Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Adam Garfinkle

I was asked recently for my assessment of U.S. policy in Iraq and my recommendations. My view is that we should withdraw U.S. military forces substantially from Iraq, but do so in a way that, given vital U.S. strategic interests in the region, avoids the optic of defeat to the extent possible. The reason is that turning Iraq into a winning proposition for the United States is not within our grasp, so we must carefully reduce our reputational equity in it in order to enhance the long-run U.S. position in the region.

This conclusion rests on five intertwined judgments:

• The successes of the surge are militarily unsustainable at acceptable costs for as long as would be necessary to enable peaceful political consolidation inside Iraq.
• That is because it will take years, if it is possible at all, for the Iraqi state to cohere in a self-sustaining manner, and our babysitting Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic cleavages, all else equal, will only prolong the process. I read the combination of the Sunni “Awakening” and the Battle of Basra as meaning multifactional civil war in Iraq is far more likely than a negotiated coalescence of a functional federal state. Despite some political progress in recent months, the most critical cleavages among Iraqi communities remain unresolved, and no credible process even exists for intercommunal negotiation.
• Given that reality, U.S. military efforts can never accumulate enough tactical successes to produce a strategic “win,” which can only be defined and reckoned in political terms. Yet we’re much too powerful to “lose” either. That’s a formula for being tied down in Iraq indefinitely for no achievable purpose other than not to appear to be defeated, or to prevent the situation from becoming worse.
• But that circumstance is tantamount to defeat when seen from a broader perspective, because the longer we must stay and fight, the more we risk aiding terrorist recruitment throughout the Muslim world (and perhaps beyond), and the more Iranian regional influence will grow thanks to the manifest demonstration of our inability to use military power to achieve stated political objectives. The longer we stay, too, the more our relations with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and other countries are shackled to Iraq and our policy options constrained by it. And the longer we stay the less “quality time” senior decision-makers can devote to other strategically significant stakes—the rise of Asia and the rise of China within Asia, for example, not to speak of unprecedented challenges to the stability of the international economic order that appear to be upon us.
• Still, substantial withdrawal is not risk-free. It could lead to greater violence, large new refugee flows and some unknown degree of regional sectarian instability and violence as a result. More important, the demonstration effect of withdrawal without victory represents a serious if indeterminate vulnerability for the United States, for reputational effects are critical to the profile of American power and the society it protects. Fortunately, however, we can influence how withdrawal looks to relevant actors, and we can cushion some of its potential ill effects to a considerable degree.

So, what to do? Here are a dozen things, the first four being mainly OSD/DOD concerns, the next four bearing on internal Iraqi matters, the last four concerning regional issues.

It should go without saying—but, given the record of the past five years, I’ll say it anyway—that there must be unity of policy command to integrate all elements of U.S. national policy in Iraq. In any conflict in which politics is trump, a strategic concept weighted overwhelmingly toward military modalities at the de facto expense of all others will invariably fail. That is true whether we stay or leave, so it bears note that if the first four recommendations were to be implemented without the other eight, it could so maximize the downside of a withdrawal that it might become more dangerous to leave than to stay. In other words, if we do the first four, we have to do the other eight (or something like them). If we don’t do the first four, we should still do the other eight, because that’s the only way an even more protracted U.S. effort might succeed eventually—though in my view it’s still a long shot—and render our sacrifices of blood and treasure something other than completely vain. (If we had all the time, money and soldiers in the world, I might advise doing 5-12 now, and waiting on 1-4 for a year or two. But we don’t have all the time, money and soldiers in the world.)

1. Devise and implement a withdrawal schedule that will leave fewer than 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq within 18 months, those troops devoted to two missions: destroying Al Qaeda and training the Iraqi military and police in hopes that there will one day be a genuine national political authority they can serve. We should aim to get below 25,000 within 24 months if possible (composed of Special Forces + trainers + force protection for trainers), and base many in Kurdish areas. These numbers and timelines are artificial to some degree, but they symbolize the essence of a necessary strategic adjustment to both the U.S. public and to regional actors. The argument that troop levels should be determined only by “military need” sounds good only until one realizes that the political objectives for which U.S. troops are fighting and dying cannot reasonably be achieved within an acceptable time frame and at acceptable cost, thanks to the profound entropy inherent in contemporary Iraqi politics. (Admittedly, that logic may also apply to a U.S. training mission: It’s a mistake to assume we’re building up stability through such a mission when we lack assurance that more capable forces will be loyal to an Iraqi national authority.)

2. Beef up U.S. regional assets in Qatar, Bahrain and elsewhere, both as a hedge against a rapid and uncontrolled collapse in Iraq, and to signal that a withdrawal from Iraq is not a withdrawal from the region. Tough positions on other issues involving Arab governments (e.g., Lebanon, Sudan/Darfur), not to exclude effective use of appropriate force, would also help magnify and clarify that signal.

3. Maintain a dominant U.S. arms-supply relationship with Iraq in order to assure access and liaison to important Iraqi elites, and to reduce troublemaking from other potential suppliers who naturally do not have U.S. interests at heart.

4. But do not negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement that leaves a large, permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq. One understands the desire to have a fixed pressure point against Iran for future use, but the negative political fallout of establishing such a pressure point in Iraq (not least undermining the nationalist credentials of any Iraqi government that would sign such a SOFA) outweighs the benefits.

5. Americans should not propose a hard or soft partition of Iraq. That’s Iraqis’ business since it’s their country. But we, with help from others not to exclude even the UN, should help Iraqis settle their political differences—something they are very unlikely to do on their own, either before or after a civil war. And we should help them immediately to conduct a census so that a political system based on regional representation rather than sectarian-defined national lists becomes possible—an appropriate job, perhaps, for the UN in cooperation with the Arab League and Coalition forces. We must do this before Iraq’s scheduled October provincial elections.

6. Meanwhile, fund generously all elements of Iraqi civil society that conduce to creating an Iraqi national identity: trade unions, professional societies, universities, schools, libraries, the arts, museums, sports teams and the rest. We cannot ordain the political outcome in Iraq, but we can use the full panoply of non-military means at our disposal to push in the right direction. There will be money for this if we’re not spending $3 billion each week on a military effort.

7. Re-imagine the effort to reconstruct and develop the Iraqi economy. The best model for this task—which is the key to preventing an Iraqi failed state ripe for future terrorist exploitation—is a corporate model, not a charity model. With help from others, the Iraqi government should create a Corporation for Iraqi Reconstruction and Development (CIRD), a government-overseen public stock company designed to attract profitable investment against the collateral of Iraqi oil-in-the-ground. It could work like this: A foreign government would buy CIRD shares with the understanding that companies from that country would get first-right-of-refusal on import tenders in specified areas of industry and services. Contracts could include provisions for having Iraqi business partners and training/hiring Iraqi workers. The investing government could redeem (or re-invest or sell to third parties) its CIRD shares from the Iraqi treasury after ten years at a certain rate of interest; higher rates for bond assets held longer. In this way, for example, Italian investments would be disbursed mainly to Italian companies working in Iraq; Iraq would have the loan of significant sums of development money; Iraqis of all communities would have added incentives to assure security for foreign companies to work; an international board of directors would assure required transparency and encourage “best practice” development techniques.

8. Bring international assets to bear to sort out property rights disputes and restitutions in Iraq that have arisen as a result of sectarian consolidation and refugee flows, or the potential for acute civil strife will be prolonged into the next generation and possibly beyond.

9. Get Iraqi refugees in Jordan quickly resettled back in Iraq: the IOM and the UNHCR should take the lead. The collapse of Hashemite Jordan would be a catastrophe for U.S. regional interests, and its refugee burden is considerable.

10. The next administration can and should change the way it speaks about Iraq: No more God- and democracy/Freedom Agenda-talk. As suggested above, it should engage allies and international organizations to spread the optic of responsibility; it should defer rhetorically to the decisions of the Iraqi government. It should emphasize both that the Coalition effort has devastated Al Qaeda forces there, and that it has given the Iraqi people a fair chance to start anew—but that we can’t want a new-and-improved, kinder-and-gentler Iraq more than Iraqis themselves. Speechwriters are clever devils; they’ll know what to say.

11. If a new administration sees a way to advance Arab-Israeli diplomacy, fine; but no rhetorical link to Iraq or to the war on terror should be made—because there really isn’t any causal connection unless we foolishly insist on one. We don’t help ourselves to get things done by entwining already complex issues together in ways that make them more complex still; obviously, we make it harder.

12. In concert with internal Iraqi political negotiations, coordinated private U.S. diplomacy concerning Iraq should be undertaken with Turkey, Saudi Arabia + GCC, Jordan and Egypt. We would be wise to carefully brief our EU allies, Japan, China, Russia and India on what’s going on in these negotiations, as well. Only after reaching an understanding with those countries, which could include prominent participation in the CIRD, should we sit with Iran and Syria. Doing so prematurely, from what might reasonably be seen as a position of at least temporary weakness, is ill-advised. An international meeting might be a suitable means for completing and/or ratifying a regional security arrangement worked out phase by phase in private; to start with such a conference, however, would be useless at best and far more likely counterproductive. Those who think that diplomacy is a substitute for the literal and implied uses of power rather than a complement to them are deeply deluded. So, however, are those who think power can achieve political ends without diplomacy, short of compelling unconditional surrender.

My analysis has benefited from the fact that I solicited and edited a symposium on Iraq featured in the March/April issue of The American Interest. I have adapted freely if selectively from the wisdom of my authors: Joe Joffe, Paul Schroeder, Walter Russell Mead, Ellen Laipson, Richard Perle, Philip Zelikow, James Kurth, Dennis Ross, Will Marshall, Cindy Williams, Edward Gnehm, Robert D. Kaplan and Francis Fukuyama.