The Plan for Iraq

Yesterday on Slate, Fred Kaplan looked at three plans circulating on what to do in Iraq; the first by Wesley Clark, the second by military historian Andrew Krepenevich, and the last by Professor Juan Cole. Kaplan doesn't think too much of Clark's plan:

"Clark's military proposals are, surprisingly, no less vague. "The vast effort underway to train an army must be matched by efforts to train police and local justices." (This is under way.) "Canada, France, and Germany should be engaged to assist." (Oh? How?) "Military and security operations must return primarily to the tried-and-true methods of counterinsurgency: winning the hearts and minds of the populace through civic action, small-scale economic development and positive daily interactions." (How, if insurgents continue to sabotage all such efforts?)...If Gen. Clark is thinking about running for president again, he needs to do better than this."

He thinks more highly of Krepenevich's plan, an "oil-spot" strategy of locally intensive US Army and Iraqi Army efforts to clear out areas, that gradually expands outward with time as areas are brought under control. Unfortunately, the hitch to Krepenevich's plan is the commitment required:

"Even if successful, this strategy will require at least a decade of commitment and hundreds of billions of dollars and will result in longer U.S. casualty rolls. But this is the price that the United States must pay if it is to achieve its worthy goals in Iraq. Are the American people and American soldiers willing to pay that price? ... And if Americans are not up to the task, Washington should accept that it must settle for a much more modest goal: leveraging its waning influence to outmaneuver the Iranians and the Syrians in creating an ally out of Iraq's next despot."

Cole's plan, though different in the details, requires the same commitment. This is, of course, the real stumbling block to any plan to "win" in Iraq.

Anyone with half a brain who's been paying any attention to the news coming out of Iraq for the last two years, knows without a shadow of a doubt that our commitment to re-building Iraq has been insufficient even to bring security to the most unruly portions of Iraq, let alone actually go about re-building anything(the NY Times reports that electrical output, two years after the invasion, is still below pre-war levels.) The biggest hitch in any of our realistic plans for bringing security to the country at this point is the level of commitment they ask of our troops and the American people in general. Any real effort to bring Iraq under control and maintain security will require billions of more dollars, and a commitment of troops not only equal to what we have over there now, but even more troops in the short-term. What we are talking about then is not so much a question of strategy, but a question of politics.

The irony of the situation is that it is exactly the means by which the Bush administration chose to go to war that is preventing it from asking for a greater commitment from the American people, and if the administration had been more honest with itself and the American people about Iraq's capabilities(or lack thereof)there would in all liklihood been no invasion in the first place. Because so many Americans are jaded about the war effort as a result of the administration's blatant manipulation of the facts, and because the administration was flat-out wrong, few are willing to give the government more leeway to try and bring Iraq under control. Few Americans, already asked to surrender billions of taxpayer dollars, 1800 dead American soldiers and countless thousands more wounded, are willing to back an even greater commitment to a war whose primary justification has proven to be entirely wrong. A second irony is that though it is that failed justification that got us into the war in the first place and is preventing a greater commitment, it has long since been replaced by a far worthier justification of creating a stable, secure and (mostly) democratic Iraq, as well as simply saving Iraqi lives from religious terrorist elements that have infiltrated, and seem to dominate, the insurgency. As I said in an earlier post, whatever you think of the means by and the reasons for which we went to war in the first place, the war now has a worthy purpose and we should be willing to fight it. But another hard political fact is that Americans can be relentlessly pragmatic about war-making; we fight if it's in our interests, and the intensity with which we are willing to fight is often proportional to how much the fighting is in our interests. Our grudging willingness to make commitments to peace-keeping operations, most of which involve hefty troop commitments but little to no risk of casualties, is a demonstration of that. Politicians are sure to point out the pragmatic benefits to American of such peace-keeping operations, such as enhanced ties with other nations or some benefit in return from those we are aiding, or helping to aid.

Where then does Iraq lie in these considerations? Clearly our own security is at stake. Most people, myself included, believe that if left to fend for itself, the Iraqi government will prove incapable of fending off the insurgency and Iraq will, in the style of Afghanistan, become of safe-haven for terrorists trying to plan attacks all the way from the United States to Kashmir. Ultimately, the only way to short-cut the ambitions of men like Zarqawi is to create a stable Iraq with a representative government. A civil war is out of the question; we don't know who would control the country afterwards, let alone where their loyalties would lie, and even if it resulted in a regime hostile to Islamic extremists(which is highly unlikely), the interim period would be one of terrorists running rampant in the country. A tyrannical government is also out of the question; a secular dictatorship loyal to us would certainly give terrorists a hard time, but lacking legitimacy among the Iraqis it would also run the risk of being overthrown at some point and replaced with a regime hostile to us and favorable to the terrorists. Or it might simply collapse, throwing the country into a civil war requiring our intervention yet again. An Islamic theocracy, controlled by the Shiites, is not a good option either. Where would it's loyalties lie? Surely it would hunt down and kill extremists like Zarqawi, an enemy to Shia, but what of terrorists loyal to Shiite Iran?

The only possible choice we have, beyond letting any of these developments take place, is to stay and co-opt the elements of the insurgency that can be brought into a legitimate and representative government, and destroy and weaken those elements that cannot. Simply saying the war is lost will shame us before the entire world, weaken us politically, and leave Iraq to the mercy of it's, and our, enemies. In fact there is no choice; we must stay in Iraq, do what it takes to attempt to "win."