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Our missing fourth option and fallback for
Iraq
19.1.2007
By Charles Krauthammer - Viewpoints
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January 19, 2007
If we were allied with an Iraqi government that,
however weak, was truly national —
cross-confessional and dedicated to fighting a
two-front war against Baathist insurgents and Shiite
militias — a surge of American troops, together with
a change of counterinsurgency strategy, would have a
good chance of succeeding. Unfortunately, the Iraqi
political process has given us Nouri al-Maliki and
his Shiite coalition.
Its beginning was inauspicious. Months of wrangling
produced a coalition of the three major Shiite
religious parties, including that of Moqtada al-Sadr.
Given Maliki's legitimacy as the first
democratically elected leader of Iraq, however, he
was owed a grace period of, say, six months to show
whether he could indeed act as a national leader.
By November, his six months were up and the verdict
was clear: He could not. His government is
hopelessly sectarian. It protects Sadr, as we saw
dramatically when Maliki ordered the lifting of U.S.
barricades set up around Sadr City in search of a
notorious death squad leader. It is enmeshed with
Iran, as we saw when Maliki's government forced us
to release Iranian agents found in the compound of
one of his coalition partners.
The Saddam hanging did not change anything, but it
did illuminate the deeply sectarian nature of this
government. If it were my choice, I would not
"surge" American troops in defense of such a
government. I would not trust it to deliver its
promises. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus thinks otherwise.
Petraeus, who will be leading our forces in Iraq,
has not only served two and a half years there, but
has also literally written the book on
counterinsurgency. He believes that with an
augmentation of U.S. troops, a change of tactics and
the support of three additional Iraqi brigades, he
can pacify Baghdad.
Petraeus wants to change the U.S. counterinsurgency
strategy, at least in Baghdad, from simply hunting
terrorists to securing neighborhoods. In other
words, from search-and-destroy to stay-and-protect.
He thinks that he can do this with only a modest
increase of five American brigades.
I am confident that Petraeus knows what he's doing
and that U.S. troops will acquit themselves
admirably. I'm afraid the effort will fail, however,
because the Maliki government will undermine it.
The administration view — its hope — is that,
whatever Maliki's instincts, he can be forced to act
in good faith by the prospect of the calamity that
will befall him if he lets us down and we carry out
our threat to leave. The problem with this logic is
that it is contradicted by the president's
simultaneous pledge not to leave "before the job is
done."
In this high-stakes game of chess, what is missing
is some intermediate move on our part — some Plan B
that Maliki believes Bush might actually carry out —
the threat of which will induce him to fully support
us in this battle for Baghdad. He won't believe the
Bush threat to abandon Iraq. He will believe a U.S.
threat of an intermediate redeployment within Iraq
that might prove fatal to him but not necessarily to
the U.S. interest there.
We need to define that intermediate strategy. Right
now there are only three policies on the table: (1)
the surge, which a majority of Congress opposes, (2)
the status quo, which everybody opposes, and (3) the
abandonment of Iraq, which appears to be the default
Democratic alternative.
What is missing is a fourth alternative, both as a
threat to Maliki and as an actual fallback if the
surge fails. The Pentagon should be working on a
sustainable Plan B whose major element would be not
so much a drawdown of troops as a drawdown of risk
to our troops. If we had zero American casualties a
day, there would be as little need to withdraw from
Iraq as there is to withdraw from the Balkans.
We need to find a redeployment strategy that
maintains as much latent American strength as
possible, but with minimal exposure. We say to
Maliki: You let us down and we dismantle the Green
Zone, leave Baghdad and let you fend for yourself;
we keep the airport and certain strategic bases in
the area; we redeploy most of our forces to
Kurdistan; we maintain a significant presence in
Anbar province where we are having success in our
one-front war against al-Qaida and the Baathists.
Then we watch. You can have your Baghdad civil war
without us. We will be around to pick up the pieces
as best we can.
This is not a great option, but fallbacks never are.
It does have the virtue of being better than all the
others, if the surge fails. It has the additional
virtue of increasing the chances that the surge will
succeed.
Krauthammer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated
columnist based in Washington, D.C.
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