Page 2 of 2 Now it's official: Iraq's a
mess By Jim Lobe
likely figure at
between $20 billion and $27 billion a year,
depending on how many support troops are involved.
Washington is currently spending about $8 billion
a month on Iraq operations.
Aside from its
remarkably grim assessment of the current
situation and how it is likely to evolve over the
next 12-18 months, the new NIE's judgments offers
some ammunition to the administration, notably its
assertion that "coalition capabilities ... remain
an essential stabilizing element in Iraq" and its
prediction
for
what is likely to happen in the event of a rapid
withdrawal of US and other "coalition" forces
during the same period.
"We judge that
this almost certainly would lead to a significant
increase in the scale and scope of sectarian
conflict in Iraq, intensify Sunni resistance to
the Iraqi government, and have adverse
consequences for national reconciliation,"
according to the report.
It warned that
the Iraqi security forces will be "unlikely to
survive as a non-sectarian national institution"
and said there is a possibility that neighboring
countries "might intervene openly in the
conflict". It also said "massive civilian
casualties and forced population displacement
would be probable" and that al-Qaeda in Iraq will
try to establish bases in parts of the country.
While those predictions echo those by Bush
and other senior officials, however, the NIE did
not define what it means by "rapid withdrawal".
Most congressional critics of Bush policy oppose
an immediate withdrawal, while the bipartisan Iraq
Study Group that was co-chaired by former
secretary of state James Baker and former
congressman Lee Hamilton called for withdrawing
all US combat troops - about 70,000 currently - by
April 2008.
At the same time, the report
noted several developments that "could [the
report's emphasis] help to reverse the negative
trends driving Iraq's current trajectory",
including "broader Sunni acceptance of the current
political structure and federalism; significant
concessions by Shi'ites and Kurds; and a bottom-up
approach to achieving reconciliation among warring
tribes and sects".
But the italicized
"could" appeared to suggest considerable
skepticism.
"These developments are
unlikely to emerge, and the authors probably knew
that," said Wayne White, an Iraq expert who served
as deputy director of the State Department's
Office of Middle East and South Asia Analysis
until 2005. The office is part of the Bureau of
Intelligence and Research, one of the 16 agencies
that contribute to the NIE process. White said he
considered the analysis in the Judgments to be
"spot on".
A favorable outcome will depend
on "stronger Iraqi leadership", the report
stressed, noting at another point in the document:
"The absence of unifying leaders among the Arab
Sunnis or Shi'ites with the capacity to speak for
or exert control over their confessional groups
limits prospects for reconciliation."
If
some developments could help stabilize the
situation, however, there are others, "including
sustained mass sectarian killings, assassination
of major religious and political leaders and a
complete Sunni defection from the government" that
have "the potential to convulse severely Iraq's
security environment", according to the report.
In that event, one of three outcomes is
likely: "Chaos leading to (de facto) partition, a
scenario that would generate fierce violence for
at least several years; the emergence of a Shi'ite
strongman; or an anarchic fragmentation of power
that would present the greatest potential for
instability, mixing extreme ethno-sectarian
violence with debilitating intra-group clashes."
As for the current situation, the NIE
concluded that "the term 'civil war' accurately
describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict,
including the hardening of ethno-sectarian
identities, a sea change in the character of the
violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization and
population displacements". At the same time, the
authors said the term "does not adequately capture
the complexity" of the various dimensions of the
violence.
"They not only accept the term
'civil war' as a description of what's going on,
but the way they put it suggests they see it as
even worse, because of the other forms of violent
conflict that are being pursued in addition to
civil war," said Juan Cole, a Middle East expert
at the University of Michigan and president of the
Middle East Studies Association. "This is a
refutation of the administration's stance."
He said he is struck by the "extreme
pessimism" of the report. "It doesn't appear to
envisage an easy or foreseeable end to the
conflict absent factors which it says explicitly
are not there today."
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