Get Out Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say

There is a certain logic taking hold in Washington, amongst Democrats as well as Republicans, that the way out of Iraq is for the US to remove troops and force the Iraqi government to stand up.

Of course the central assumption that underlies this theory is that the Iraqi government have an inherent capability that they are so far not employing.

However, many military experts - some of them the Republican administration's greatest critics - are arguing that this central assumption being made is wrong.

Anthony C. Zinni, the former head of the United States Central Command and one of the retired generals who called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, argued that any substantial reduction of American forces over the next several months would be more likely to accelerate the slide to civil war than stop it.

“The logic of this is you put pressure on Maliki and force him to stand up to this,” General Zinni said in an interview, referring to Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister. “Well, you can’t put pressure on a wounded guy. There is a premise that the Iraqis are not doing enough now, that there is a capability that they have not employed or used. I am not so sure they are capable of stopping sectarian violence.”

Instead of taking troops out, General Zinni said, it would make more sense to consider deploying additional American forces over the next six months to “regain momentum” as part of a broader effort to stabilize Iraq that would create more jobs, foster political reconciliation and develop more effective Iraqi security forces.

Now the notion of sending more troops to stabilise the situation in Iraq is a political non-starter. It is also an indication of just how far the situation has deteriorated from where we could reasonably hope to be at this point.

Levin continues to argue that the solution is for the US to step down forcing the Iraqis to step up to the plate:

“There is no purely military solution here,” Mr. Levin said in an interview. “They have got to reach a political compromise in Iraq. The leaders have got to make concessions involving power sharing and resource sharing or else this insurgency and the violence continues to spiral.”

While Mr. Levin’s plan calls for beginning troop reductions over the next six months, it does not stipulate a time-frame for completing the withdrawal, or spell out precisely how many troops should be removed in the initial phase. The plan, however, does call for shifting the American military role to more limited missions like protecting the American Embassy, training the Iraqi forces and engaging in counterterrorist operations against cells of Al Qaeda.

“The point of the proposal is to force the Iraqis to take hold of the situation politically,” Mr. Levin said.

I agree with Mr Levin that there is no purely military solution to the situation in Iraq. However, I am also unsure if there is any available solution that does not involve civil war.

The very Iraqi army that is called upon to stand up is mostly Shiite. How can anyone be sure that they will not use the situation to extract revenge on the Sunnis and engage in ethnic cleansing to ensure their control of Baghdad?

John Batiste, a retired Army major general who also joined in the call for Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, described the Congressional proposals for troop withdrawals as “terribly naïve.”

“There are lots of things that have to happen to set them up for success,” General Batiste, who commanded a division in Iraq, said in an interview, describing the Iraqi government. “Until they happen, it does not matter what we tell Maliki.”

Before considering troop reductions, General Batiste said, the United States needs to take an array of steps, including fresh efforts to alleviate unemployment in Iraq, secure its long and porous borders, enlist more cooperation from tribal sheiks, step up the effort to train Iraq’s security forces, engage Iraq’s neighbors and weaken, or if necessary, crush the militias.

Indeed, General Batiste has recently written that pending the training of an effective Iraqi force, it may be necessary to deploy tens of thousands of additional “coalition troops.” General Batiste said he hoped that Arab and other foreign nations could be encouraged to send troops.

If the coalition is serious about leaving Iraq and avoiding a civil war, then there is much more that needs to be done than simply removing troops.

However, most of what needs to be done should already have been done during the past three years but Rumsfeld refused to engage a sufficient amount of troops to perform the tasks and ensure order in Iraq. Now, three years down the line, there is even less political will to engage more troops and the insurgency is organised in a way that it was not three years ago.

I don't want to sound too pessimistic, but I can't see any good way out of this hole that Bush and Blair have dug.

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tag: Iraq, Iraq war, "Stay the course", withdrawal, war on terror