REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Fixing Iraq
Some alternatives to pre-emptive retreat.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is in the U.S. this week on his first official visit, and the biggest and best news is that he and President Bush see eye to eye on the need for a revamped security strategy in Baghdad.
Security in the Iraqi capital has been deteriorating, and especially worrisome is the increasing number of killings by sectarian militias. Many Baghdadis are afraid to leave their neighborhood and sometimes even their homes on normal business. Increasing numbers are fleeing for safer regions of Iraq or nearby foreign countries. While this isn't yet "civil war," current trends are planting the seeds of one.
One response to this is pre-emptive retreat, a proposition gaining too much of a hearing of late. Writing in the New York Times this week, former U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith suggests resigning ourselves to the partition of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish states. The big problem with that idea is that Baghdad is a multiethnic city, and dividing it along ethnic and sectarian lines would entail displacing at least two million Iraqis and a lot more bloodshed.
The better and more realistic option is to rethink how to help Prime Minister Maliki and his government achieve their goal of a unified and pluralistic Iraq. Here are a few key issues:
• More security forces for Baghdad. Whatever one thinks about the number of U.S. troops overall in Iraq, there is no question too few have been deployed in the capital. So news that American troops will be redeploying from relatively peaceful areas of the country to help out in Baghdad is encouraging.
So too is the new police plan announced by Mr. Maliki and President Bush. It envisions embedding more U.S. soldiers with Iraqi police units, which should add to their effectiveness and help overcome suspicions that they are sectarian agents of the Shiite-led Interior Ministry. Unlike his predecessor, Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani has no affiliations with any militia.
• Better intelligence. In our view the real Iraq intelligence scandal isn't about prewar WMD estimates; it's the U.S. inability to better identify the leadership of the "insurgency" that has actively sought sectarian strife.
The number of bombs since the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi only reinforces our view that the majority of Sunni violence has always come from elements of the former regime, such as its KGB-trained mukhabarat, and not al Qaeda. Since Saddam's regime was notorious for record-keeping, it shouldn't be as hard as it has been to identify the likely troublemakers. Both the CIA and the Pentagon's intelligence agencies have failed terribly on this score, and their leadership in Virginia needs to be held accountable.
• Iraqi leadership. Most Iraqi political and religious leaders remain committed to a unified Iraq. The Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani continues to urge restraint in the face of Baathist terror, and over the past week or so an encouraging split has developed in the Sunni leadership too. Omar al-Jubouri of the Iraqi Islamic Party was quoted as blaming the provocations of the hardline Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars for "50% of Sunni deaths in Iraq."
On the other hand, the followers of hardline Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are a big faction in parliament and a hard problem. Sunni Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani also crossed the line of acceptable behavior when he said that an Iraqi who kills an American soldier should "have a statue built for him." Iraq is a democracy now, and Mr. Mashhadani is free to speak his mind. But he can also be told that such rhetoric will lead to the loss of his Green Zone residence and the squad of American soldiers that protects him.
• International support. Iran and Syria continue to funnel men and materiel to the factions responsible for violence. But a bigger problem may be the tacit encouragement of the Sunni insurgency by the so-called moderate Arab states. Many of them support Iraq's minority Sunnis in their intransigent belief that they are still the country's rightful rulers. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should raise this issue with Arab leaders this week as she also looks for a solution in Lebanon.
• U.S. resolve. The quickest way to further factionalize Iraq is to send the message that the U.S. won't be around much longer to protect the country's non-sectarian institutions. But that's precisely what many Democrats have been doing, including the Congressional leadership. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi greeted Mr. Maliki yesterday with a press release headlined, "Maliki Misses the Point--Situation in Iraq is Deteriorating." Mr. Maliki got another glimpse of Democratic unseriousness in their threats to boycott his Capitol Hill speech because they disagree with his recent criticism of Israel's action in Lebanon.
There is an almost willful defeatism in these and many other criticisms of our position in Iraq, as if the only point at this moment is to prove that we should never have toppled Saddam Hussein in the first place. We can relitigate what in our view was a persuasive case for regime change. But what is truly unrealistic is to think that the U.S. has any choice now but to win in Iraq. The regional mess we'd inevitably have to clean up if we lose could make our current difficulties look like child's play.
"The fate of our country and yours is tied," Prime Minister Maliki told Congress yesterday--adding that if democracy fails there "then the war on terror will never be won elsewhere."
