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Six Months That Could Change IraqThree possible post-surge scenarios.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Dec. 24, 2007, at 12:22 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

Thomas Friedman has been lambasted for writing way too many times (at least 14 times from late 2003 to mid-2006) that "the next six months" will determine the future of Iraq. The waggish blogger Atrios, who first cataloged this habit, coined the term "Friedman Unit," defined as six months in the future.

That said, the next six months might really be the decisive six months in the course of this war—and, as much as recent trends seem hopeful, the long-term prognosis, alas, doesn't.

In July 2008, the last of the surge troops—the five extra brigades that President George W. Bush sent to Iraq as a last-ditch effort to impose order—will come home, having finished their 15-month terms of deployment. No troops will be sent to replace them (mainly because, for all practical purposes, no such troops will be ready to go). The surge, in short, will be over.

At that point, things will likely go in one of three directions—one good, two bad.

The first scenario is that Iraq's security forces will have ramped up, in quality and quantity, to the point where they can effectively step in where U.S. forces have stepped out—and that Iraq's political leaders will have settled their sectarian disputes. If both of those things happen, Iraq's future will look not quite bright but not so gloomy, either.

If those developments don't occur, then one of two entities might start spiraling toward collapse—the Iraqi nation or the U.S. Army.

Is the surge working? That depends on what you mean by "working." Initial skeptics of the surge (and I count myself, as well as the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, among them) never disputed the notion that more troops, shrewdly deployed, would impose order and reduce violence where those extra troops were deployed. We doubted whether a mere 20,000 extra troops could impose order throughout Iraq (or even in all Baghdad) on a sustained basis.

There was also the larger point, emphasized by the U.S. military commander, Gen. David Petraeus, himself—that there is no strictly military victory to be had in Iraq. The point of the surge was to create "breathing space" that might allow Iraq's political leaders to reconcile their differences and form a viable central government. If the Iraqis didn't take advantage of this breathing space, the most brilliant strategy and the most successful operations would ultimately be for naught.

And so, yes, violence is down; casualties—American and Iraqi—are down. This is indisputably the case, and one factor in this is certainly the surge and, as important, the counterinsurgency strategy that Petraeus has crafted to go with it.

But there are other factors, as well, especially the alliances of convenience that Sunni tribes have struck with U.S. forces—most notably in Anbar province—to beat back the jihadists of the al-Qaida in Mesopotamia organization. These deals were struck, at the Sunnis' initiative, before the surge began. American commanders are also paying other Sunni insurgents not to attack their soldiers (a wise use of money). And, while this has been going on, Shiite militia leader Muqtada Sadr has been observing a moratorium on attacks against "coalition forces."

Another factor is that, as a result of the past two years' ethnic cleansing, much of Iraq, especially Baghdad, is now Balkanized. Sunnis have killed or chased away most Shiites in Sunni areas, and vice versa.

However, there are still vast swaths of mixed neighborhoods throughout Iraq, especially in Baghdad. And it is widely and firmly believed—by military commanders and seasoned reporters on the ground—that these areas would erupt in horrendous bloodshed if American troops were not clamping down on the fault lines.

Now here's the problem: All these phenomena—the surge, the alliances of convenience, the moratorium—cannot last forever. In fact, they can't last much longer than (pardon the phrase) the next six months, maybe (let's make it two F.U.s) the next year.

First, the troops. Not only will five of the current 20 brigades be out of Iraq by July, but Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Army chiefs would like to cut troop-deployment terms from 15 months back to their normal 12 months (with 12 months back home for rest and further training). The 15-month terms were always seen as a temporary measure. Talk to soldiers, and they will tell you that 15 months of continuous combat duty is simply too wearing. Enlistment rates are down; junior officers are dropping out at rates unseen since Vietnam days. The war in Iraq is the main reason for both trends. The Army is already stretched to the bone. Senior officers—and Gates—are deeply worried that maintaining this breakneck pace for much longer might break the all-volunteer Army.

However, if the terms of duty are cut back to 12 months of deployment, followed by 12 months home, it is not clear whether even 15 brigades can be sustained in Iraq for very long. And once troop levels fall below 15 brigades, it is not clear—as they approach 10 brigades, it is very unlikely—that the mission of securing the Iraqi population (the essence of counterinsurgency) can be sustained.

The clock is also ticking on the other games that are keeping ultraviolence at bay. After the Sunni-U.S. alliances defeat the jihadists, or reduce their ranks to a manageable level, nobody expects the Sunni fighters—who, before their "awakening," spent much of their time shooting and blowing up American soldiers—to become pliant citizens. (Stalin didn't join NATO or the IMF after he and the Western allies beat Hitler, either.) They will go back to shooting our soldiers, undermining the Shiite-led Iraqi government, or both; in fact, having gained the experience of fighting alongside U.S. troops, and the armaments that went with it, they will be a more formidable force in sectarian battles with Shiites.

If the Sunni insurgents resume their sectarian battles, it is doubtful that Sadr's Mahdi Army will maintain its cease-fire.

In sum, U.S. forces may soon have more eruptions to damp down—or, to switch metaphors, more holes in the Iraqi dike to plug up. And the task will be more daunting still once the troop-levels decline.

All this is why Gen. Petraeus and most other officers refrain from wild cheering at the reports of declining casualties and violence. They are pleased with the results; they have done what they set out to do, more creatively and successfully than many critics had predicted (and, I confess, I count myself among that number, too). However, they know, first, that these trends can be reversed in a flash and, second, that they mark only tactical successes in this sort of struggle—that the true, strategic signposts of success are, ultimately, beyond their control.

And that's why, this time around, the next six months might really be crucial.

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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 .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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Remarks from the Fray:

It's so hard even to get honest information about what's going on in Iraq, and harder still to take any comfort in the trends we're told are the fruits of the surge strategy. Take the situation in the southern Basra region as a related example. It has long been held up as one of the only cases in Iraq where the coalition had achieved something like the victory they once claimed to seek, and an example of how democracy and political stability was achievable with a little patience and a smart strategy. But what did the Brits really leave behind there after the recent withdrawal of their forces?

One recent Associated Press story initially tries to tout the "remarkable" 90% drop in violence that followed the British withdrawal from Basra as though this were a positive omen for the future stability of Iraq. But what does this statistic really mean? Well, farther down in the article, it turns out, the main explanation for this trend is that (1) there are no more British troops left for the militia-men to shoot at, and (2) the region is already firmly in the control of the Sadrist militia, making pointless any violent challenges from other militias like the Badr brigade. Since Basra has always been primarily Shiite, naturally, there is less occasion for inter-ethnic (e.g. Sunni-Shiite) violence seen in many other parts of the country. So violence is down 90% in Basra? Big deal. If this is supposed to be a best-case scenario, then was it really worth a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives?

Similarly, I'm sure that current reductions in coalition casualties and overall terrorist violence are, in and of themselves, a positive development. But does it have any correlation at all with the chances for future stability and democracy in the country, especially in the absence of any significant positive political developments in the meantime?

There is too much willingness on our side to be reassured by an incomplete and overly wishful interpretation of the situation in Iraq, as has been the case all along. The same entities who tried to tell us that Saddam had WMDs, who happily quoted Dick Cheney saying that the insurgency was in its last throes and that our campaign had just turned a corner, are mostly the same ones who now try to reassure us that the surge is working. Fortunately, there are notable commentators like Kaplan who've always been honest and shown the appropriate degree of skepticism. Otherwise, on even a question as basic as whether or not Iraq is now better off than it was under Saddam, I would take the opinion of the average American corporate journalist with a grain of salt.

If the surge is buying time and allowing breathing space for anyone, it's less for the Iraqi government than for the architects of this disaster to get out of Washington with what little is left of their reputations. Maybe some day they can try to blame it all on the Democrats.

--fingerpuppet

(To reply, click here.)

You know, and I know, that the troops who made up the surge were only there for 15 months, but Bush/Cheney/Murdoch/Ailes will be claiming that they were withdrawn because a Democratic Congress refused to give them sufficient funding, and that failing to elect a Republican will be "surrender."

If the Iraq War had been fought as a REAL "war for civilization," Bush would have funded and manned it sufficient to win the thing. But that would have forced an end to the Bush tax cuts and forced the super-rich to begin to pay for the cost of the war. Instead, the war was fought with the maximum amount of money and manpower which still permitted Bush to preserve the tax cuts. And, of course, that wasn't enough.

The purpose of the Surge was to make it APPEAR that victory was possible into the 2008 election campaign. If the Surge had never taken place, there would be no question of victory because Iraq would be a cauldron of violence. The purpose of the Surge was to defeat the enemy. It's just that the enemy was never terrorism, Bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein. It was us.

--the_slasher14

(To reply, click here.)

The Maliki "government" is irrelevant to Iraq's future, and everybody knows it. It has never been anything but an American puppet with a Dawa agenda. It has never earned any claim on long-term Iraqi loyalties. It is profoundly corrupt and patently incompetent. It achieved power, more apparent than real, only by virtue of an alliance of convenience with Sadr, who is a life-long enemy of Dawa and whose objective is control of Baghdad, and with the Kurds, whose long-term goal is independence, de jure or de facto. The only function the Maliki government now has is to serve as a funnel for American aid to reach the Shi'ites. It represents yet another American blunder in Iraq, one that has become an encumbrance and an embarrassment. Anything the American military achieves in Iraq is achieved by working around the political farce in the Green Zone, not through it.

Yet Maliki's is the only government Iraq has. Everything else boils down to a regional militia. The elephant in the living room is that Iraq, as such, has nowhere to go. The most that can be achieved, from an American perspective, is a precarious balancing of the various factions against one another. That balance will depend on a great many factors, some of them outside American control. And, as Kaplan argues, even those factors ostensibly within American control are sharply limited by military feasibility, funding and politics.

In other words, by any objective measure, Iraq is still a fool's gamble for the Americans. Its prognosis is continued hostility and instability, meaning that desperately needed new investment in its vaunted oil resources will not be forthcoming. The country will remain a basket case. American forces in Iraq will be little more than a very high-cost way of doing what Saddam used to do without cost to them.

The real purpose of the surge and all of Bush's policies is, of course, political. The policies are intended to smooth things over, keep the superficial peace, and go on dangling the prospect of some sort of success in front of the American people (who are so weary of the war that they will take any excuse to stop thinking about it). All of this need last only until next November. Then Bush will be off the hook, at least in his own mind. Iraq's and his party's future will become someone else's responsibility, and he can return to Crawford and active alcoholism. He hasn't really been interested in his job since November 2004.

--Fritz Gerlich

(To reply, click here.)

(12/25)

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