Baker-Hamilton Report

The report is published and noteworthy for its complete condemnation of Bush policy. Only Bush and Cheney continue to cling to a public posture that refuses to admit the reality of conditions in Iraq today and the foolhardiness of attacking Iraq in the first place.

The report calls for opening discussion with Iran and Syria, but Bush is reluctant to do so. How discussions could be worse then the current situation is unexplained. Alan Simpson, the former Republican Senator from Wyoming said that we talked to the Russians throughout the Cold War (remember the Hot Line on the President’s desk) so why not to our opponents today?

The main problem with the report’s conclusions is that it is centered on an Iraq army that is supposed to secure the peace. The basic reality about Iraq is that it never was a coherent country. Tired diplomats put it together in 1919 after a lengthy and lethal world war and a peace conference that tried to settle enormous European and Asian problems. No one really thought through how the disparate groups making up Iraq could coexist.

The sectarian violence that increases daily and is a civil war in all but name is the central crisis preventing success in Iraq. The Army has to be made up of groups of people who hate each other: the Shiite majority who want the power denied to it for years; the Sunni minority who don’t want to lose the power they had under Saddam; and the Kurds who prefer to be left alone managing their own affairs as they have been doing for the past 15 years. No one documents how this is ever going to work. Bush’s father understood this at the end of the Gulf War and decided that disposing Saddam would be considerably worse than keeping his brutal dictatorship in existence. Now mix in religious passion and fanaticism and just look at each day’s headlines to see the chaos that prevails.

The New Republic’s Iraq issue was filled with short articles that addressed the situation more realistically than the Hamilton-Baker report. The Anne Marie Slaughter article discussed in the last post suggests an aggressive diplomatic approach. Two other articles provide succinct proposals recommending courses of action. They are both very logical and believable – the only problem is that they absolutely contradict each other. And that is the problem. The Bush administration has created a problem that is not solvable by the American can do spirit and it is time we realize that is the case.

James Kurth, a professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, in his New Republic article “Crush the Sunnis” argues that before leaving Iraq we must “inflict a dramatic and decisive defeat” on the Sunni insurgents or they will be encouraged to increase their attacks on us throughout the world. Iraq should be divided in two with the Kurds in the north, the Shia in the south, and the Sunnis stateless in the middle.

Kurth states the Sunni Arabs have to pay for both the dictatorship they promulgated and the insurgency they initiated. Even with Shia militias exacting vengeance, a recent poll of Sunnis showed that 90 percent of Sunnis approve of insurgent attacks on U.S. troops despite the US presence serving to mitigate the militias.

Kurth argues that in a three state solution, the Sunnis would claim they had defeated the U.S. military and would continue fighting their neighbors in the other two regions. With only two states we would provide support to them and thwart any tendency over time for the Shias to align with Iran or the Kurds to differ with Turkey.

Josef Joffe, a professor of Political Science at Stanford and the Hoover Institution, in his New Republic article “Ally With the Sunnis," argues the opposite of Kurth. The gist of his article is that our hardcore interests are menaced by Iran; it is they who have sponsored Hamas and Hezbollah, are building nuclear capacity, and have the most powerful army east of Israel. The ironic result of the Bush policy is that in eliminating Saddam, Bush eliminated the major detriment to Iran’s Middle East ambitions. Iran as a Shia state is now poised to become the great friend and protector to the majority Iraq Shiites. By threatening Syria we have pushed them into a marriage of convenience with Iran so that now both dangerous countries are aligned against the U.S.

With Iran seen as our real foe, Joffe argues that we should contain them by strengthening the Sunnis so that there is a standoff between the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Kurds. Offering the Sunnis protection splits the indigenous insurgents from the foreign ones who are only interested in contesting the U.S. This will free our troops from combating the insurgency and allow them to be positioned along the Iran and Syria borders, signaling to those two counties that they would have to attack the U.S. if they wanted to influence Iraq. This would be a fight away from urban centers where our military strength could be used in full. We could dig in for the long term, but at a cost much lower then our present turmoil.

So there it is. Two reasonably argued diametrically opposed positions. What a mess. Thomas Friedman in today’s NY Times may have the best solution, which mirrors Anne Marie Slaughter. Right now Iran and Syria have little at stake and can just watch the U.S. in its troubles, contributing as much or as little as they can get away with. But if we leave, things change dramatically for them. Refugees departing the civil war cross their borders. Money to support their Iraqi friends needs to be spent. Iran aligning with the Shiites and Syria with the Sunnis puts the two nations at odds with each other. The U.S. is not around to blame. Spillover of the chaos in Iraq is now their problem. Sounds a bit better then “stay the course.”