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What model should Iraq follow after U.S.
forces withdraw?
27.7.2007
By Lionel.Beehner, Council on Foreign Relations |
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July
27, 2007
Introduction
Even as they disagree on how long American forces
will remain in Iraq, U.S. officials and foreign
policy experts suggest a number of scenarios for
what Iraq might resemble after coalition forces
eventually pull out. President Bush has proposed the
so-called South Korean model, a long-term residual
troop presence to prevent civil war from breaking
out. Many have also likened the conflict to Vietnam,
where the fall of Saigon did not unleash the massive
"domino" effect many predicted. Others have offered
Lebanon, which suffered from a long civil war before
an uneasy truce was inked, as a more accurate
template. Then there are those who say Iraq should
become a federalized state, akin to post-1995
Bosnia. Experts disagree over the degree to which
the conflict in Iraq could spread to neighboring
countries.
The South Korea Model
Over fifty years after the Korean War, some thirty
thousand U.S. troops remain stationed along the DMZ,
which divides the peninsula between North Korea and
South Korea (the number is expected to diminish to
24,500 next year). The U.S. forces are there to keep
an uneasy peace between the two Koreas and prevent
war from erupting again. The analogy to Korea is
meant to portray the Iraq conflict as a long-term
one that requires a residual "over-the-horizon"
military presence, mainly to support indigenous
forces and keep the peace. "The idea is more a model
of a mutually-agreed arrangement, whereby we have a
long and enduring presence, but one that is by
consent of both parties and under certain
conditions," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told
reporters in early June. He also said the Korean
model stood in contrast to the aftermath of the
Vietnam War, where "we just left lock, stock and
barrel."
Still, some opponents of the war, including several
presidential aspirants, have seized on this
comparison as a justification for keeping U.S.
forces in Iraq indefinitely. This CFR.org issue
tracker examines the positions of current 2008
candidates. Democratic presidential candidate Bill
Richardson, for instance, has called for "zero
troops," including residual forces, as well as for a
withdrawal of embassy staff if the security
situation worsens.
Others say Korea is a faulty model, and a residual
force will only embolden Islamic radicals and arouse
suspicions that U.S. interests are related more to
oil than democracy promotion. "Any U.S. bases
remaining in Iraq, either to keep a finger on the
oil, or to act as a jumping off point for attacking
Iran, will similarly quickly come under withering
attack from Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda," writes
Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute, a
public-policy research organization.
The Lebanon Model
Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war illustrates that long
and violent factional fighting can draw regional
countries into a wider war. But some experts say
Iraq is different and argue the sectarian violence
would stay relatively contained and not spread to
neighboring countries. "Such meddlers tend to seek
advantage in their neighbors' civil wars, not to
spread them, which is why they rely on proxies to do
their fighting," write CFR's Steven Simon and Ray
Takeyh in the Washington Post. "You can already see
that pattern at work in Iraq today."
The Lebanon model was promoted by some White House
officials back in 2004 as a blueprint for dealing
with Iraq. Before last summer's war, Lebanon was
seen as an example of how a failed state could
transition into a relatively stable democracy in the
Arab world, held together by a power-sharing
arrangement, however tenuous. "It works in a
flawed-but-muddling-through sort of way," Michael J.
Totten, a Beirut-based journalist, wrote in the Wall
Street Journal in January 2006. "[But] what makes
this place unique is that the Lebanese political
system is nearly incapable of producing
dictatorship." Although eighteen months later,
Lebanon teeters on the brink of sectarian war, some
experts say its power-sharing agreement between
sectarian camps with competing agendas and claims to
land may provide a model, however flawed, for Iraq
to follow.
But other analysts fear Iraq may result in something
worse than Lebanon at its nadir in the 1980s.
"Lebanon's simmering civil war eventually burned
itself out and left a coherent, albeit weak, state
in its ashes," writes Christopher J. Fettweis of the
U.S. Naval War College in the Los Angeles Times.
"Iraq could soon more closely resemble Somalia in
the 1990s, an utterly collapsed, uncontrolled,
lawless, failed state that destabilizes the most
vital region in the world." Democratic presidential
candidates, similarly, regularly refer to the
prospect of "genocide" in postwar Iraq.
The Vietnam Model
The Vietnam War ended in a four-year-long withdrawal
of U.S. forces followed by the fall of Saigon and
the rest of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese.
In Vietnam, the U.S. military slowly handed over
combat duties to local forces as part of its "Vietnamization"
campaign. Some analysts say employing a similar
strategy in Iraq would be complicated because the
conflict is more of a communal civil war, not an
ideological struggle for national liberation. "Such
a policy," writes CFR's Stephen Biddle in Foreign
Affairs, "might have made sense in Vietnam, but in
Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal
tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine
the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it."
Some say the lesson of the "Vietnam model," as it
applies to Iraq, is to maintain a U.S. presence and
economic aid to sustain a political solution. "The
shame of Vietnam is not that we were there in the
first place, but that we betrayed our ally in the
end," wrote former Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird
in Foreign Affairs. Adds Henry Kissinger, a former
secretary of state, in a recent op-ed: "The
essential prerequisite for such a political solution
is staying power in the near term."
Fettweis says Vietnam is an apt comparison to Iraq
because both represented major strategic mistakes in
U.S. foreign policy, turning public opinion against
the White House and against interventionism in
general--what became know as "Vietnam Syndrome." But
he says the significance of pulling en masse out of
Iraq, like Vietnam before it, may prove to be
overplayed by the war's architects. "[J]ust as the
war's critics predicted in the 1960s, Vietnam turned
out to be strategically irrelevant," he writes.
"Saigon fell, but no dominoes followed; the balance
of Cold War power did not change."
The Bosnia Model
The "nation building" parallels between Iraq and
Bosnia are manifold. The Iraq Study Group, among
other sources, has advocated a Dayton-like peace
process to bring in Iraq's neighbors to cooperate on
border control and security operations. Moreover,
Iraq's Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites have made fitful
attempts to reach a power-sharing agreement, much as
the various ethnic factions did in
Bosnia-Herzegovina during the mid-1990s. Troop
deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have been
compared to foreign troop proportions deployed to
keep peace in the former Yugoslavia (to meet the
troop-to-civilian ratios applied in Bosnia, the
coalition would have to deploy 258,000 thousand
forces to Iraq). And Bosnia may give development
specialists a blueprint on rebuilding Iraq's
economy, particularly regarding how much foreign aid
to give per capita.
But the main use of the "Bosnia model" has come from
advocates who favor a looser federation rather than
a centralized state, not unlike Bosnia post-1995.
"The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united
Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each
ethno-religious group--Kurd, Sunni Arab, and Shiite
Arab--room to run its own affairs, while leaving the
central government in charge of common interests,"
wrote Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) and the
Council on Foreign Relations' President Emeritus
Leslie H. Gelb in the New York Times. "In effect,
Iraq is already becoming Bosnia," adds Michael E.
O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, writing in
the Washington Times. Decentralization in Iraq, like
Bosnia, would require land swaps, the separation of
ethnic groups, and a political agreement that
disperses powers to the regions, while keeping a
unitary state. "Ethnic relocation is distasteful and
not free from risk but if carried out with care as
government policy, it can occur with less trauma
than in the Balkans," adds O'Hanlon.
Yet others disagree. More than a decade after the
Dayton Peace accords, some say that Bosnia's Serbs,
Croats, and Muslims still do not share a unified
vision for the country as a whole. "Of all the
ironies of the American adventure in Iraq, perhaps
none is larger than using the 'success' of Bosnia as
a model to solve the sectarian violence now raging
in Baghdad," write Don Hays of the U.S. Institute of
Peace, R. Bruce Hitchner of the Dayton Project, and
Edward P. Joseph in the International Herald
Tribune. "The Dayton legacy of balancing power at
the central, cantonal, and local levels is
hopelessly dysfunctional." They say Bosnian Serbs,
emboldened by Kosovo's push for independence, may be
poised to pull out of the Dayton arrangement.
Moreover, Bosnia, given its porous borders, remains
a lawless haven for drug and arms traffickers,
terrorists, and other organized crime elements.
The Northern Ireland Model
The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus,
has characterized the counterinsurgency campaign in
Iraq as a long slog and likened it to the
decades-long struggle by British forces to quell
Northern Ireland. "Northern Ireland, I think, taught
you that very well. My counterparts in your
[British] forces really understand this kind of
operation... It took a long time, decades," he told
the BBC. "I don't know whether this will be decades,
but the average counterinsurgency is somewhere
around a nine or a ten-year endeavor." In Northern
Ireland, conflict has raged for years between
Catholics and Protestants over whether to merge with
Ireland or remain a part of the United Kingdom.
Similarly, in Iraq Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds
have competing views of what kind of future state
Iraq should resemble (i.e. decentralized versus
centralized, secular versus religious, pro-Arab
versus pro-Iran). Yet some critics of Petraeus'
comments point out that the roots of the conflict in
Northern Ireland stretch back centuries, not
decades, a template that bodes for a long and bloody
U.S. occupation in Iraq. "Here's the problem of
using the Northern Ireland analogy: For how long did
a band of less than a thousand IRA militants keep
peace at bay?" asks one blogger. "We're not dealing
with a few hundred insurgents in Iraq."
washingtonpost com
Pentagon makes contingency plans for Iraq pullout
WASHINGTON, -- The Pentagon is making contingency
plans for a gradual U.S. withdrawal of troops from
Iraq, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert
Gates, who called the planning a "priority."
In a letter delivered on Tuesday to Sen. Hillary
Clinton, a New York Democrat and presidential
candidate who tangled with the Pentagon to learn
whether such plans exist, Gates said he was actively
involved in drafting them.
He said he would work with the Senate Armed Services
Committee to find a way to keep senators informed
about the "conceptual thinking, factors,
considerations, questions and objectives associated
with drawdown planning."
"You may rest assured that such planning is indeed
taking place with my active involvement as well as
that of senior military and civilian officials and
our commanders in the field," Gates said. "I
consider this contingency planning to be a priority
for this department."
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman stressed the
Pentagon was not planning for a quick or wholesale
withdrawal of forces. A phased reduction would be in
line with a Bush administration view that some
long-term U.S. presence in Iraq may be needed.
"Planning for reducing our forces, drawing down our
forces, is certainly something that is an
appropriate thing to do," Whitman said. "We are
doing that kind of planning, planning for the
eventual drawdown, eventual reduction, the beginning
of withdrawing of forces from Iraq."
The Defense Department develops contingency plans
for a range of scenarios worldwide.
This spring some 30,000 more U.S. troops were sent
to Iraq, bringing the total force to about 157,000,
under the current plan aimed at establishing enough
security to allow Iraqi politicians to make progress
toward reconciliation.
All of the so-called "surge" forces have been in
place since June 15. Democrats in Congress, however,
are calling for a strategy change leading to
withdrawal.
Clinton had asked the Pentagon in May for
information about contingency planning for a
possible troop withdrawal from Iraq.
Defense Under Secretary Eric Edelman, in the
Pentagon's written response, did not address whether
the Defense Department was making such plans.
Instead, he said public discussion of withdrawal
"reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States
will abandon its allies."
Clinton called the response unacceptable and
outrageous.
Gates, in a follow-up letter, backed Edelman, noting
the official was given his first senior presidential
appointment as an ambassador in 1998, during the
administration of the senator's husband, former
President Bill Clinton.
Reuters
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