Out on a limb

First all, thanks to all those who commented in my previous thread on Iraq and thanks to Nadezha posting a lengthy response over at Liberals Against Terrorism (I agree with Joe that my preferred acronym, LaT, probably looks a little too similar to the Lashkar-e-Taiba's) for posting a very nice reply on the subject. It's a good piece, well-worth reading and as such it requires a full reply.

Dan's reaction is a lengthy cri de coeur that boils down to "Say it ain't so!"

Not exactly. The Post article didn't contain much that was new for me as far as the problems we're now facing in Iraq versus those we had expected to face going in. Recall that I went through and summarized Cordesman's definitive treatment on the subject, which I would wholeheartedly recommend for anyone who wants a full and scholarly read on the problem. My issue with the Post article was not so much that these problems existed but rather that the administration, more or less for domestic concerns, is going to just shrug it's shoulders and give up as a result. Now that would be okay if our sole objective in going into Iraq was deposing Saddam Hussein, but it wasn't and that certainly wasn't our stated reason for staying after the WMDs proved elusive. After all we've heard about what a credibility gap the US has in Iraq because of our encouragement and then abandonment of the Iraqi people after the Gulf War, you'll forgive me if I don't want us to add to it if nothing else.

Dan makes an impassioned case for why a "cut and run" strategy is dangerous for US interests. Given his personal focus on terrorist groups, he is particularly distressed by the notion that Al Qaeda would benefit from being able to claim to have defeated the US in Iraq.

Not only would they "claim" to have defeated the US but, as with their earlier victory in Somalia or Hezbollah's in Lebanon, their claim would be entirely accurate. The whole premise of bin Laden and his followers as far as why the West should be attacked is not because we are strong but rather because we are weak and unable to stand against the mujahideen in open battle. A US withdrawl from Iraq justifies that doctrine in every way and if you think that our being in Iraq is a magnet for terrorism, just wait until we pull out and see what happens. Hezbollah is still reaping enormous financial and recruiting benefits throughout the Middle East because they're the only Arab force that can claim to have foughted and defeated Westerners in open battle, for instance. Having al-Qaeda reap that benefit again entirely apart from their tangible gains if the US withdraws from Iraq would be a disaster of unparallel porportions given their current global profile, which is something they didn't have back in Somalia.

Without saying it in so many words, he also fears a sort of "Iraq syndrome" that would inhibit the US from intervening with force where necessary to deal with terrorist threats.

Essentially, yes. Without US support, Iraq will collapse into ethno-sectarian violence a la 1990s Afghanistan and I see evidence whatsoever that this violence will stop at the country's borders. That's a pretty big mess right there and with the European militaries unable to deploy sizeable forces away from home it means that there'll be no one around to clean it up. Certainly there'll be no incentive to clean it up from either a war-weary US populace or a political establishment where neither party will be terribly eager to throw themselves into the fire.

For me, Dan's strongest argument, which he doesn't flesh out, is that leaving Iraq as a "failed state" would present a considerable threat not only to Iraq's neighbors but to the rest of the world.

Fair enough, let me do that now. I don't think that Zarqawi or his successors will be able to take over Iraq, but I can easily see them setting up a Taliban-style Islamic Republic of Anbar to the point where we start worrying about full-blown Afghan-style training camps all over again. The Shi'ite clerical establishment's restraint at launching reprisals against Sunnis is likely to fade and I can easily see that heading south into eastern Saudi Arabia (where all that oil is, lest we forget) and the smaller Gulf emirates. Iran could simply intervene militarily in southern Iraq using the concerns of their co-religionists as a cover and either set up a rump protectorate or annex the place outright. With the US unable to intervene and the Europeans emasculated, who's going to stop them? The Kurds will likely declare independence and out doing quite well for themselves, but I guarantee that'll result in net gain for the PKK and other Kurdish separatist movements in Syria and Iran.

As a result, I believe (and I think Nadezha does to) that Iraq collapsing would be a Bad Thing.

The balance of Dan's remarks, and the bulk of his concern, address domestic politics and his fear that the Bush Administration and the GOP have concluded that politics trumps US interests in Iraq. He cites a series of posts that our co-blogger, Eric Martin, has published on this site, which offer plausible evidence that the US electoral calendar is influencing Iraq exit strategies.

Martin (whose response I read in the comments and duly noted) isn't the first and certainly won't be the last liberal blogger to express these criticisms, but he did so in a very articulate and non-hysterical manner that is one of the reasons I enjoy reading the entire Liberals Against Terrorism team to begin with. I didn't agree with his assessments at the time (just as I expect he disagrees with a great many of mine), but this was the first article I had seen (and I know that you guys have posted many, many examples of this, lest you think I am unappreciative of your work) where that actually struck me as plausible.

Undoubtedly, some in the GOP hierarchy are political cynics who would like to time a reduction in troop levels with the 2006 elections. However, too much can be made of electoral politics. It would be a mistake to see the Post article as a trial balloon or the maneuvering of dissident bureaucrats within one part of the Administration or another. The recent rumblings in the media are, in fact, reflecting shifts to a more realistic and sober set of objectives -- shifts we've been tracking for a number of months. It may be news to the Post and the NYT, but not to close observers of the Bush's second term Administration.

As noted above, I am aware of this as much as any other regular reader of your site. The object of my particular ire, however, was that the Post article contained two new tidbits that I certainly hadn't seen before:

1. The US is no longer interested in creating a democracy in Iraq but rather to focus on creating the conditions where a democracy can eventually be set up, which is diplospeak for just another Middle Eastern dictatorship. As I said in my initial post, if we were going to do that and all that talk about creating a democracy was just talk for the rubes (like me) then what was the problem with Allawi?

2. The US is no longer committed to defeating but rather to "reducing" the insurgency. You can read that a couple of different ways, but the way it will be read in the Middle East is that the US is getting ready to bail out when the going gets tough.

As I argued earlier regarding the GWOT/GSAVE ruckus, the White House is "out on a limb" with its continued attachment to the politics of "war" all the while developing a far broader, longer-term and, shall we say, more nuanced strategy for combating the threats from Islamist extremism.

I'm aware of this, though to me the issue of what we call what we're in is nothing more than a matter of semantics and marketing. I didn't like GSAVE (though the fact that "struggle" is jihad in Arabic had a certain appeal to me) for the simple fact that it sounded lame, though if you look at the recommendations (scroll down) that Rohan Gunaratna was making as early as the spring of 2002 I think you'll see a far more articulate and nuanced plan than any put forward by anyone else.

The President is facing an even more acute version of the same problem in Iraq. The original justifications for the invasion have gone by the boards, and the "feel-good" moments of being treated as liberators were long-gone by the time the Bremer/Sanchez duo departed Baghdad. The rationales used for the November elections were to transform the Middle East through a successful democracy in Iraq and to fight terrorists to keep them from attacking us at home. Neither rationale remains terribly satisfactory to a growing portion of the American public, as Dan outlines in his post.

Yep, though I feel at least part of this is due to the fact that the administration, either because its obsession with secrecy or mendacity (pick whichever one you think feels good) has been unable to satisfactory defend itself on any of these issues. Pro-war columnists, policy wonks, bloggers, ad infinitum can construct excellent rationales to defend even the worst aspects of this misadventure, but with the exception of "flypaper" I can't think of one that's actually been adopted by the administration beyond the slogans you've just articulated above. This is part of an ongoing problem I have from a counter-terrorism perspective that I have with the administration, namely a refusal to be up-front with the American public about the broader realities of the war.

For instance, when the government rounded up the gang down Lodi or more recently when it came to light that at least several of the 7/7 London bombers were likely trained at Lashkar-e-Taiba camps down in Pakistan, the reaction among much the punditocracy was nothing short of shock that terrorist training camps were still in business over 3 and a half years after we'd stomped the Taliban. As I noted at the time, this wasn't news - it was readily available to anyone with access to the internet, but nobody in either the administration or the opposition party really wants to talk about it or how to fix it on either the political or the policy level. I can give literally hundreds of other examples, but my point is that you cannot complain that support for the need to contribute manpower and money to a conflict is fading when you aren't willing to treat the public like adults when it comes to the conflict to begin with.

Nadezha then proceeds to narrate once again the need for the military to train Iraqi forces and the need for the Iraqis themselves to work out the nuts and bolts of the political process that is, after all, going to end up governing their country. I understand all that, but the key thing that needs to be understood as all of this haggling is going is, "What are our goals in Iraq?" Are we in fact trying to set up a democratic society over there or just trying to set up a government, any government, that will last long enough for us to declare victory and go home? That was distinct tone of the Post article and one of the reasons that I directed so much of my ire towards it to begin with.

To return to the various sources of Dan's angst about realism intruding into Administration policy. First, isn't it time we face up to the fact that the Iraq war was never part of a "war on terror" nor was it about fighting terrorists in Iraq to avert another 9/11.

Semantic distinctions. Whether or not Iraq was part of the war on terrorism when we invaded, it certainly is now from the perspective of the terrorists. Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, al-Adel, al-Ayyeri, and Zarqawi are all remarkably clear on this point. And while I have always rejected the core argument of the "flypaper" thesis (which strikes me as one of those things that sounds brilliant to pundits, which is where the term predictably originated from - I believe it was David Warren and Andrew Sullivan, no?), I do think that it would also be foolish to argue that al-Qaeda's or to use Indian terms, the International Islamic Front's (which I think does a far better job of capturing what we're actually fighting) resources are not having to be diverted to support the jihad in Iraq.

This confusion, shared by an unfortunately large number of US troops, has probably been responsible for a number of the difficulties the US has faced as an occupying authority in treatment of civilians and detainees.

That contention is one that I'll disagree strongly with. The whole idea that US soldiers are unable to make meaningful distinctions between various insurgents and people who are picked up during sweeps in Iraq and mentally lump the whole of them together as being on par with the 9/11 hijackers is, like the flypaper theory, one of those arguments that sounds great to pundits and commentators but which fades when exposed to reality. Prisoner abuse has occurred for a number of reasons, many of which are far more easily explainable than this kind of mass psychoanalysis.

The idea that we'd "rather fight 'em there than here" is both nonsense and morally repugnant, to put it politely. True, we are now forced to fight terrorists in Iraq. But that's not because we're preventing them from attacking the US, but rather because they're trying to prevent a functioning country from emerging. Of course, in the sense that the US has a strong interest in the future of Iraq, fighting the terrorists is protecting the US. And I share some of Dan's concerns about the manner in which the US withdraws from Iraq producing a psychological victory for jihadists. But those are not the ways that President Bush employs the claim that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terror.

Agreed on flypaper, as noted above. As for Iraq being central to the war on terrorism, you're free to read the last book written by Yousef al-Ayyeri, bin Laden's spiritual advisor and the leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia until his death at the hands of Saudi security forces in 2003. The English title roughly translates to The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad and I would recommend reading it and reading Saif al-Adel's Iraq al-Jihad for the same reason that I would recommend reading Mein Kampf to anyone who wanted to learn about what the Nazis wanted to do. An al-Qaeda victory in Iraq would not simple be a psychological phenomenon, but it would have a number of very nasty real-world consequences to it, not the least of which being that the terror network will have a new base from which to operate from that directly borders Jordan, whose monarchy Zarqawi is sworn to overthrow. And if Zarqawi does succeed in overthrowing the Hashemites (and I will be quite honest that I see little that will stop him, given his claim that he has beaten the US), that brings his zone of control right up to the Israeli border. Here again, I think we can both agree that this would be a Very Bad Thing.

Second, except for the Jacobins and dreamers, the war has never been about "the march of freedom" in the sense of creating a liberal democracy in the Middle East as a beacon to the region. I'm not one of folks who think that Muslims or Arabs can't be democrats. I for one wanted to see elections for an interim government as early as possible instead of the CPA taking total charge. I also welcomed the January elections as a critical but small step toward a better future for Iraq and Iraqis (although not, I might add, as a vindication of the decision to go to war in Iraq).

As for your criticism of the CPA, believe it or not a lot of the neocons thought the same thing at the time, not that it matters at this point. As for the Iraqi elections, they were a critical step in the Iraqi political process in that they accomplished several things:

1. Allawi stepped down without any violence, for all the talk that he was just Saddam-lite.

2. The principle of popular sovereignty was established for the Iraqis.

3. The insurgency was shown to have definite limits in that it was unable to disrupt the political process for all its threats. The emperor, to put it bluntly, had no clothes.

Whether or not any of that vindicates the decision to go to war in Iraq is another issue altogether, but it's certainly a beneficial outcome. And if we are indeed to be nuanced, can we not accept that good things can emerge from bad policies?

But I also recognize that reconciling the tensions among democratic institutions, freedoms, rule of law and cultural norms is a massive undertaking for any society -- the US itself is engaged in perpetual adjustments to manage those tensions. When you add to the mix the number of circles that the Iraqis have to square -- most notably regarding federalism and the role of Islam as a source of civil law -- we shouldn't be surprised at the way things are turning out. For me, the source of never-ending surprise is that so many Americans still think that they can dictate the results of what has to be a sustainable bargain among the Iraqis themselves.

I've noticed that. The problem, at least as I see it, is multi-fold though entirely understandable. I don't think that social engineering (which is more or less what we're talking about) works, which is one of the reasons why I tend to oppose it here. As such, I don't think you can socially engineer the Iraqi people into becoming a quaint Middle Eastern version of Britain or Canada. Another point that needs to be recognized is that democracy does not equal utopia and that the type of society that is going to result from Middle Eastern democracy is not going to be one consistent with some of the more libertarian notions popular online, which is why people are conflating the application of sha'riah on issues of marriage and divorce among Muslims with the establishment of a theocracy even while completely ignoring (as liberalhawk so eloquently pointed out here) that Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, regulates Jewish marriage and divorce using halacha and relies on Hanafi sha'riah to deal with similar issues among its Muslim population.

Nadezha then tries to draw a distinction between "winning the war" and creating the basic conditions for Iraqis to make a decent future for themselves. I don't, in large part because I see one of the major prerequisites of that happening as being defeating Zarqawi, for whose agenda all this internal Iraqi politicking is merely incidental. As I noted in my latest summary of Cordesman's work on Iraq:

Another point that needs to be made clear is that even if Iraq completely or largely stabilizes politically we are still going to be dealing with an al-Qaeda threat to the country for the immediate future. This is pretty much what has happened in Afghanistan, where the former ruling class (the Pashtuns) have been incorporated into Karzai's (granted, much weaker) government with relatively few hitches. The reason that this is so problematic in the case of Iraq is that if you accept (and I do) that most of the mass casualty terrorist attacks are being carried out by Zarqawi, it is not entirely clear that they will necessarily cease in the event that a new constitution is successfully drafted. Just today, for instance, we got a stark reminder that al-Qaeda continues to support its campaign in Afghanistan and there is little reason to suspect that it won't do the same in Iraq. That also means, incidentally, that the "bleed back" is likely to continue from the immediate future since most of the individuals that intelligence agencies are concerned about are foreigners rather than Iraqis. In the interest of refraining from snark, I will simply note that Cordesman is unambiguous that the only way you are going to stop Zarqawi and his ilk is through a military solution.

Given who Zarqawi works for and the threat he represents, if that isn't a reason to stay and fight I'm not sure what is. It's certainly directed tied to the goal that Nadezha quotes General McCaffery laid out to the Foreign Relations Committee. Whether or not that'll satisfy Cindy Sheehan, beats me, but I think it will satisfy most of the American public if articulated successfully.

As I discussed earlier regarding adjustments in counterinsurgency strategies, it will also require constant flexibility and adaptation of American strategic ends and operational means. And that's assuming the Iraqis themselves can come to a consensus on what sort of governance they want, or at least will accept.

In a great comment posted by jonnybutter, he warns me of the dangers of political naivete. But I'd nonetheless like to see Bush make the case I've outlined rather than remain trapped in his obsolete political rhetoric. It's what Joe Biden means when he says Bush needs to "level with the American people" before they lose patience.

Looking back on this string of posts, I honestly have to wonder if there's that much difference between Biden's criticism and those of my own if they are as Nadezha says. And I am all for adjusting our strategy to reflect the realities of the insurgency (and as someone who is from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and know most of the people at the CGSC who published this), but what needs to be understood is that the goal that General McCaffery laid out to the Foreign Relations Committee has just been ditched if we're no longer even looking for a democracy in Iraq. As I keep repeating, why not simply have left Allawi in power as the Saddam-lite that everyone said he was if that was the plan?

My political concerns are the opposite of Dan's -- that Bush will "stay on message." Is America really going to be better off if the President and the antiwar folks manage between them to further polarize the Iraq war even though there's a significant common ground that could be built around the very policies his Administration is beginning to pursue?

To stay "on message" he'll first need to find it - and the sloganeering that you outlined above has been woefully ineffective at this point. The administration has been hard-pressed to make a coherent case in support of the war since the failure to find WMDs became too hard to ignore with the publication of the Kay report and support has been driven largely by the arguments of people outside of government ever since.

As far as further polarizing the country around the Iraq war, don't make me laugh. The country is already polarized around the issues of both Iraq and Bush and there is very little that is going to change that for the immediate future. Again, as I noted back in June:

To put it another way, the administration went into Iraq with something on the order of 70% of the population supporting it, including (as myself and countless others have noted) a sizeable number of self-described centrists, liberals, and Democrats. The vast majority of those (excluding those in the party establishment, expert, and pundit categories) the administration lost quite early on with the failure to find WMDs and subsequent allegations concerning pre-war intelligence and hasn't in my opinion been able to regain them since ... internal conflicts within the administration over the post-war reconstruction made that impossible and, when combined with the Plame affair, pretty much solidified the vast majority (again, in terms of the general population) of liberals and Democrats' earlier unease with regard to the administration's conduct of the war, which soon led to a great deal of skepticism and then to open contempt. The party establishment, which near as I can tell had invested a great deal of political capital in the war under the expectation that at least most of the pre-war claims would pan out and they would be able to profit politically from participating in it. As a result, they proved insufficiently critical of the administration on the war in Iraq until it was too late (if you want to see a particularly memorable example of this, go back to Saddam's capture in December 2003 you can find John Edwards on TV talking about how he has always supported the president and the war), thereby leading to the rise of the Howard Dean campaign that drew heavily on many of the same organizational and social networks that had previously come together in the anti-war movement.

The reason I mention all of this is the simple fact as far as I can see is that there is no real way to win these individuals back, particularly many of those who had formerly supported the war, because in order to make the transition they had to come to a number of conclusions about the competence and honesty of the administration (with which I strongly disagree) that, had I come to them, would leave me similarly cynical. Add to that the fact that their opinions are regularly reinforced by those portions of the press, foreign policy establishment, intelligence community, and academia that never had much use for the war or the administration to begin with and you can see the dilemma as far as winning them back over is concerned. As far as many of them are concerned, the best way to fix the situation in Iraq is to neutralize the administration (in the sense of what they see it's ability to do harm) or at least force it to comply with their preferred policies. They tried to do this in the 2004 election and appear to be moving forward with that policy to this day because, simply speaking, they regard the administration as having screwed up Iraq and don't trust it to do a decent job as far as anything else is concerned.

I don't believe that all that much has changed since June as far as the basic truth of this assessment is concerned, nor do I see any real way to win the majority of these people back over. I also think Liberals Against Terrorism has at least recognized this dilemma, judging from all the posts over there from the January 30 Iraqi elections to around April when the insurgency ended its post-election lull about how anti-war liberals or liberals in general should accept that good things can result from bad policies (like the Iraq war) or how it seemed like the adults were, if temporarily, back in charge at the administration and were starting to implement policies on that you guys agreed with. As I said, I don't believe that there's much that Bush or anyone else can do to change the perceptions among this class of people, which is why I listed another one in that particular post:

The mushy middle, for a whole host of reasons, seems to be primarily focused on results at this point. When Iraq was showing progress after the elections, the general mood was quite hopeful. Since those elections, however, there has been very little (from the perspective of the US population) progress and far too much violence for many of them to continue to support the amount of money and lives. And, if I might be so bold, this is compounded by the fact that the administration is perceived as continuing to react to the situation in Iraq rather than being proactive - Bush's recent round of responses in defense of the war, for instance, only came about in response to the bad polls, not Zarqawi's continued penchant for bloodshed. As long as that perception of reacting rather than acting holds up and little visible political progress is made by the Iraqi government, public opposition to the war is likely to increase.

You'll notice that I have touched very little with respect to the actual situation on the ground in Iraq. For lack of a better way to describe it, it is irrelevant as far as public perception on the ground is concerned. The security situation in Iraq was in far more jeopardy of flying apart last April than it is today and there was little in the way of calls for the US to pull out.

Those are the people that I think Bush should and can reach out to if he is willing to do so, which led to my conclusion:

It remains to be seen whether the US and the current administration will be able to successfully counter this strategy while it still has the political will and capital to do so. If they want to, however, they're going to have be willing to fight for Iraq as hard politically as our troops have been on the ground.

That held true at the time and I think it still does now. Unfortunately, unless the administration is willing to fight as hard for US involvement in Iraq as it was against John Kerry, I think that public support is going to continue to wane.

Nadezha continues:

Bush is doing a disservice to the rest of his Administration, the troops and the country by clinging to meaningless sloganeering to maintain the loyalty of his base.

Speaking as a member of that base, he isn't doing that good job, in part because vague sloganeering only goes so far. The GOP base is and remains loyal to the Iraq venture but it is also desires substance to back up all the rhetoric and articulation so that we can give a satisfactory answer whenever people ask us how we can possibly continue to support Bush given his monumental foreign policy failures, of which the war in Iraq is Example #1. Thus far, we've pretty much been left on our own on that one and we've done pretty well for ourselves, but at some point there comes a need for leadership and direction from the top and I think it quite appropriate to say that this time is now.

There are centrist Republicans and large numbers of Democrats in Congress who don't buy the Bush rhetoric but are pleading to work with his Administration on realistic policies. My fear is that they will become increasingly isolated in the center -- treated as defeatists by Bush partisans and as out-of-touch hawkish elites who have betrayed liberal ideals by those who want out of Iraq yesterday. As a wartime President, Bush should be pulling people together by defining the true challenges and real limitations we face, explaining how and why our policies are adapting to circumstance, and specifying what we're really there to achieve. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to see that sort of leadership out of this President.

I'm not seeing it either, which is the real substance of my criticism, though I expect my definition of "realistic policies" are going to differ rather markedly from Nadezha's, probably enough to put me in the Jacobin category. Going back to my original post, my real issue is the last category that Nadezha sketched out, namely what we're in Iraq to achieve. I support the goals that General McCaffery layed out to the Foreign Relations Committee, but the views expressed in that Post article were the exact opposite and I don't think it'd be that terrible, as we wait for the Iraqis to iron out their new constitution, for someone in the administration come out and disavow what they have been telling people like me for about, oh, 2 years or so now.