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What Can We Still Achieve in Iraq?Reconciliation's off the table, but there are other decent ways out.

By Fred KaplanUpdated Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007, at 6:30 PM ET

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih One of the more disturbing articles, in a spate of almost nothing but disturbing articles, about Iraq lately is Joshua Partlow's front-page dispatch in the Oct. 8 Washington Post, reporting the widespread view among Baghdad politicians that "reconciliation"—the prospect of a unified national government—is an illusory goal.

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"Iraqi leaders argue that sectarian animosity is entrenched in the structure of their government," Partlow writes. (Italics added.) He quotes Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih as saying, "I don't think there is something called 'reconciliation,' and there will be no reconciliation. To me, it's a very inaccurate term. This is a struggle about power."

Two inferences can be drawn from this story, each dismaying, the two together more dismaying still.

First, the "surge," at least as originally designed, seems hopeless. The idea of the surge, recall, was to provide enough security in Baghdad to give Iraq's political leaders the "breathing space" to reconcile their differences. Yet if there simply is no way for the leaders to settle their disputes—if sectarian animosity is not merely rife but "entrenched in the structure of their government"—then the surge has no strategic purpose. (It may reduce civilian casualties, and that's a notable accomplishment; but unless it makes Iraqis feel secure, and unless that facilitates political order, it's like plugging a few leaks in a wall riddled with holes. It's not a sustainable mission.)

However, the Post story also casts doubt on the proposition, advanced by many critics of the war, that if the United States merely sets a timetable for withdrawal, Iraq's political leaders would realize that they had to get their act together. The Post story suggests there is no act.

This is the Democrats' (and some Republicans') dilemma. On the one hand, they don't want to pull all the troops out now and watch Iraq very possibly collapse into a bloodbath. (Most Iraqis don't want us to go home, either, at least not right now.) On the other hand, the present path seems to be a dead end.

So, what to do?

One approach is to go back to basics: What are America's interests in Iraq? Which of these interests can realistically be achieved? How can we go about achieving them?

Here's a list of feasible and worthwhile aims: 1) preventing al-Qaida in Mesopotamia from becoming a powerful political force; 2) maintaining stability in the one part of Iraq that is fairly stable; and 3) keeping sectarian conflicts from spreading outside Iraq's borders and across the Middle East.

Take these aims, one by one:

1) To keep AQM diminished as a force, the United States should continue, and even step up, its alliances of convenience with Sunni and tribal forces in Anbar and other provinces. Yes, this strategy holds risks. We could be arming and strengthening militias that, after defeating AQM, might go back to attacking Shiite militias or U.S. troops, as they were doing before. Certainly there should be no illusion that the experience of fighting alongside American soldiers and Marines will turn the Sunni insurgents into our friends or allies—any more than the United States and the Soviet Union remained pals after joining together to beat Nazi Germany.

Still, the strategy is worth pursuing for two reasons. First, though AQM hardly created Iraq's sectarian tensions, its main goal is to aggravate them and to sire general chaos. It is in no nation-state's interest, least of all ours, for a country like Iraq to deteriorate into violent anarchy at the hands of Islamist fundamentalists. Second, when we do pull out of Iraq, it will be good—both on its own merits and for America's image in the world—to have defeated or gravely diminished our one genuine, self-declared enemy in the conflict.