American permutations
The decisive results of the 8 November 2006 mid-term congressional elections in the United States were variously interpreted, but the chief pollsters for the Republican and Democratic parties agreed on one thing: the rebuke of President George W. Bush’s party signified the voters’ desire to see troops come home from Iraq quickly. One prominent Republican political adviser, who wished to remain unidentified, opined that Americans would take to the streets if a drawdown of US forces did not begin immediately. On 6 December, the long-trailed report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), for which Congress had appropriated $1.3 million in a defence spending bill early in 2006, was released by its authors into this explosive political atmosphere.
The authors
The study group was the brainchild of Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman from Virginia with a penchant for travelling through war zones on fact-finding missions. He had visited Iraq twice, in 2003 and 2005. His first foray was replete with visits to villages and towns in the Iraqi hinterland, relatively unimpeded by security concerns. By the time of his second visit, his movements were circumscribed by the sharp increase in violence that began with the February and March 2004 Sunni and Shia revolts in Fallujah and Najaf. Reflecting on the profound change he detected between 2003 and 2005, he contrived to have a bipartisan commission authorised to explore ways in which the United States might rescue the situation in Iraq. The alternative to a commission would have been hearings in Congress, but Wolf reasoned that the polarised politics on Capitol Hill would yield more heat than light. Wolf’s provision shrewdly mandated that the report be made to the public, rather than a divided Congress or hostile White House.
The commission consisted of those who come closest to being a distinguished foreign-policy establishment as is probably possible in the US at this point. It was co-chaired by Republican James A. Baker III, formerly secretary of Treasury and State and chief-of-staff to president George H. W. Bush, and Democrat Lee H. Hamilton, former congressman and once chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The group was rounded out by a former Supreme Court justice, a one-time secretary of state, an ex-attorney general and an erstwhile senator. The sense of anticipation generated by this group against the background of an administration widely perceived to be floundering, UN reports of widespread internecine violence, and rising American casualties is difficult to overestimate. The ‘thumping’, as Bush characterised his party’s electoral rout, intensified this already anxious mood.
‘Cut and walk’
Prior to the release of the report, Baker had carefully heightened public suspense with Delphic utterances about the pragmatic desirability of talking to one’s enemies (Iran and Syria) and leaked rumours of an interest in large troop reductions. The published report did not disappoint. At 160 pages, the New Approach – A Way Forward assembled the case for the withdrawal of ‘all combat brigades’ by the end of the first quarter of 2008, with the remainder allocated to force protection, search-and-rescue and ‘training, equipping and advising’ the Iraqi Army. Assistance to Iraq’s army would be continued if – and only if – the Iraqi government made a serious effort to pursue the national reconciliation programme to which it had committed itself. In the absence of ‘substantial progress’, the United States ‘should reduce its political, military or economic support for the government’. This condition departed dramatically from the administration’s policy, which had predicated the withdrawal of US forces on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s fulfilment of his reconciliation pledges and on the increasing competence of the Iraqi Army. Neither of these circumstances is held to be likely.
The study group, in classic Washington fashion, situated its recommendations among alternatives that most observers would regard as implausible, impracticable, undesirable or already underway – ‘precipitous withdrawal’, ‘stay the course’, ‘more troops’, and ‘devolution to three regions’ – in order to emphasise the sagacity and realism of the group’s ‘new approach’. The tactical disingenuousness of this framework was underscored by the substantial speed implied, on the one hand, by the study group’s own timetable for withdrawal and, on the other, by the fact that the president had already begun to speak of the need for a new strategy. To protect its flank, the study group also hedged somewhat on the drawdown, saying that while ‘all combat brigades not necessary for force protection’ could leave Iraq by early 2008 this was ‘subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground’, which the authors’ leave undefined. Nevertheless, if not quite ‘cut-and-run’, the study group’s recommendation might fairly be described as ‘cut-and-walk’.
If Americans somehow doubted the need for drastic measures, the report implied, they had only to look at alarming facts about the war that, significantly, differed from comparable statistics released by the Bush administration. Per Baker–Hamilton, virtually every indicator was dire: the number of attacks per day in October 2006 (180); increase in attacks since February 2006 (70%); increase in daily attacks against Iraqi forces since January 2006 (100%) and against Iraqi civilians (400%); and number of Iraqi civilians killed every month (3,000).
Broader differences with US policy
The study group’s foreign-policy recommendations focused on expansive initiatives. One would be the establishment of an Iraq International Support Group consisting of Iraq’s neighbours ‘as well as other key countries in the region’. The purpose of the group would be to dampen the impulse of bordering countries to intervene in Iraq in ways that would further weaken its unity and, secondly, to help cover the cost of Iraq’s rehabilitation. The report balances its assertion that all the neighbouring countries have an interest in a unified and stable Iraq with a frank judgement that these countries are likely to act in ways that are inconsistent with this interest if left to their own devices.
The three states the authors have in mind are Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. These governments would be the object of a ‘new diplomatic offensive’, which would aim to win their cooperation for the support group envisaged by the report. Syria is suspected of turning a blind eye to the cross-border movement of mainly Sunni jihadists, while Iran is thought to be the key to control over marauding Shia militias and the failure of national reconciliation. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has warned darkly – if implausibly, in view of scarce military means and the risk of inviting retaliation – that it would have to intervene to protect Iraqi Sunnis in the event of an American withdrawal of military forces. A simultaneous component of this diplomatic offensive would be ‘a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab–Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine’.
Taken together, the insinuation that the situation in Iraq was more bloodily chaotic than the Bush administration had allowed; the assessment that American forces had not stemmed the violence and could not be expected to do so; the proposal to withdraw most troops in a little over a year regardless of what the Iraqi government does; and the endorsement of a highly detailed ‘diplomatic offensive’ all amounted to a comprehensive repudiation of the administration’s policies. At the conceptual level, moreover, the authors rejected the president’s claim that the disaster in Iraq was due to al-Qaeda extremists supported by Syria on one side and Shia extremists supported by Iran on the other. For the study group, outsiders were not responsible for the ‘civil war’; Iraqis were.
Round reactions
Upon its release, the report met heavy criticism from nearly every quarter. Democrats condemned the hedged language on withdrawal and the early 2008 timetable as mere temporising, designed to protect the administration. Republicans, as exemplified by the front page of the 7 December edition of a New York tabloid, which depicted Baker and Hamilton as ‘Surrender Monkeys’, lashed the report as advocating capitulation to terrorists and as a betrayal of Iraq. Observers on both sides of the partisan divide questioned the utility and/or wisdom of engaging Iran and Syria, especially given countervailing priorities that Washington had in its relationship with both countries: in the case of Iran, an upcoming UN Security Council sanctions resolution stemming from Tehran’s apparent nuclear weapons aspirations; in Syria’s case, the UN investigation of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri’s murder and what looks increasingly like an attempt to overthrow the government of Fouad Siniora in Lebanon.
Likewise, critics on the right and left reviled the suggestion that pressuring Israel to negotiate with Syria or the Palestinian Authority would help the American cause in Iraq. For these detractors, the notion that an Arab–Israeli settlement would induce a single Iraqi insurgent to lay down his weapon was risible, while the notion that Israeli policy toward Syria or the Palestinians was implicitly responsible for America’s difficulties in Iraq was a subtle form of scapegoating.
The administration’s defenders observed that the ISG’s recommendations might have been relevant to Baker’s world in 1991, but had little to do with the current situation. Their strategy was to listen impassively to the ISG’s briefing and portray it as just one of a host of studies and recommendations on how to cope with the crisis that Iraq had become. In public statements, Bush was palpably neuralgic, scolding a reporter who asked him if he was in denial about the situation in Iraq by saying: ‘It’s bad in Iraq. Does that help?’. In practical terms, the administration commissioned a study by the National Security Council (NSC) staff under J.D. Crouch, a deputy national security adviser. The White House also sponsored a Pentagon study, albeit during the awkward transition between defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, Robert Gates, who was confirmed by the Senate and assumed his new duties on 18 December.
As of mid-December, these were just two of the welter of plans either in process or already released. The aforementioned NSC plan will probably echo a memorandum by Stephen Hadley, the president’s main national security adviser, which was leaked in late November. According to that document, the US would attempt to recast Maliki’s political base to afford him the freedom he needs to reach out to Sunnis and get the Shia militias under control. The Office of the Vice President, in contrast, is said to be pressing for the ‘80% plan’, under which the US would throw its political and perhaps military support to the Kurds and Shia, giving up on the idea of reconciliation between Arab Sunnis and other Iraqis. Although this approach stands little chance of adoption, it reflects the pressures – and, critics charge, desperation – that permeates the policy-making community.
‘Go Long’ , ‘Double Down’, ‘Go Home’?
The Pentagon is reportedly at work on three options. One of these is called ‘Go Long’ – an American football play that aims for a sizeable gain from a single pass – which would combine a slight increase in US forces in the short term with a longer-term intensive commitment to training Iraqi troops. Another option known as ‘Double Down’ – a gambling term that signifies doubling a bet on the basis of a promising but incomplete blackjack hand – envisages a heavy increase in US forces. A third alternative is referred to as ‘Go Home’. But the Pentagon is scarcely likely to approach this president with a serious proposal along the lines of the ISG report. Senator John McCain, a possible Republican candidate for president in 2008, has come out strongly in favour of some blend of ‘Go Long’ and ‘Double Down’. He and an assortment of neo-conservative critics of the administration’s approach believe that the US Army and US Marine Corps can field a larger number of brigades than the Pentagon has said is realistic. For policymakers reluctant to concede that the American effort in Iraq is doomed and who want to avoid blame for a worsening of the security situation in Iraq in the aftermath of withdrawal, the only course is to raise the stakes. Accordingly, this option appears to be gaining traction.
At the other end of the spectrum, Leslie H. Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations has advocated the managed separation of Iraq into autonomous federal entities – an idea that might have been practical two years ago, but which now seems to have been overtaken by the dramatic increase in sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing sparked by the bombing of the al-Askari mosque in February 2006. Finally, there is Democratic Congressman John P. Murtha’s proposal for an immediate redeployment of US troops ‘consistent with their safety’, a quick reaction force in the region, and a diplomatic campaign to foster Iraqi stability.
A policy still adrift
The president has promised a major speech in mid-January, in which he would unveil his new strategy towards Iraq. In the meantime, if the ISG has any effect on American discourse about the war, it is that the report has liberated Washingtonians to acknowledge and talk about the risks of defeat in Iraq. That alone is a major contribution.
