The elephant gives birth to a
mouse By Anthony Cordesman
It is going to take time to make a full
appraisal of all the annexes and content of the
full Iraq Study Group (ISG) report, but the principal
recommendations of the James Baker-Lee
Hamilton Commission are very unlikely to produce
success. The bipartisan report, presented to
President George W Bush and the US Congress on
Wednesday, does recognize that the situation in
Iraq is deteriorating and that the current
strategy is unworkable - but then so does
virtually everyone else.
The key problem
is that events may be spiraling out of control,
and the key to success is not outside action but
Iraqi action. As a
result, the most important
single sentence in the ISG's executive summary is
its introductory caveat, "if the Iraqi government
moves forward with national reconciliation".
The problem with this caveat is that
almost any reasonable mix of recommendations would
work if Iraqi society as a whole moved forward
with reconciliation. The problem is that the
report, with its 79 recommendations, does not make
workable suggestions for creating or incentivizing
such action.
Simply calling for a weak and
divided Iraqi government to act in the face of all
of the forces tearing Iraq apart is almost
feckless: it is a "triumph of hope over
experience". Efforts to exhort Iraqis into
reconciliation are hardly new; this has been a
core political effort of the Bush administration
since before last month's congressional elections,
and one that dates back to at least the summer of
2005.
The only new twist is to call for
the US to use threats and disincentives to
pressure the Iraqi government to act decisively.
Saying that the "United States must make it clear
to the Iraqi government that the United States
could carry out its plans, including planned
redeployments, even if the Iraqi government did
not implement their planned changes" borders on
being irresponsible. It comes far too close to
having the US threaten to take its ball and go
home if the Iraqi children do not play the game
the United States' way.
Such a policy
ignores that lack of a clear Sunni leader and
power structure, the diverse ambitions of the
Kurds, and above all the divisions among the
Shi'ites. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is not
weak because he personally is weak, he is weak
because he is a compromise leader with two
powerful parties - Muqtada al-Sadr and the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq - that
are seeking Shi'ite power and pursuing their own
ambitions.
More important, it ignores the
fact that the Iraqi government is weak as much
because of US action as because of Iraq's inherent
problems. The US destroyed the secular core of the
country by disbanding the Ba'ath Party. The US
created a constitutional process long before Iraq
was ready, and created an intensely divisive
document with more than 50 key areas of
"clarification", including federation, control of
oil resources and money, control of security, the
role of religion, the nature of the legal system,
etc.
The US created an electoral system
that almost forced Iraqis to vote to be Sunnis,
Shi'ites and Kurds and divided the nation on
sectarian and ethnic lines. The US in effect sent
a bull in to liberate a china shop, and the ISG
now called on the US to threaten to remove the
bull if the shop doesn't fix the china.
Calling on outside powers to help the US
and on the US to "immediately launch a new
diplomatic offensive to building an international
consensus for stability in Iraq and the region"
may be worth trying. Relying on "Iraq's neighbors
and key states inside and outside the region to
form a support group to reinforce security and
reconciliation within Iraq" does, however, come
close to a pious hope. The neighbors that are
going to try have tried. A conference inside or
outside Iraq is still a good idea, but hinging a
strategy on its probable success is simply
foolish.
There is even less reason to rely
on Iran and Syria decisively to change their
behavior and their present perceptions of their
national interests. Why should they? Presumably,
they feel their present strategy and actions are
correct, and why should they react to US weakness
in ways that help the US? Dialogue with both
states by all means, but great expectations are
not a meaningful policy.
The executive
summary does not come to grips with incentive
options. It is possible that some kind of US or
international consortium that offered a major aid
package tied to conciliation could have an impact.
There are many areas where aid is needed at the
local level, and it might be particularly useful
in the insurgent areas in the west and mixed
cities. A major aid program to revitalize and
expand Iraq's oil exports, tied to fair sharing of
the wealth, might help. It is even possible that a
relocation plan might ease some sectarian and
ethnic adjustments.
The main report does
touch briefly on these issues and even recommends
a moderate US aid expenditure of US$5 billion a
year. The executive summary, however, is all tacit
threats and no incentives, and there is nothing
approaching an aid plan or a workable approach to
using aid to bring stability quickly or provide
incentives for conciliation. Worse, it makes the
threat that "if the Iraqi government does not make
substantial progress toward the achievement of the
milestones of national reconciliation, security,
and governance, the US should reduce its
political, military or economic support for the
Iraqi government".
The ISG is threatening
to weaken a weak government; good for its
opponents, but bad for the US and Iraq.
The report also does not provide a
credible security-policy option. Undefined US
troop cuts are desirable by 2008, or possibly
earlier or later. The US is to rush in more
qualified trainers and embeds that it doesn't
have, and assign more existing combat forces
unqualified for the mission. The plan for dealing
with the militias is to form a new US bureaucracy
without addressing the need for immediate,
day-to-day security in a nation without effective
courts and police in most threatened areas.
There is no meaningful plan for creating a
mix of effective Iraqi military forces, police
forces, governance and criminal-justice system at
any point in the near future, much less by 2008. A
truly effective effort may be possible with
political conciliation and the proper resources
and planning. But (a) the full report does not
provide a credible explanation of how this can
happen, and (b) the development of effective Iraqi
forces is definitely not possible without
conciliation.
The main report ignores the
problems in today's training and force-development
programs to the point where many of its
recommendations are little more than exhortative
nonsense. It also is pointless to make a long
series of detailed sub-recommendations for change
in the Iraqi security forces in the main report
without detailed justification and without a
meaningful detailed assessment of the capabilities
of the existing force and training effort.
Finally, there is no "Plan B". The report
does not address what happens if events spiral out
of control, or how the US should react to possible
future contingencies. The tacit assumption is that
they play it the United States' way or the US
leaves faster. There is no clear plan for what to
do if large-scale civil war occurs; how to deal
with regional actors if they become involved in
the conflict or take positions the US opposes. The
message seems to be that domestic US policy
concerns demand more attention than the nature and
pace of events in Iraq or America's longer-term
security interests in Iraq, the region and the
world.
This does not mean that there are
not many good ideas and a great deal of useful and
thoughtful material embedded in the main body of
the report. But this is not a good or workable
plan for the future.
Anthony
Cordesman holds the Arleigh A Burke chair in
strategy at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a private, tax-exempt
institution focusing on international public
policy issues. Its research is non-partisan and
non-proprietary. CSIS was a sponsoring
organization of the Iraq Study Group.
