intentions, the Democrats' proposal might have the same effect—that is, it might whip the Iraqis into gear. Or, another way to express the thought: If anything can whip the Iraqis into gear, this might be it.

Is there a chance that it will work—that the pressure might compel action? Probably not. There are two overwhelming facts about Iraqi politics. First, the conflicts that divide the major factions—political, economic, ethnic, and religious—are real. Second, there is almost no political or cultural tradition of compromise as a method of resolving conflicts.

The concept of implacable domestic conflict is difficult for many Americans to grasp. Not since our own Civil War have there been large, organized factions so bitterly opposed to each other that they would rather kill and die than split their differences peacefully. The idea of such intense conflict is so bizarre that we find it hard to take seriously. Hence, Sen. John McCain's remark last year, at a private fund-raising session in New York: "One of the things I would do if I were president would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit.' " The thing is, a lot of Shiites and Sunnis don't regard what they're doing as bullshit; they regard it as supremely (even Supremely) vital, and just sitting them down and lecturing them—even threatening to pull out American troops—may not compel them to reconcile.

As even President Bush has said in recent months, the point of the ongoing "surge" in U.S. troop strength is to create a sense of security in Baghdad—so that Iraqi political leaders have the breathing space, and can muster the legitimacy, to put together a government of national unity. Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, has been particularly adamant on this score: There is no military solution, he stresses; the military can only, at best, help create the conditions for a political solution.

Yet the corollary of this observation is that if there are no grounds for a political solution, a military campaign is futile and may as well be abandoned.

This is what the House measure proposes to do—to give the Iraqis a few more months, beyond the few years they've already had, to demonstrate that a political solution is possible. If a political solution isn't possible, the U.S. military—especially that portion of it involved in the Baghdad surge—has no real mission. And a fighting army with no mission is an army that has no defensible reason to fight.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
Photograph of George W. Bush by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks from the Fray:

If our war aim is a stable Iraq, and there can be no stability (because of the inability of the Iraqis to create a political system that will be stable), then there IS no military solution -- short of terminating any pretense of turning their country over to the Iraqis, and governing it instead as a military fiefdom. But that, we now know, will require an increase in troop strength, which would surely mean cataclysmic budget revisions and a draft. [A]in't gonna happen.

All of the above wouldn't matter if the war were about Iraq, but it hasn't been about Iraq -- in the United States -- for a long time. The war was begun on the assumption that it would be over quickly, and in plenty of time to ensure a Republican landslide victory in 2004. Then, with the large Congressional majorities that would attend this triumph, the Bushies could ensconce themselves, and the principles they stand for, in power for generations to come.

The war was against the Democrats every bit as much as it was against Saddam. Oh yes, there were non-political reasons for the war, and if it had been the cakewalk Bush/Cheney and the neocons thought it would be, [those reasons] would have come to the fore. But the predictions of "mission accomplished" in a few short weeks were wrong, and once that was clear, it changed everything.

Because once it became clear that the war would NOT be over quickly, the Bushies faced a choice: drastically increase the level of troops involved, or face the prospect of depending upon the Iraqi political scene to rationalize itself to the point where the country could be governed without a massive American presence.

Drastically increasing the troops was exactly what Bush/Cheney/Rove did NOT want to do in 2004. Not only would they have to run for office while in the process of instituting a draft, but they would have had to do so while increasing taxes to pay for all of this. Therefore, the only solution left was to rely on the Iraqi politicians to get their act together. This was a dicey prospect even in the best of times, given that Iraq's population has deep natural divisions. But it was especially dicey given that there had not BEEN any Iraqi politics for a generation under Saddam's rule, and therefore everything was being made up as they went along.

Still, the illusion that it was possible held together long enough to get Bush re-elected, and with a Republican Congress as well. That was the good news; the bad news was that the Iraqis had learned something from 2004 -- to wit, the American commitment to their country was limited to what would retain the hold of the Republican Party on power. There would NEVER be a troop increase of a size large enough to pacify the country once and for all. The most they would get would be "surges" (there was one right after election day, remember), but Bush/Cheney had no intention of jeopardizing their political victory with a draft and with the massive tax increases that would attend a serious attempt at victory.

On the other hand, Bush/Cheney could ALSO not withdraw troops short of an obvious victory, because that would mean they [had] started a war that they failed to win, and would have forfeited the Republican claim to being "tough on defense." This locked them into their present position for the next four years, and any Iraqi capable of understanding politics could see that.

Which in turn meant two things: the various Iraqi factions who, as Kaplan points out, really DO hate each other, now had no incentive to settle their differences, since the world in which they'd have to hash them out on a long-term basis wouldn't exist until 2009 at the earliest.

Second, of course, it meant that the only political advantage which remained to Bush/Cheney was to prepare for the elections of 2012 and the future, when they could blame the "loss" of Iraq on the Democrats. This too, of course, means the war must be continued into 2009, when Hillary (or whoever) can sweep into office in time to be blamed for taking the only logical step -- withdrawal.

The Iraqis understand what most Americans do not -- that for Bush/Cheney the war is no longer against anyone in the Middle East, but against the Democrats.

--the_slasher14

(To reply, click here.)

"First, the conflicts that divide the major factions—political, economic, ethnic, and religious—are real. Second, there is almost no political or cultural tradition of compromise as a method of resolving conflicts."

Exactly true. Which is why it puzzles me that the war's opponents still cling to the myth of Iraq being "contained" by Saddam Hussein.

Military dictatorships have no long-term future (see the 20th century for incontrovertible evidence of this). Saddam's definitely didn't. Hit by sanctions, shorn of its WMD, and sitting next to its mortal, ambitious enemy (Iran), Saddam had no long-term hope whatsoever of survival or of "containing" the divisions mentioned above.

This left two options. The US could go in and glue Iraq together with military force. Or it could leave Saddam's government to collapse, and Iraq with it.

Many critics of the war don't seem to have a problem with this latter option. But I think even they are slowly realising the effect such an unmanaged collapse might have had on the Middle East and the global economy. This slow realisation is what I call "progress in Iraq".

--GreenwichJ

(To reply, click here.)

The Admininstation, in its desperate effort to buy more time to fix the Iraq that they broke, have been heavily dependant on the misguided calculation that "withdrawal = defeat". This was an effective short term strategy to enforce the "stay-the-course" mentality. Any attempt to stray from the definitive course of the "decider" would suffer the consequence of being indelibly identified with the politically toxic slur..."defeatist".

For an Administration afflicted with a case of terminal short-sightedness, what they failed to realize was that they (or some future Administration) would, at some point, be making the judgment that it was indeed time to leave Iraq. By their own definition, that they persistently pounded into the American and International psyches, they have made it virtually impossible to ever withdraw from Iraq, under any circumstances, without it "appearing" to be a defeat.

While it is far overdue, the Administration needs to start redefining "withdrawal". They need to infuse into this new definition the many and varied accomplishments that we have achieved over the last 4 years. They need to be every bit as single-minded about the positive re-definition of "withdrawal" as they were about the uncompromising negativity they originally assigned to the term.

It is purely a perception game, but it is a game where the enemy has had the overwhelming advantage from the moment we failed to translate our regime change success into a equally determined and focused reconciliation strategy.

In the end, withdrawal will not define our defeat. Our tragic failure to immediately reign in the forces of lawlessness and chaos sealed our fate in the first weeks following the invasion.

--travelinMike

(To reply, click here.)

(5/12)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
PLUS » Ruth Marcus: Berlin vs. Baghdad Q&A