WASHINGTON - Warning that Iraq faces
"complete disintegration into failed-state chaos",
the International Crisis Group (ICG) is calling on
the United States to make a "clean break" in its
strategy for both Iraq and the wider Middle East
region.
In a new report released on
Tuesday, the Brussels-based group endorsed many of
the key recommendations submitted two weeks ago by
the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), headed by
former US secretary of state James Baker and
former
congressman Lee Hamilton,
including initiating direct talks with Iran and
Syria, as part of a regional effort to stabilize
Iraq.
But the 44-page ICG report, "After
Baker-Hamilton: What to Do in Iraq", stressed that
some of the ISG recommendations are not nearly
far-reaching enough.
It criticized, in
particular, the ISG's characterization of the
current government of Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki "broadly representative of the Iraqi
people" and its recommendation that Washington
work to strengthen it.
"Hollowed out and
fatally weakened, the Iraqi state today," the
report asserted, "is prey to armed militias,
sectarian forces and a political class that, by
putting short-term personal benefit ahead of
long-term national interests, is complicit in
Iraq's tragic destruction.
"The government
and security forces should not be treated as
privileged allies to be bolstered. They are but
one among many parties to the conflict," the
report stressed, adding that all Iraqi parties, as
well as their foreign backers, must be brought to
the table if the worst is to be avoided.
"We are looking at Iraq's complete
disintegration into failed-state chaos,
threatening to drag down much of the region with
it," said ICG president Gareth Evans, a former
Australian foreign minister. "What is needed above
all is a new multinational effort to achieve a new
political compact between all relevant players."
The ICG study comes one day after the
release of an alarming new Pentagon report
confirming that attacks against US forces and
civilians in Iraq reached new highs - at nearly
1,000 per week - from August through November
despite the deployment of nearly 20,000 additional
US troops to try to curb violence in Baghdad over
the same period.
"The violence has
escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace," marine
Lieutenant-General John Sattler, a top official
with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters
on Monday. "We have to get ahead of that violent
cycle, break that continuous chain of sectarian
violence."
The sharp rise in violence -
and the apparent inability of US troops to
contain, let alone reduce, it - is certain to
raise new doubts about the wisdom of sending yet
more troops to bolster the 140,000 who are already
in Iraq.
President George W Bush, who has
been mulling various proposals for a change in
strategy since the ISG released its
recommendations two weeks ago, has reportedly been
leaning in favor of a so-called "surge" option
that would dispatch as many as 50,000 more troops
to Iraq over the coming months to pacify Baghdad
and al-Anbar province, where the Sunni insurgency
is strongest.
That idea, which has been
put forward most aggressively by several retired
generals, Republican Senator John McCain, and some
of the same neo-conservatives at the American
Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard who
helped lead the drive to war in Iraq in 2003, has
reportedly run into strong resistance from the
Joint Chiefs.
During his briefing on
Tuesday, Sattler himself appeared skeptical that
additional US troops would be effective, and, in
his first public break with the administration
since he left it two years ago, former secretary
of state Colin Powell - himself a former chairman
of the Joint Chiefs - agreed with the ISG that
Washington should begin reducing its troops in
Iraq rather than adding to them.
While the
ICG report did not explicitly address the "surge"
option, it noted that the debate regarding
appropriate troops levels is largely "disconnected
from ground realities" in Iraq. "More troops - in
or out - are not going to solve this," said Evans,
who stressed that the only way to redress the
situation and avert the risk of a "regional
conflagration" is through political compromise by
all Iraqi parties and their regional supporters.
The report endorsed the ISG's call for
convening an International Support Group
comprising the five permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council and all of Iraq's
neighbors committed to engaging in "sustained
multilateral diplomacy".
"Regional actors
are taking measures in anticipation of the outcome
they most fear: Iraq's descent into all-out chaos
and fragmentation," said the ICG. "By increasing
support for some Iraqi actors against others,
their actions have all the wisdom of a
self-fulfilling prophecy: steps that will
accelerate the very process they claim to wish to
avoid."
The primary aim of the Support
Group would be to forge a "new, more equitable and
inclusive national compact" that would include
militias and insurgent groups, as well as the
government, "on issues such as federalism,
resource allocation, de-Ba'athification, the scope
of the amnesty and the timetable for a US
withdrawal".
That would require Washington
to engage Iran and Syria, a key step advocated by
the ISG but so far rejected by the Bush
administration, which has tried to sanction and
isolate both countries as part of strategy to
"transform" the Middle East.
"For as long
as the Bush administration's paradigm remains
fixated around regime change, forcibly remodeling
the Middle East, or waging a strategic struggle
against an alleged axis composed of Iran, Syria,
Hezbollah and Hamas, neither Damascus nor Tehran
will be willing to offer genuine assistance," said
the report, which called for a "clear redefinition
of Washington's objectives".
"The goal is
not to bargain with them [Iran and Syria], but to
seek agreement on an end-state for Iraq and the
region that is no one's first choice, but with
which everyone can live," it went on.
"An
approach that does not entail a clean break
vis-a-vis both Iraq and the region at best will
postpone what increasingly is looking like the
most probable scenario: Iraq's collapse into a
failed and fragmented state, an intensifying and
long-lasting civil war, as well as increased
foreign meddling that risks metastasizing into a
broad proxy war" that is unlikely to be contained
within Iraq's borders, the report argued.
