Iraq: everybody and his aunt and his aunt's canary, they've all got a plan

It’s happened. One Iraq tipping point is upon us: an explosion of comment urging us to change course in Iraq. Everyone and his aunt and his aunt’s canary have become self-appointed advisers to Bush. You can read yet another 11 salient viewpoints below, a selection of the outpouring for your perusal.

But it seems the punditry all back some form of phased withdrawal. I believe this is a cop-out. Withdrawal phased or immediate makes no difference. If you’re going to get out, get out NOW.

The point is, the violence in Iraq will not get worse if we left. It will go on regardless. If anything, it may lessen if we leave, because we won’t be there to invite attack. We’re not holding the country together. All we’ve done there is mess it up. Why stay and make it worse?

This blog has always stated the case for getting out the sooner the better. If we’d gotten out a year ago, it would’ve been better.

Not that we will leave. We won’t. But I wish we would, because we could save ourselves a heap of pain, death and aggravation. The Iraqis don’t need our interference to get on with their nation-building, nation-splitting, civil war or whatever historical wave they’re riding. They have their own scores to settle. We don’t belong there. Our best opportunity is to do diplomacy from the outside, and throw money at where it may do some good.

That’s all we can do. But we won’t. We will stay there, killing and getting killed. To no avail. That’s what a quagmire is all about.

The poor, poor Iraqis.

Our poor, poor soldiers.

Sacrificed for what? The military and oil ambitions of a few blind men. Cry, the beloved country. Cry for the deaths that have been and the deaths that will be.


1. A Nadir of U.S. Power -- by Sebastian Mallaby/Washington Post

It's not exactly morning in America.

In Iraq, things get ever uglier, and the old remedy of extra troops now seems tragically futile. The Bush team has recently tried putting thousands of additional soldiers into Baghdad, and the result after two months is that violence there has increased.

Iraq is often seen as a special Rumsfeldian screw-up. But in Afghanistan, the Bush team quickly handed off to a model pro-Western leader backed by a broad NATO coalition. And what are the results there? The government is wobbling, warlords run drugs and the pro-al-Qaeda Taliban have 4,000 to 5,000 active fighters in the country.

It's not just military efforts that are faltering. Five years ago, President Bush launched an experiment in tough-talk diplomacy, warning foreign leaders that they must be with us or against us in the war on terrorism. At first this yielded at least one achievement: Pakistan sent troops for the first time into its wild border regions to root out Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. But that success has now gone into reverse. Pakistan recently withdrew its soldiers, in effect ceding the border territory to the radicals.

It would be nice if this merely proved that tough talk can backfire. But traditional diplomacy is faring no better. In North Korea and Iran, the United States has tried every diplomatic trick to prevent nuclear proliferation, making common cause with Western Europe, Russia, China and Japan, and wielding both sticks and carrots. The result is failure: North Korea has tested a nuke and Iran still presses on with its enrichment program.

A few years ago, the collapse of Russia's currency triggered a furious debate in Washington over who lost Russia. Now Russia's pro-Western voices are being snuffed out, and Americans are so inured to the limits of their power that they don't even pose that question. A crusading journalist has been killed, and on Thursday Vladimir Putin silenced Human Rights, Amnesty International and more than 90 other foreign organizations. Everyone accepts that there's not much the West can do about this.

In Somalia, a Taliban-style group of Islamic militants has seized part of the country. One of its commanders is said to be sheltering terrorists who blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania: A brand-new terrorist haven may be emerging. Again, it is assumed that the world's sole superpower can't do much but watch.

Three long years ago, the Bush administration described the killing in Darfur as genocide. You might think that an impoverished African state that can't control its own territory would be a pushover. But the Bush administration has tried sanctions, peace talks and United Nations resolutions. Sudan's tin-pot dictator thumbs his nose at Uncle Sam and dispatches more death squads.

When historians analyze the decline of empires, they tend to point to economic frailties that undercut military vigor. Well, the United States has several economic frailties and can't seem to address any of them.

Every honest politician knows that entitlement spending on retirees is going to bust the budget. But since the failure of Bush's proposed Social Security overhaul last year, nobody is doing anything about it.

Every honest politician knows that we need to quit gobbling carbon. But higher gas taxes are seen as a political non-starter on both sides of the political spectrum.

Every honest politician knows that support for globalization is fraying because of rising inequality at home. But how many of them stand up for policies that could reduce inequality without harming growth -- most obviously, tax reform? You don't hear anybody on the left or right denouncing the absurdity that more than half the tax breaks for homeownership flow to the richest 12 percent of households.

In fact, it's hard to name a single creative policy that has political legs in Washington. Is anyone serious about tackling the crazy tort system, which consumes more than a dollar in administrative and legal costs for every dollar it transfers to the victims of malpractice? Nope. Is there any prospect of allowing the millions of immigrants who come here to do so legally? To be honest, not much.

Instead, the right and left are pushing policies that are marginal to the country's problems. The right wants to make its tax cuts "permanent," even though the boomers' retirement ensures that taxes will have to go up. The left wants to raise the minimum wage, even though this can only help a minority of workers.

I'm not predicting the end of the American era, not by a long shot. The U.S. business culture is as pragmatic and effective as its political culture is dysfunctional. But has there been a worse moment for American power since Ronald Reagan celebrated morning in America almost a quarter of a century ago? I can't think of one.

(smallaby@washpost.com)


2. War Torn -- by Peter Beinart /The New Republic

In Washington today, there are two debates about Iraq. The first is loud and fake. It consists of flag-draped speeches in which President Bush says things like "The party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run." It looks like a debate about foreign policy, but it's not. It's a debate about national identity--about the kind of country we want to be: a country that retreats and loses or a country that fights and wins. The Democrats stand accused of defeatism; the Republicans demand victory. The question, as a recent Weekly Standard cover story put it, is "will we choose to win in iraq?"

The second debate is quiet and clinical and awful. It starts with these realities: The violence in Iraq is getting worse; the militias are growing stronger; the Americans are growing more hated; and the good guys--the Iraqis who told us their country could be a decent, functioning place--are either dead or back in Dearborn. This other Iraq debate is a choice between last-ditch efforts that will probably fail and simply accepting defeat and mitigating its effects. It's the choice you face when someone teeters on the edge of death--between aggressive measures that might produce a miracle but could also increase the agony, and letting the patient go, in the hopes that, by bowing to the inevitable, you can at least ease the pain.

The day after the midterm elections, the first Iraq debate will probably end and the second one will truly begin. Republican Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner has already said that, unless Iraq's government imposes order in the next two or three months, the United States must consider a "change of course." James Baker, whose Iraq commission will report at about that time, is saying much the same thing. Bush may still try to stay the course, but, if Iraq causes Republicans to lose the House or Senate, Republicans will suddenly become a lot more willing to lose Iraq.

When the real Iraq debate begins, it will feature three basic alternatives. The first--call it "do it right"--is the brainchild of military wonks like Kenneth Pollack and Andrew Krepinevich Jr. It starts with a counterintuitive assumption: that, in Iraq, security drives politics rather than the other way around. While most commentators envision political settlements that would allow Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki to disarm his country's militias, the "do it right" folks say such settlements are a pipedream. Instead, the U.S. military should create facts on the ground that undercut the militia's appeal. In particular, the United States and its Iraqi allies should pursue a classic counterinsurgency campaign: Rather than chasing terrorists, they should simply park themselves in civilian areas and provide the security for which Iraqis yearn. Once the U.S. and Iraqi armies finally protect Iraqis, sectarian militias will lose their raison d'être.

Many people agree that, once upon a time, this would have been a good strategy. But that time may now have passed. For starters, to effectively protect Iraqis the United States would need many more troops. And adding any more would put a brutal strain on an already wheezing U.S. military. Pollack and company believe you can make headway without more U.S. troops, but that requires Iraqi forces to make up some of the gap, and there is no guarantee they can. After all, the more Iraq's communities turn on each other, the less Sunnis will rely on Shia soldiers for protection. And, even as Iraqis grow more hostile to one another, they are also growing more hostile to us. A recent University of Maryland poll shows that more than 60 percent of Iraqis (and an even higher percentage of Arab Iraqis) now support attacks on U.S. troops, which makes counterinsurgency--a strategy dependent on winning hearts and minds--much harder. All of which may explain why Army Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, has put in place elements of exactly the strategy the wonks are pushing, and yet violence in Baghdad keeps escalating.

If "do it right" banks on a new military strategy, "hail Mary" puts its faith in a new diplomatic one. The model is Dayton, where Richard Holbrooke sequestered the leaders of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia at an Air Force base and didn't let them out until they struck the bargain that ended the Bosnian war. In Iraq, such a bargain would center on oil: guaranteeing the Sunnis some share of it so they stop fighting the Shia-dominated government. Once that happened, the theory goes, the Shia wouldn't need militias to protect them, and Iraq's government could gain control. (Senator Joseph Biden's "partition" plan--which actually calls for a weak central government that shares oil--is a variant of the "hail Mary.")

The problem with the Bosnia analogy is that Dayton came after nearly four years of civil war, when the parties were exhausted and a rough balance of power had emerged on the ground. In Iraq, by contrast, the killing is just gathering steam. And, while it seems obvious in Washington that Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds can all do better at the negotiating table than they can on the battlefield, it's not at all clear that most Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish leaders see it that way. Striking Dayton-like deals--never mind enforcing them--requires either a high degree of political trust, which Iraqis clearly lack, or an outside power strong enough to impose a solution, which the United States, tragically, is not.

The "hail Mary" plan may still be worth trying, but, to give it any chance of success, the United States would have to threaten to withdraw our troops if the parties didn't agree. Which brings us to option number three: "Withdraw our troops." After all, if you believe a Dayton-type deal is impossible--that, even if negotiated, it would quickly unravel--why put U.S. troops in the bloody middle? The optimistic case for withdrawal--that once Americans leave Iraq the Sunni insurgency will lose its rationale, thus making a reconciliation possible--has weakened over the last year, as Sunnis have grown more afraid of Shia death squads than American G.I.s. But the pessimistic case has grown stronger: If Iraq is doomed to hell no matter what we do, why send brave young Americans down with it?

It is impossible to know whether that hell is inevitable or whether some change in American strategy might still stave it off. But one thing is clear: For every day that goes by without an honest debate about Iraq, defeat becomes more certain. The good news is that, in a few weeks, that debate will finally begin. And, if we are very, very lucky, it will still matter.

(Peter Beinart is editor-at-large at The New Republic and the author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again)


3. Three Choices, Mr. President
The Least Bad Option on Iraq: Disengagement and Damage Control
By Richard Holbrooke/Washington Post

Dear Mr. President:
As soon as the midterm elections are over -- and regardless of their outcome -- you will have to make the most consequential decision of your presidency, probably the most complicated any president has had to make since Lyndon Johnson decided to escalate in Vietnam in 1965, and far more difficult than your decisions after Sept. 11, 2001. Then, you rallied a nation in shock, overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and confronted Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs -- acting in all cases with self-confidence and overwhelming national approval.

Now all four projects are in peril. With far less public support, and time running out on your presidency, you must reverse the recent decline in Afghanistan, get North Korea back to the six-party talks, isolate a cocky, dangerous Iran that thinks events are going its way and, above all, figure out what to do with Iraq. So allow me to offer some very unsolicited suggestions on that war.

Broadly speaking, you have three choices: "Stay the course," escalate or start to disengage from Iraq while pressing hard for a political settlement. I will argue for the third course, not because it is perfect but because it is the least bad option.

In your radio address last week, you said that "our goal in Iraq is clear and unchanging: . . . victory." You added that the only thing changing "are the tactics. . . . Commanders on the ground are constantly adjusting their approach to stay ahead of the enemy, particularly in Baghdad." One can only hope that you do not mean those words literally -- or believe them. "Stay the course" is not a strategy; it is a slogan, useful in domestic politics but meaningless in the field.

Your real choice comes down to escalation or disengagement. If victory -- however defined -- is truly your goal, you should have sent more troops long ago. You and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld say that the commanders in Iraq keep telling you they don't need more troops, but, frankly, even if technically accurate, this is baffling. Plain and simple, there are not, and never have been, enough troops in Iraq to accomplish the mission.

But where would more troops come from? The Pentagon says the all-volunteer Army is stretched to the breaking point; it is now recruiting 42-year-olds and lowering entry standards. Afghanistan also needs more troops. And suppose additional troops do not turn the tide? Does the United States then send still more? Even advocates aren't sure escalation will produce a turnaround.

The last option is the most difficult for an embattled wartime president: Change your goals, disengage from the civil war already underway, focus maximum effort on seeking a political power-sharing agreement, and try to limit further damage in the region and the world.

Even your strongest critics understand that disengagement is fraught with risk. You have warned of the bloody consequences that might follow a U.S. withdrawal. Preventing such a tragedy must be your first priority. For this and other reasons, I do not favor a fixed timetable for withdrawal, since it would give away any remaining American flexibility and leverage. But the kind of killing that you predict would follow an American departure is in fact already underway, and nothing we have done has prevented it from increasing rapidly. At the current pace, there will be well over 40,000 murders a year in Iraq. A recent University of Maryland poll found that 78 percent of Iraqis surveyed believe the American presence is now "provoking more conflict than it is preventing," and 71 percent support a U.S. withdrawal within one year.

I urge you to lay out realistic goals, redeploy our troops and focus on the search for a political solution. We owe that to the Iraqis who welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and put their trust in us, only to find their lives in danger as a result. By a political solution, I mean something far more ambitious than current U.S. efforts aimed at improving the position of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by changing ministers or setting timelines for progress. Sen. Joe Biden and Les Gelb have advocated what they call, in a reference to the negotiations that ended the war in Bosnia in 1995, a "Dayton-like" solution to the political situation -- by which they mean a looser federal structure with plenty of autonomy for each of the three main groups, and an agreement on sharing oil revenue. Your administration has dismissed these proposals out of hand, and the time lost since Gelb first presented them more than two years ago has made them far more difficult to achieve.

Yet only two weeks ago, the Iraqi parliament took a big step toward creating more powerful regions, with an interesting proviso to delay implementation for 18 months. You could use this legislation as leverage to negotiate a peaceful arrangement for sharing power and oil revenue, while redeploying and reducing our forces in Iraq. If such an effort fails, nothing has been lost by trying.

Those who say this is a proposal to partition Iraq into three countries (which it is not) and would trigger all-out civil war are misrepresenting the idea, while offering nothing in its place. Whatever else you do, Mr. President, you should send American troops to northern Iraq (Kurdistan), which is still safe but increasingly tense, to reduce the very real risk of a Turkish-Kurdish war. Both the Turks and the Kurds would welcome this U.S. presence, but it would have to be accompanied by a cessation of Kurdish terrorist raids into Turkey. This would allow Special Forces troops to move rapidly into other parts of Iraq if a terrorist target appeared, and it would show the world that you were not withdrawing from America's commitment to Iraq.

In recent years, almost any advocate of a change in policy has been accused of wanting to "cut and run." Such rhetoric works against the bipartisanship that this crisis requires. But if you were to decide to draw down American troops -- without a fixed timetable -- and seek a political compromise, the responsible leadership of the Democratic Party would surely work with you, especially if the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, recommends significant changes in policy, which you could use as a starting point for rebuilding a bipartisan national consensus.

This crisis is far too acute for recrimination. If we are still at war during the 2008 campaign, as seems likely if you do not change course, it will benefit neither party but will leave your successor with the same choices you now face, but under far worse circumstances.

(Richard Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, writes a monthly column for The Washington Post.)


4. We Can't Just Withdraw
Iraq may be closer to an explosion of genocide than we know.
By Robert D. Kaplan

If only Iraq were like Vietnam. After the 60-day siege of An Loc in the spring of 1972, where heavily outnumbered South Vietnamese troops and their American advisors rebuffed several North Vietnamese divisions, the Saigon government found itself in a superficially strong position, which gave President Richard M. Nixon the fig leaf he needed for a final withdrawal. South Vietnam had rarely been safer since the start of the war. You could travel around the country in relative security. Optimism might have been unwarranted, but it wasn't altogether blind.

More crucially, Vietnam had ultimately two chains of command, the South and North Vietnamese governments. Negotiations through third parties were easily organized, if hard to conduct. Vietnam was merely split, but Iraq is pulverized. To call Iraq a civil war is to be kind: within each sectarian community there is no group really in control. Nouri al-Maliki's government is little more than another faction that adds complexity rather than coherence to the situation.

Because no one is able to monopolize the use of force among either the Sunnis or Shiites, within each community various groups are in fierce competition over who can best defend it, which translates into who can murder more members of the other community. Even formal groupings like Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army are aggregations of many smaller factions and death squads, whom their leaders don't always control. Only when the political struggle within each sectarian community calms down can the civil war itself be ameliorated. Right now, there is no one on any side with the pivotal power to negotiate with the other.

An emerging school of thought says that the only real leverage we're going to have is the threat of withdrawal, which would concentrate the minds of the various groups to seek modalities with each other for governing the country. That's a bet, not a plan. You could also bet that any timetable for withdrawal will lead to a meltdown of the Iraq Army according to region and sect. Even if we promise that all of our military advisors will stay put, in addition to our air and special operations assets, no one in a culture of rumor and conspiracy theory might believe us.

Because it turned out we had no postwar plan, our invasion (which I supported) amounted to a bet. Our withdrawal, when it comes to that, must be different. If we decide to reduce forces in the country under the current anarchic conditions, then we are both morally and strategically obligated to talk with Iran and Syria, as well as call for a regional conference. Iraq may be closer to an explosion of genocide than we know. An odd event, or the announcement of pulling 20,000 American troops out, might trigger it. We simply cannot contemplate withdrawal under these conditions without putting Iraq's neighbors on the spot, forcing them to share public responsibility for the outcome, that is if they choose to stand aside and not help us.

What we should all fear is a political situation in Washington where a new Congress forces President George W. Bush to redeploy, and Bush, doing so under duress, makes only the most half-hearted of gestures to engage Iraq's neighbors in the process. That could lead to hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, rather than the tens of thousands we have seen. An Iran that continues to enrich uranium is less of a threat to us than genocide in Iraq. A belligerent, nuclear Iran is something we will, as a last resort, be able to defend against militarily. And it probably won't come to that. But if we disengage from Iraq without publicly involving its neighbors, Sunni Arabs—who will bear the brunt of the mass murder—will hate us for years to come from Morocco to Pakistan. Our single greatest priority at the moment is preventing Iraq from sliding off the abyss.

A tottering Iraq, informally divided into Iranian and Syrian zones of influence, even as Iran continues to enrich uranium, is an awful prospect. But it is not without possibilities: states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to balance against the new Shiite hegemony, will implicitly move closer to us and to Israel, perhaps providing useful assistance in a settlement of the Palestinian issue. Meanwhile, Teheran and Damascus will become further enmeshed in Iraq's problems. Future violence in Mesopotamia will become their fault; not ours. The weak border between Syria and the fundamentalist Sunni region of Iraq could well undermine the Alawite regime. We will manage.

What we will not be able to manage is a genocide, mainly of the Sunnis, that we alone will be seen as responsible for. Any withdrawal—with all of its military, diplomatic, economic aid, and emergency relief aid aspects—has to be as meticulously planned-out as our occupation wasn't. Staying the course may be a dead end. But don't think for a moment that "redeploying" is any less risky than invading.


5. Time for the neocons to admit that the Iraq war was wrong from the start – by Matthew Parris/Sunday Timess

HARK — CAN YOU hear it? Borne on the wind, can you hear the sounds of construction — of hammers hammering and woodsaws sawing? And do you detect a note of panic? I do. The good ship Neocon is going down. She has struck the Iraqi rocks, the engine room is awash, and on the deck in anxious pursuit of something to float them away is a curious assembly.

Her Majesty’s Brigade of Neocon Columnists and Leader Writers mingles with much of the elite of British politics. The new Labour Cabinet and its courtiers and most of the Opposition’s front bench rub shoulders with Fleet Street’s finest. Is that David Aaronovitch I see, hammer in hand? Jack Straw is handing him the nails. There’s Michael Gove scribbling notes while Danny Finkelstein rips a blank sheet from a discarded do-it-yourself regime change manual, and ponders a hastily sketched design. Willie Shawcross has the saw and Tim Hames and Margaret Beckett are ripping planks from the deck. Gordon Brown skulks behind the mast as those unlikely bedfellows, Matthew d’Ancona, of The Spectator , and Johann Hari, of The Independent, assemble what timber they can find.

They are building a lifeboat for their reputations. The task is urgent. It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez; no small thing to have handed Iran a final, undreamt-of victory in an Iran-Iraq war that we thought had ended in the 1980s; no small thing to have lost Britain her credit in half the world; no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder.

It is no small thing to have embellished the philosophy, found the prose and made the case for the most almighty cock-up in politics that we are ever likely to witness. They meant for the best, these politicians, dreamers and writers. They didn’t think it would end like this. But it has: more killed than even Saddam could boast, and nothing to show for it but an exhausted British Army and the global energising of violent Islamism on a scale of which Osama bin Laden never dreamt.

Our British neocons have invested heavily in this ill-fated craft, and the wreck is total. How shall they be saved? Never fear. They’ve been working on the elements of a rescue plan. By Christmas all will be singing from the same sheet. All together, now, warrior-columnists and soon-to-be-former Cabinet ministers: one, two three . . .

“The principle was good but the Americans screwed up the execution.”

Oh diddums, guys. Damned awful luck. You had this fantastic plan for invading a foreign country and harnessing a grateful populace behind your ideas for rebuilding an Arab nation along better lines — and then along come the Americans and make a mess of it. Now why in Heaven’s name would they do a thing that? Vandals.

Funny, because I don’t quite recall most of you saying it at the time — some of you wrote columns and some of you delivered speeches declaring that Iraq was making giant strides; most of you blamed the difficulties on “Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters”, and some of you actually visited and returned rejoicing at the progress — but let’s overlook that. Let’s for the sake of argument grant that you worried from the start that the US just didn’t have the hang of this nation-building business. Now, you declare, we know that’s the reason the whole strategy hit the rocks.

Crap. The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. Your idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that.

We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no “good” Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy. It wasn’t a question of being tactful, respectful, munificent, or handing sweets to children. We were impostors, and that is all.

So now the liferaft: “Tut-tut, no post-invasion strategy.” Well there certainly was a post-invasion strategy, and just because it didn’t work does not mean a different strategy would have made the difference. The post- invasion strategy was minimalist, based on the belief that Iraqis had the human and financial resources to set up their own administration without too much delay, if given full security back-up.

It didn’t happen. But look at two different strategies that armchair neo- imperialists are now saying would “of course” have done the trick if only the stupid Americans had realised it. First there is what is now said to have been Colin Powell’s preference: to smother the country with troops and bulldozers and bricklayers and engineers. In fact, in the early months huge reconstruction was attempted, much was spent — and more than 100,000 troops is hardly derisory as a military presence — and I have yet to hear why airlifting British soldiers to Basra to shovel up garbage in a city perched on one of the world’s richest oilfields would have swung it for us. Our own troops’ famously sensitive “hearts and minds” tactics turned out to make not a jot of difference when the chips were down. Leaping from their burning armoured vehicle with uniforms in flames didn’t leave British soldiers much time to wave at Iraqi kids.

But what if there had been twice the troop numbers, twice the candy, the dollars and the engineers? Iraqi resentment might have been even greater. When I was there two years ago no Iraqi suggested that they wanted to see more Americans. Such a policy, had it failed, would today have the single-malt sippers at the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall opining that the mistake the Americans made was not to leave it to the Iraqis, or keep a lower profile.

The other strategy which is now said to have been “obviously” wiser is to have left the Baathist administration and Civil Service more or less intact. You may ask why in that case the huge expense of occupying the place, instead of just murdering Saddam, or inviting him to Switzerland with £20 billion and an amnesty.

Anyway, the idea that you can simply decapitate a regime like his is dubious — as if there had been a Whitehall-style mandarinate there, with a cadre of Sir Humphreys in a Baghdad club, awaiting a memo that a new government had taken over. But the coiled spring driving the clockwork of both the civil and the military parts of Baathist administration was terror and brutality from top to bottom. At the apex was one monstrous dictator. Remove him and all would have fallen into chaos and corruption. An occupying power that tried to slip its bottom smoothly into the driver’s seat while leaving the vehicle (the existing police, army and Civil Service) intact would have found the machine impossible to drive. And today everyone would be grandly pronouncing that of course our mistake was not to have removed at once Saddam’s bloodstained, corrupt and hated state machine.

The former hawks of press and politics now scramble for the status of visionaries let down by functionaries. This is a lifeboat that will not float. Let these visionaries understand that occupation is always brutal and usually resisted; that occupying armies are always tactless, sometimes abusive and usually boneheaded; that in the argument between hands-on and hands-off you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t; and that the first, original and central cause of the Iraq fiasco was not the bad manners of this or that poor, half-educated squaddie from Missouri, nor the finer points of this or that State Department doctrine of neocolonial administration.

The reason for failure was not the post-invasion strategy. It was the strategy of invasion. Blame the vision, not the execution.


6. Iraq is no Vietnam – it's far worse than that – by Andrew Sullivan/Sunday Times

V, it turns out, is not for vendetta. It’s for Vietnam. In the long, bitter debate before the Iraq war it was always war opponents who brought the V-word up. Many of us who never lived through that nightmare shrugged it off. It was another baby-boomer neurosis, we thought. America had fought and won wars since then, notably the first Gulf war. America had liberated Afghan Muslims and protected Bosnian Muslims, without the “quagmire” so many warned about. It became a point of pride for war supporters to deny outright any Vietnam comparison as preposterous.

So it made news when last week the president himself confirmed that the analogy had some bite. He was asked about a recent analogy from Thomas Friedman, a columnist, who had compared the current moment in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive when Vietcong guerrillas in the south and North Vietnamese troops launched a joint attack and prompted a collapse in morale in the American heartland. “He could be right,” George W Bush said. “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence and we’re heading into an election.”

The president didn’t mean, mind you, that the United States was losing. He was reiterating what has long been a common view among neoconservatives: that the Tet offensive was a military failure for the Vietcong, which was crushed, but a profound PR success for the communist North. The lesson neoconservatives drew was that America will not falter, as it did in Vietnam.

“The full context was that the comparison was about the propaganda waged in the Tet offensive,” the White House explained later. “The president was reiterating something he’s said before — that the enemy is trying to shake our will.”

Consider it shaken. The polls suggest plummeting support for the war and deep discontent with the president and Congress. And the reason, it must be conceded, is similar to the reason in the Vietnam war. The US is now in a classic counter-insurgency war, just as it was in Vietnam. Its superior firepower is of no use in such a situation, just as carpet-bombing Vietnam and Cambodia couldn’t turn the Vietnamese population into allies of a foreign intervention.

Worse, the military has even less knowledge and intimacy with the culture and history of Iraq than it did in Vietnam. It has no South Vietnamese to deploy as spies and informants. Without that knowledge, and without support from a functioning government on the ground, the military risks becoming paralysed by a maze of tribal, sectarian and religious forces that it can neither understand nor master.

On a practical basis this means that American soldiers can clear a town of insurgents but when the Americans leave the insurgents return and, in the absence of a powerful central government, the inhabitants have no option but to co-operate with the enemy. The government’s own forces are either incompetent or infiltrated by the very militias that are fomenting the sectarian conflict in the first place. And so the war grinds on, with little chance of victory.

A political solution, the only secure way to achieve peace in Iraq, has slipped across the horizon, as Sunni Arabs, Shi’ite Arabs and Sunni Kurds recoil into the protection of the clan, the tribe and the ethnic or religious family. After each round of violence a cycle of revenge follows.

And so the Iraqi civilian casualties mount to something like 3,500 a month. We can argue about numbers but it remains indisputable that the number of deaths in Iraq is now surpassing the murderous levels of the previous dictatorship. The Americans look on, fighting hard in some places, resigned to stalemate elsewhere.

If you look up such a situation in a dictionary, you’ll stumble across the V-word eventually. But the analogy still doesn’t hold. In terms of American casualties there is no comparison. The toll in Vietnam was 20 times that of Iraq — and there was a draft (conscription to you Brits), so the cost of warfare was brought home powerfully across America. Today’s volunteer military both minimises such casualties and protects most Americans from the war’s terrible toll.

In other respects the analogy is flawed because the situation in Iraq is worse than Vietnam. When South Vietnam fell, the consequences were largely restricted to the region. They were awful — as the toll of communism culled hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and Vietnam. But they ended at the ocean.

In Iraq the consequences of American withdrawal could be a full-scale civil war, widespread ethnic cleansing, and the involvement of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and even Egypt in a potentially catastrophic Sunni-Shi’ite conflagration. Add to that the possibility of Turkey intervening in Kurdistan and you could have the region with a chokehold on the world’s energy supplies turning into a corpse-ridden, Balkan desert.

Worse, withdrawal could allow for a failed state — or even region, like Anbar province — to become a training camp for jihadists to wage war on the West from a safe haven in the Middle East. Unlike Vietnam, this could bring the war home to America’s own cities. Or to London. Or Paris or Madrid or Tel Aviv.

If victory is impossible and defeat unimaginable, what can America do? One answer is the one given by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary: denial. Last week Cheney said the government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, was doing “remarkably well”. Sadly for Cheney the number of Americans willing to believe this is now much lower than the number who believe the Earth was made in seven days 6,000 years ago.

And so the smart money in Washington, especially if the Democrats retake part or all of the Congress on November 7, is on some sort of deal with the neighbouring regimes to stabilise and police Iraq.

The Bush family consigliere, James Baker, has been asked to come up with a plan. It may take talking directly to Iran and Syria, something that will represent a real volte-face for the White House. It may mean reaching out to Jordan, the Saudis, and even the Russians for direct or indirect negotiation with the various factions in Iraq — or with Iran and Syria.

Just as a chastened America will have to cede managing the North Korean crisis to China, so it will have to pass on some of the burden for containing Iraq to its neighbours. It’s a high-risk strategy — but so are all the alternatives.

More important: it will be an acknowledgment that the project as it has been understood for the past three years is now over. But we will have to wait until after the elections to know exactly what lies ahead.


7. Five Ways To Prevent Iraq From Getting Even Worse
Staying the course is no longer an option. Here's the best scenario for the U.S. to do some good before it pulls out
By APARISIM GHOSH / BAGHDAD/Time

It's a grim sign of the chaos engulfing Iraq today that trying to save your family can put them in even more danger. That's what happened to Ammar Jawad, a Shi'ite in Baghdad, who this month moved his wife and two children to Balad, an hour's drive north of the violence-racked capital. He figured his family would be safer in Balad, a Shi'ite-majority town--until the war went there too. A week after Jawad's family arrived in Balad, a couple of Sunnis were killed in a suburb. Sunnis in a neighboring town retaliated by killing a dozen Shi'ite laborers. The Shi'ites then called in militias from Baghdad, and they went on a rampage in and around Balad. By the time U.S. troops finally stanched the bloodbath last week, nearly 100 people had died. Now Iraqis like Jawad, whose real name has been changed to protect his identity, are wondering if there's anywhere to go. "Even if I can get them out of Balad, where can I hope to send them next?" he asks. "What is the use in making any plans?"

There are no good options left in Iraq. To those who have lived through the daily carnage wrought by organized criminals, sectarian militias and jihadist terrorists, the idea that the U.S. can prevent a full-scale civil war--let alone transform Iraq into a stable democracy--has been dead for months. The main question is, How long will it take for military officials in Iraq and policymakers in Washington to concede that the whole enterprise is closer to failure than success? Midway through what is already one of the deadliest months this year, the U.S. military's spokesman in Baghdad, Major General William B. Caldwell IV, last week called the persistence of sectarian violence in Baghdad "disheartening" and acknowledged that the three-month-old U.S. campaign to take back the city has gone nowhere. That verdict added to rising clamor for an overhaul of the U.S.'s strategy in Iraq. In recent weeks, senior Republicans, like Virginia Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, have said the Bush Administration should insist that the Iraqi government demonstrate progress by the end of the year or face a change of course by the U.S. Foreign policy hands in both parties are hoping that the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic Representative from Indiana, will provide the White House with the political cover to abandon its now quixotic goals of creating democracy in Iraq in favor of a more limited focus on establishing enough stability to allow U.S. troops to leave without catastrophic consequences. "You can't sugarcoat that. The Iraq situation's not winnable in any meaningful sense of the word. What the U.S. needs to do now is look for a way to limit the losses and the costs," Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former member of the Administration's foreign policy team, said last week. The question, Haass added, is "how poorly it's going to end up."

It's not just the politicians who are reassessing the U.S.'s options in Iraq. General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has ordered a group of young officers to review the military's strategy in Iraq and ask tough questions. Pace is pursuing the underlying riddle: Why are there almost as many U.S. troops in Iraq now as there were two years ago when, in the interim, more than 300,000 Iraqi security forces have been recruited and trained? Pace, according to an officer familiar with the process, wants to know, What's wrong with this picture?

So what can still be done? Despite the consensus of gloom--Bush told ABC News last week that the violence in Baghdad "could be" compared to the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968-69, which helped turn many Americans against that war--few Iraqi or U.S. officials believe an immediate withdrawal is wise or likely. But paralysis could be worse. So the focus is on finding ways to bring violence down to a sustainable level, after which the U.S. can begin to extricate itself from the mess. At this late date, there's nothing the U.S. or the Iraqi government can do to stop the bleeding altogether. Iraq's most pressing problems may still take years to resolve. But quick and decisive action in a few key areas could at least help slow the inexorable descent into anarchy. Here are five of them:

1. CLEAN OUT THE ROGUES

The Bush Administration's strategy has hinged on standing up credible Iraqi security forces to take over responsibility for the country's security. So far there are 311,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers and police, of varying capabilities. While that's close to the goal of 325,000, the real problem is less about quantity than loyalty. To anybody paying attention, it's clear that the security forces, broadly divided between the police under the Interior Ministry and the army under the Defense Ministry, are the main vectors of the widening civil war. The bureaucracies and the fighters have been infiltrated by militias, notably the Mahdi Army of Shi'ite radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Iran-backed Badr Organization, affiliated with the dominant party in the Shi'ite coalition that controls parliament. Many policemen and soldiers are more loyal to their sect leaders and militia bosses than to the Iraqi government. In Baghdad, for instance, many police vehicles and Interior Ministry offices bear stickers and posters of al-Sadr. Sunni victims of sectarian violence routinely accuse the police and army of looking the other way when the militias unleash havoc--or worse, joining in the killing.

Until recently, the government has ignored such allegations, suggesting that the victims were deceived by insurgents masquerading as cops or soldiers. But in the past few weeks, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government has acknowledged that some elements of the security forces have gone rogue. An entire police brigade was suspended this month on grounds that officers were indulging in sectarian or criminal activities, and the Interior Ministry claimed it fired some 3,000 employees and removed from their posts two top police generals.

But that doesn't go far enough. Al-Maliki says the security forces will continue to recruit from the ranks of the militias--leaving ordinary Iraqis feeling that one set of bad cops and soldiers will simply be replaced by another. The only option is for the U.S. to press al-Maliki to abandon his plans to absorb the militias into the security forces, slow down recruitment and set up a screening process to prevent militiamen from infiltrating the ranks. And cops suspected of abuses can't merely be fired. "If these officers and policemen have been guilty of sectarian crimes, they should be in jail and not in the street where they can commit more crimes," says political analyst Tahseen al-Shekhli. "Otherwise, the message al-Maliki sends to every policeman is, 'There is no punishment for killing Sunnis.'"

2. DEAL WITH AL-SADR

Since the Feb. 22 destruction of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, the Mahdi Army, al-Sadr's black-clad private militia, has been on the warpath against Sunnis, especially in and around Baghdad. Once driven by anti-Americanism--the Mahdi Army fought pitched battles against U.S. troops in 2004--the militias are fired by a determination to avenge centuries of Sunni oppression. Often with the connivance of the Iraqi security forces, marauding gangs professing loyalty to al-Sadr have killed or kidnapped thousands--not only Sunnis but also Shi'ites who don't subscribe to their radical version of the faith. Al-Sadr's truculence has become increasingly destabilizing. Last week, just days after he met with al-Maliki to discuss an end to sectarian killings, al-Sadr's men battled police and a rival Shi'ite militia and briefly seized control of the southern city of Amarah.

In public, the U.S. military says al-Sadr--who controls a sizable block of parliament--is a major political figure and must be treated accordingly; in media briefings, even al-Sadr's name and that of his militia are studiously avoided. Privately, however, American commanders say they would like the shackles taken off just long enough to deliver some blows against the Mahdi Army. It wouldn't be simple: a full-frontal assault on heavily populated Sadr City isn't a smart option, and a senior U.S. intelligence officer says that "Sadr himself has a diminished ability to command and control his forces." But the U.S. may still be able to do some good by hacking away at those elements of the Mahdi Army responsible for the worst sectarian atrocities and criminal activities. Doing so, however, would require more steel from the al-Maliki government. After the U.S. arrested a top al-Sadr operative in Baghdad last week, a man they described as "the alleged leader of a murder and kidnapping cell" in east Baghdad, the Prime Minister emerged from a meeting with al-Sadr in Najaf to order the man's release.

3. BRING THE SUNNIS BACK

Yes, that's been tried, but much of the hard slog U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad put in last winter to bring the Sunnis into the political process was undone last month when Shi'ite and Kurdish parties forced through legislation that brings Iraq closer to a partitioned state, which Sunnis fear would leave them without access to the country's main resource, oil. "The Shi'ites and Kurds used their combined parliamentary majority to bully the Sunnis," says a Western diplomat in Baghdad. "They need to understand that a big part of democracy is about reassuring the minority that its worst fears won't be realized."

Sunni parties boycotted the vote on the federalism bill and are threatening to withdraw from the all-party government. The risk is that more Sunnis will join the insurgency, which is being driven by extremist jihadis who have taken over parts of western Iraq. The Mujahedin Shura Council, an umbrella of jihadist groups that includes al-Qaeda's Iraqi wing, last week announced the formation of an Islamic state in "the Sunni provinces of Iraq." Scores of white-clad jihadis staged a brazen show of force in several towns in Anbar province. Although the majority of Sunnis want no part of an Islamic state run by jihadis, they may feel they have no option if the political process seems rigged against them.

One option, says the Western diplomat, is to use U.S. leverage with the Kurds to "get them to stop pushing the Sunnis into a corner." That would isolate the Shi'ites, who won't have a large enough majority in parliament to pass legislation. Khalilzad can draw on the fact that the Kurds, although committed to their own autonomy, owe their very existence to American arms. And the growing number of jihadist attacks on Kirkuk, a northern city coveted by the Kurds for its rich oil deposits, shows that they too stand to lose by radicalizing the Sunnis.

4. WAKE UP THE NEIGHBORS

Since Syria and Iran are a big part of Iraq's problems--Damascus shelters and funds Sunni insurgents; Tehran arms and trains Shi'ite militias--they will have to be a big part of any solution. That has always been clear in Baghdad, where leaders like President Jalal Talabani maintain that the U.S. needs to engage Iraq's neighbors in some sort of dialogue, through unofficial channels if no other options exist. Talabani told the BBC last week that "if Iran and Syria were involved, it will be the beginning of the end of terrorism and securing Iraq within months."

But talks with either country remain anathema to the Bush Administration, which has consistently accused Syria of harboring terrorists and is currently engaged in a war of words with Iran over its nuclear program. "We'd be very happy for them not to foment terror," White House spokesman Tony Snow said last week. "But it certainly doesn't change our diplomatic stance toward either." Given the U.S.'s predicament, the Administration needs all the help it can get in Iraq. "Dialogue is what everybody does--enemies and friends," says former Marine General Anthony Zinni, a former chief of the U.S. Central Command. "It's neither good nor bad."

Haass, who served both President Bushes, says that despite the Administration's current reluctance, the U.S. will eventually find itself in such dire straits that it won't have much choice but to engage Syria and Iran. "We don't have the luxury of not talking with Iran about Iraq simply because we disagree with Iran about other things," Haass says flatly. "I believe that as a rule of thumb we make a mistake when we set preconditions for negotiations. What matters in a negotiation is not where you begin, but where you end up."

5. GET TOUGH. THEN GET OUT

Given the breakdown of security in much of Baghdad and western Iraq, military commanders won't contemplate an imminent reduction in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq--which is holding steady at 140,000. And although some hawks, like Arizona Senator John McCain, advocate sending more troops in the short term, the Bush Administration--and the public--hasn't signaled any inclination to do so.

Even at current troop levels, U.S. forces may be able to bring the violence down to a more tolerable level. As the insurgency has intensified, many U.S. units have gone into "force protection" mode: going outside the wire only when a situation has reached crisis proportions and there's little they can do to set things right. That's the scenario that unfolded in Balad last week, when U.S. forces stood on the sidelines despite calls by Sunni leaders for them to intervene against the Shi'ite death squads. Some top commanders would instead like to see the U.S. military adopt more aggressive counterinsurgency tactics. For instance, rather than confine most troops to a few large bases on the outskirts of urban centers, the commanders advocate setting up smaller "patrol bases" near volatile neighborhoods. Those would give U.S. troops a higher profile--which is in itself a deterrent against violence--and allow them to respond more swiftly to trouble.

In Baghdad, the Americans have increased their patrolling in the city, but they are rarely on hand to prevent Shi'ite militias or Sunni insurgents from strafing a neighborhood or snatching people from the streets. Setting up more patrol bases in Baghdad could allow for surprise swoops and a more rapid response to crises.

But the corollary to a more aggressive posture is that as U.S. troops grow more visible, the insurgents will have greater incentive to keep fighting, which would inevitably lead to higher U.S. casualties. Although the military says it can withstand even the heavy toll it has suffered this month, many officers, as well as lawmakers from both parties, acknowledge that the unabated sacrifice of American life will eventually exhaust what public support remains for the war. At the Pentagon, officers are discussing withdrawal schemes. The question at this point may simply come down to how rapidly it's done. "We're all waiting for Nov. 7," says a senior officer, referring to Election Day in the U.S. "We know things have to change, but it needs to be reasonable. They can't just want us to bail out immediately. That would be ugly."

If all of these prescriptions were applied, would they make a difference? It's possible, but only if taken together. The Iraqi security forces can't be cleaned up unless the U.S. is prepared to face down al-Sadr--and it can accomplish neither of these tasks unless American commanders are allowed to be more aggressive on the ground. And no political solution is possible unless the Sunnis stay in the tent and the Iranians and Syrians agree to stay out of it.

Equally plausible, however, is the prospect that none of these steps will work, taken separately or together. Among independent analysts in Iraq and Washington, there is a growing skepticism about prescriptions of any kind. "No mix of options for U.S. action can provide a convincing plan for victory in Iraq," wrote Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a recent paper. "The initiative has passed into Iraqi hands. There are no 'silver bullets' that can quickly rescue this situation." Saving Iraq, if it's still possible, won't happen without more blood and heartbreak--among Americans as well as Iraqis like Ammar Jawad. His family survived the bloodletting in Balad, and Jawad is leaning toward leaving his family there. He says he has "given up believing things will be better anywhere in Iraq." It will be a long time before Iraqis like him will be persuaded otherwise--no matter when the U.S. goes.

(With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly, MICHAEL DUFFY, Mark Thompson/Washington, M. Ezzat/Baghdad, Scott MacLeod/Cairo)


8. Endgame in Iraq -- by William Greider/The Nation

The facts are so stark, even American military commanders are now speaking openly about an approaching climax for our bloody misadventure in Iraq. "To Stand or Fall in Baghdad," the New York Times headline declared this morning. A show-down is here, the generals acknowledge. There are no more back-up strategies.

Learned policy experts from all sides are now debating the various alternatives for an exit plan. Preferably with honor, they hope, but getting out is becoming unavoidable, regardless. They would like to dream up a some sort of fig leaf that gives cover to our failed warrior president. Not that he deserves one, but they want a plan will encourage Bush--finally--to accept reality.

Who is being left out of this momentous discussion? The Iraqi people, whom we were allegedly teaching how to become small-d democrats. Bush relentlessly touted "democracy" as his true goal. He cited the three Iraqi elections as proof that he was succeeding.

So let's have one more election in Iraq--a referendum where the Iraqi people get to decide whether America's armed forces withdraw and when.

This ingenious proposal comes from Harold Davis, an attorney in Douglas, Mass., whose letter to the editor appeared in Saturday's Boston Globe and spelled out the logic. "Let's put our Iraq withdrawal to a vote--an Iraqi vote," Davis declared.

His proposition is sincere, but also cleverly hoists Bush on his own bloated rhetoric. "If the principles hold true," Davis says, " shouldn't the Iraqi people hold the fate of their country in their hands?" His letter provided sample wording for the ballot initiative.

Voters in Iraq would be asked to choose one of the following options:
I ask that all coalition forces be withdrawn within six months of the date of this referendum.
I ask that all coalition forces be withdrawn within one year of the date of this referendum.
I ask that the government of Iraq determine some time in the future when all coalition forces should be withdrawn."

That sounds reasonable enough, but recent polls suggest Iraqis (if they could get to the polls without being killed) would vote for immediate US withdrawal.

Will the dwindling ranks of war enthusiasts in Washington rally around Harold Davis's call for Iraqi self-determination? Or does the White House fear that a free election on war and peace would be pushing this democracy talk a bit too far?


9. There's One Last Thing to Try
This past August and September were the two deadliest months on record for Iraqis, and October is set to exceed even those levels.
By Fareed Zakaria/Newsweek

American policy in Iraq over the past two and a half years has been a mixture of nation-building and counterinsurgency, neither with much success. But the United States is now facing an even more difficult task: ending a civil war. People in Washington have decided to postpone any policy rethinking until the midterm elections are done, because we don't want politics to interfere with this process. After that, the hope is that the Hamilton-Baker study group will report its findings. Then we can begin making some of the moves it recommends. There's just one problem: conditions on the ground are deteriorating rapidly. Violence in Iraq has become largely sectarian in nature and has drastically worsened in the past two months. The International Organization for Migration estimates that 9,000 people every week are being driven out of their homes. The Iraq Casualty Coalition, which calculates Iraqi deaths based on local press reports, says that August and September were the two deadliest months on record for Iraqis, and October is set to exceed those levels. One more symbolic explosion—another Samarra bombing, say—could set off a chain reaction that will make things completely uncontrollable.

Another dangerous new trend is the rapid disintegration of political authority across the country. As the vacuum in security and authority widens, political leaders in Baghdad are losing control of their militias and cadres across the country. Local gangs are asserting power in their neighborhoods and making money in the protection business. They will not easily give it up. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently made an analogy to Algeria's civil war, pointing out that it took 13 years before that conflict burned out. But Algeria had a unified, competent government facing a reasonably unified, competent insurgency. That's simple compared with Iraq's chaos.

Historically, outside forces can do little in such circumstances. The proposal floating around various policy circles, for stepped-up regional diplomacy or a regional conference, is a fine idea and should certainly be tried. But will Syria and Iran really help stabilize a pro-U.S. government in Iraq? And do they really have the power to switch off the violence there?

Iraq's basic problem is an internal one. Its major parties need to commit to a power-sharing agreement. Such a deal appears highly unlikely. Iraq's governing majority—Shiite religious parties and the Kurds—seem wholly averse to making significant concessions to the Sunni minority. The Sunnis, beset by their own radical elements and lack of leadership, seem unable to present a united platform or to rein in the insurgents. And the United States seems to lack much power to make either side move.

The most disturbing recent event in Iraq—and there are many candidates for that designation—was the decision by Iraq's single largest political party, SCIRI, to push forward the process of creating a Shiite "super-region" in the South. This was in flagrant defiance of the deal, brokered by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad before the January elections, that brought major Sunni groups into the political process and ensured Sunni participation in the voting. It is a frontal rebuke to President Bush, who made a rare personal appeal to SCIRI's leader, Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, on this issue.

Perhaps the most critical element of a deal to end Iraq's violence is a broad and comprehensive amnesty. Almost no civil war or sectarian strife has ever ended without one. And yet every time amnesty gets discussed, powerful Shiite voices veto it. (Congressional Democrats and Republicans also have engaged in demagoguery on the issue, compounding the problem.) Another is an oil-revenue-sharing agreement, along the lines advocated by Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb. This project moves forward and backward in fits and starts. Additionally, attempts at reversing, even modestly, the massive de-Baathification of Iraq have proved virtually impossible. Overwhelmingly, the evidence suggests that the major players in Iraq have neither the intention nor perhaps the capacity to forge a national compact.

Can the United States regain some leverage to force things forward? There is one last thing to try: privately but forcefully threaten a reduction of U.S. support for the current government. Nothing else—not the promise of aid, arm-twisting by the American ambassador, phone calls from President Bush—seems to have worked. It could be an honest conversation that explains to Iraq's governing coalition that American support cannot be unconditional. Without the American military, this Iraqi government would likely fall, and many of its members' lives might be in danger. Perhaps that will focus their minds.

Of course, there is a good chance that even this won't work. At that point—a few months from now—we will have to be willing to follow through on the threat. That does not mean a complete withdrawal. But American forces should be reduced and repositioned so as to create a much smaller, less active, less ambitious and, one hopes, more sustainable American presence in Iraq.


10. The Mess -- by Serge Truffaut/Le Devoir

When one pays attention to the development of the Iraq issue over the course of recent days, one has to wonder whether the mess has not taken possession of the White House. Between President Bush's contradictory statements, the rumbling discontent of American as well as British generals, the lesson taught by former Secretary of State James Baker about high level administration, and a month of October not yet over that promises to be one of the deadliest yet, the presidency projects the image of a dog trying to bite its own tail.

Let's start with the army. In barely cloaked terms, the American general in charge of American forces present in Iraq indicated that he had just begun an in-depth examination of the settled strategy on the subject. The main reason for this examination? The application of the vast plan conceived earlier this year for the pacification of Baghdad was a complete flop. A fact to note: all along during this episode that primarily concerns him, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has adopted a low profile.

Last week, you will remember, Baker intervened in public to criticize the way the White House has managed the issue. Since then, thanks to secrets whispered by classical Republicans such as Baker, we know that the moment the latter chose to formulate his assessment was obviously not innocently chosen. His goal? To benefit from the reversals predicted by the polls during the mid-term elections to get rid of the neo-conservatives and certain religious currents. To be plain, the Republican Old Guard wants to get in its revenge with a view to the 2008 presidential election.

Then, there was that initiative taken last Friday by - it must be emphasized - Sunni and Shiite religious leaders assembled within the Islamic Conference Organization. Called the Mecca Document, the text that they signed - negotiated in the absence of American representatives - proposes an amnesty that they deem the only suitable method for pacifying Iraq as well as a scheduled withdrawal for the troops of the American-British coalition.

Simultaneous with the gesture effected by the Islamic Conference Organization, the Times of London asserted that a delegation of Americans had also negotiated an amnesty agreement with the Sunnis without saying a word about it ... to the Iraqi government! We must say that relations between Washington and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are becoming ever more elastic. The reason? The latter is effectively delaying the disarmament of Shiite militias. Still worse, at the request of the young Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, he freed a cadre of his personal guard known to have massacred Sunnis.

Between the public discontents of senior officers, the torpedoes launched in the direction of the White House by old Republican mandarins, and everyone's competing initiatives, one cannot help but observe that a strategic as well as political change is under way. As we wait to know its content, let me highlight a significant renunciation: nobody anymore mentions the establishment of ... democracy!

(Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher)


11. Truth and Arrogance -- by Nancy Snow

Do a Google search in the last 24 hours on the word “arrogance” and you’ll find over 800 articles devoted to the remarks of a senior U.S. diplomat who dared to speak the truth about Iraq. A regular commentator on Al Jazeera, Alberto Fernandez, director of press and public diplomacy for Near Eastern Affairs, told the Arab-language network in a 35-minute interview: “We tried to do our best [in Iraq] but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq.”

Finally, a U.S. Government official stated the obvious. It is possible for the world’s sole superpower to be arrogant and stupid in its policy. What is refreshing, though improbable, is that these words were not those of Cindy Sheehan or the Dixie Chicks but came from a senior State Department official. For his astute frankness, Fernandez in short order had to backpedal from his earlier statement and declare his mea culpa: “Upon reading the transcript ... I realized I seriously misspoke by using the phrase 'there has been arrogance and stupidity' by the US in Iraq. This represents neither my views nor those of the State Department. I apologize.”

Blame it on poor translation, says the State Department. Fernandez, who has given dozens of interviews to Middle East media in Arabic, is suddenly showing a decline in his personal mastery of the language, despite what Reuters reports is an official whose “popularity with the Arab news media has been bolstered by his command of Arabic and his willingness to speak passionately about issues.”

We don’t expect our government spinmeisters to be all that frank and open. We expect them to blindly support the administration and speak from a text like bureaucratic news readers. Staying “on message” is how they hold onto their jobs. Fernandez’s very popularity with the Arab media and Arabic-speaking public was not just because of his ability to converse in the regional language. It was also because he could deliver the administration line with something akin to a pulse. One Iraqi Kurdish lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman, told the New York Times he wished that there more like Fernandez in the U.S. Government: “I have been expecting American officials - someday, last year, this year - to say something about this, that this policy has not worked. It has been a failure. They should admit it before it is too late.”

As an official who is tasked with bringing more understanding about the United States to the Near Eastern region, you would think that Fernandez would be given just a little more elbow room than usual to explain U.S. policy to a very skeptical public that is more likely to expect propaganda and spin than truth to come out of official Washington.

But official Washington cannot see the broader view, which is why for years I’ve advocated that we rescue public diplomacy from official speak. Get it away from the concentrated control of Washington, D.C. and into the civic society where people are freer to exchange their views with their overseas counterparts. Fernandez, the State Department guy who is popular in the Arab press, went too far, according to his superiors. He spoke the truth, which for the Bush administration is like playing not just with fire, but in a bonfire. It kills. In acknowledging a failed policy, Fernandez got burned, but he is unlikely to get sacked because we have so few Arabic speakers in government and State needs him to continue to present the U.S. point of view to the Middle East.

Were Fernandez free to speak openly and frankly, he would likely be the best official representative we have on public diplomacy in the Middle East. Because he cannot, we have no choice but to reach out and around the clutches of the State Department and Pentagon to continue to speak the unspun truth and confront the insanity one-by-one, citizen-to-citizen. An arrogant and stupid policy campaign in Iraq has failed us. Let’s do what we can now to stop the bleeding.

(Nancy Snow was a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Information Agency and State Department from 1992-1994. Her latest book is The Arrogance of American Power: What U.S. Leaders Are Doing Wrong and Why It’s Our Duty to Dissent . Snow is Associate Professor of Communications at California State University, Fullerton and Senior Research Fellow in the Center on Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California. She edits a website on American persuasion, influence and propaganda at www.nancysnow.com)