Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and veteran of policy circles dating back to the Johnson administration, was an unlikely candidate to surprise the routine world of Washington national-security roundtable discussions. But debating Iraq with Lawrence Korb on July 20 at the Center for American Progress, he did just that. When his turn to speak came, Gelb fled the safety of the podium and stood and delivered his remarks Oprah-style, pacing around the room wireless microphone in hand.
A key premise of the withdrawal argument had been that anti-Americanism was the prime driver of strife in Iraq. The country could best be unified in the context of a U.S. exit -- and sooner rather than later, before the cycle of violence generated a level of sectarian distrust that transcended Iraqi nationalism.
But that point now seems to have passed. Even Gelb's partition alternative is less a plan to save the country than a plan to concede that Iraq is beyond saving. So in the late summer of 2006, when the world's eyes turned to Lebanon even as the violence in Iraq reached new levels, the last opportunity to secure a decent outcome in Iraq has already passed, and nothing America can do at this point will change that.
God willing, there will be no civil war in Iraq,” intoned Nouri al-Maliki, third prime minister of post-Saddam Iraq to conclude the July 25 joint press availability with President Bush. Importuning the divine is as good a plan as any at this point, for the substantive meeting itself was merely the capstone in a process that closed the door on the last best hope for the conventional policy process.
About a month before al-Maliki's trip, the famously fractious congressional Democrats finally reached a reasonable degree of unity around a plan for Iraq -- the Reed-Levin Amendment to the Department of Defense appropriations bill -- that encapsulated the long-standing liberal argument that ruling out an open-ended military commitment was the best chance to avoid a downward spiral of sectarian violence.
Unfortunately, when the final plan was released days later, it included neither amnesty nor a timetable. Congressional Democrats had launched opportunistic attacks on the former point, leading the administration to come out against amnesty as well. Bush's views prevailed over al-Maliki's initial instincts in both cases.
The opportunity thereby lost was enormous. On June 28, two days after the release of the revised, timetable-free reconciliation plan, the leaders of 11 insurgent groups announced that they were willing to halt all attacks immediately in exchange for a promise of American withdrawal within two years. But Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the offer with the repetition of long-standing administration cant that a timetable is “a signal to the enemies that all you have to do is just wait.” That a substantial bloc of America's erstwhile enemies was prepared to give up in exchange for a timetable did not, apparently, enter into the picture.
This opportunity, once lost, can probably never be regained. The level of violence in Iraq reached frighteningly large dimensions this spring with more than 100 Iraqi civilians killed per day in both April and May. This heightened domestic hatred has sharply reduced the odds that removal of foreign forces would bring about national reconciliation. A wave of retaliatory killings by Shiite militias in early July even had some Sunni leaders reversing course and calling for more American troops to be deployed.
Bush came out of his meeting with al-Maliki not with a new plan for national reconciliation, but instead with a plan to shift several thousand troops into Baghdad in hopes of securing the capital. The plan has virtually no chance of succeeding. Brookings Institution analyst Kenneth Pollack -- a fan of the strategy -- estimated in congressional testimony that it would require 100,000 to 120,000 troops in Baghdad at a time when there are only 127,000 soldiers in the whole country.
But even if sufficient forces were available, the plan's goal of combating Shiite militias and death squads in the capital seems unrealistic at this point. After all, the two largest militias -- the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army -- are affiliated with political parties represented in al-Maliki's parliamentary coalition. While al-Maliki was en route to Washington, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the nation's largest political party and overseers of the Badr Organization, was calling, in effect, for more militias, telling The Washington Post that the answer to Iraq's security problems was the formation of neighborhood defense committees. Under the circumstances, a serious effort at a crackdown would simply leave the United States without meaningful allies in the country.
One way or another, the current trends toward sectarian violence and “soft” ethnic cleansing as Iraqis increasingly try to sort themselves into homogenous neighborhoods is almost certain to continue. The main question remaining is how long American troops will be left in the crossfire.