Iraq: some articles which talk more sense than Jim Baker's Iraq Study Group ever will

1. An Iraqi Solution, Vietnam Style – by MARK MOYAR/NY Times

IRAQ’S prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, is now saying that he wants the United States to stand back and let him use Iraqi forces to restore order. Within six months, he asserts, the bloodletting will cease. The United States must give this proposal very serious consideration. Critics of America’s current Iraq policy, particularly among the Congressional Democrats, have tended to concentrate on international diplomatic remedies. Experience, however, suggest that only the Iraqis themselves can end the chaos and violence.

The United States faced a very similar crisis a half-century ago. In 1955, the pro-American government of Ngo Dinh Diem sought to disband militias that belonged to religious sects, analogous to the Shiite militias in Iraq today. A self-interested faction controlled the South Vietnamese police, much as self-interested Shiites dominate the Iraqi police. In Vietnam as in Iraq, the only strong force not beholden to the sects was the army, and the army’s leadership was not entirely loyal to the national government.

When the South Vietnamese sects defied the authority of the Saigon government in the spring of 1955, the American special ambassador, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, urged Diem to compromise with them. Efforts to suppress the sects by force, Collins warned, would alienate the Vietnamese people, unhinge the army and lead to disastrous civil warfare. This advice was based on the mistaken premise that political solutions suitable in the United States would likewise be suitable in any other country.

Diem rejected Collins’s advice, and with good reason. In South Vietnam, as in other historically authoritarian countries, if the government failed to maintain a monopoly on power, it would lose prestige among its supporters and enemies. Only a strong national government could prevent the sects and other factions from tearing the country apart. While Diem was able to gain the submission of some groups by persuasion, others remained defiant.

In April 1955, fighting broke out between the South Vietnamese National Army and one of the militias. Diem sought to capitalize on the fighting to destroy the militia, which caused Collins to advocate Diem’s removal. Other Americans predicted chaos and wanted to abandon South Vietnam altogether.

President Dwight Eisenhower, however, decided that Diem should be allowed to use the army against the militias. In Eisenhower’s view, a leader who had the smarts and the strength to prevail on his own — even if it meant he discarded American advice — would be a better and more powerful ally than one who survived by doing whatever the United States recommended.

Through political acumen and force of personality, Diem gained the full cooperation of the National Army and used it to subdue the sects. Simultaneously, he seized control of the police by replacing its leaders with nationalists loyal to him. In a culture that respected the strong man for vanquishing his enemies, Diem’s suppression of the militias gained him many new followers.

Diem went on to become a highly effective national war leader. When, in August 1963, he suppressed challenges to his authority from another religious group, he again experienced an upsurge in prestige. Some American officials and journalists, however, denounced him for what they mistakenly saw as counterproductive heavy-handedness, and the officials prodded South Vietnamese generals into overthrowing him.

The South Vietnamese government rapidly deteriorated after the coup, in which Diem was assassinated. The new leaders were inept and tolerated strident opposition groups in order to satisfy the Americans. Violence proliferated among religious groups, and Viet Cong subversion accelerated.

South Vietnam’s history recommends the pursuit of two objectives that American officials are now urging upon Prime Minister Maliki: subduing the Shiite militias and transferring control of the police from Shiite partisans to Iraqi nationalists.

In Iraq as in Vietnam, the leader best able to end the violence will be one who possesses a very keen understanding of the country’s politics and can judge them better than outsiders can. Mr. Maliki has shown that he does not share America’s views on how to deal with the militias and the police. Vietnam tells us that we should welcome his willingness to act on his own initiative, rather than being alarmed by it.

Just as Diem established himself because Eisenhower let him participate unhindered in a Darwinian struggle, we should give Mr. Maliki the chance to restore order as he sees fit, provided his government does not try to suppress the insurgency through wholesale violence against Sunni civilians, as some fear it will.

If we pull back our troops temporarily and let Mr. Maliki deal with Iraq’s problems using Iraqi forces, we will be able to determine more quickly whether he can save his country as Diem saved his in 1955. We will see whether he has the political skills to cut deals with local leaders, the support of enough security forces to suppress those who won’t cut deals, and the determination to prevent the obliteration of the Sunnis.

If he does not have these attributes, it is to be hoped that the Iraqi Parliament, the Council of Representatives, will exercise its constitutional right to remove the prime minister by a vote of no confidence. Perhaps there is a better prime minister out there. It is also possible that nationalists will try to stage a coup and install a more authoritarian, less sectarian government. We may decide to condone a coup if the situation becomes desperate enough. But we would be best advised to avoid orchestrating one as we did so disastrously in 1963.

The United States may ultimately find that no Iraqi leader can neutralize both the insurgents and the militias. The benefits of a self-sufficient Iraqi government are so great, however, that we must give Mr. Maliki the opportunity to try.

(Mark Moyar, an associate professor at the United States Marine Corps University, is the author of “Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965.”)


2. Iraq's Divide at the Top
Analysis: Iraq's national unity government is the cornerstone of the U.S. exit strategy. But the week's events only highlight that national unity is its name, not its nature
By TONY KARON/Time

That Iraq is spinning dangerously out of control is no longer a matter of debate; the question has become how to stabilize it and limit the damage. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group, headed up by former Secretary of State James Baker, is supposed to offer up some answers next month when it presents its much-anticipated report. But the events of the past week underscore how difficult even damage-control in Iraq has become.

U.S. policy in Iraq depends largely on the ability of the elected government to forge a national unity compact that can end both the insurgency and the sectarian violence that continues to claim hundreds of casualties every week. And right now the signs of that government being able to achieve that goal are not looking good.

The gloomy assessment of the situation in Iraq offered in the Senate this week by U.S. intelligence chiefs was echoed by events on the ground: The mass abduction of dozens of people inside the headquarters of the higher eduction ministry — by men wearing uniforms of the Interior Ministry police no less — highlighted the absence of security or government control even in the heart of the capital. And the reported arrests of senior police officers that followed — as well as sharply divergent accounts by different cabinet ministers of how many people had been kidnapped, how many had been released, and whether any had been killed or tortured — suggested that different arms of the government (often broken down on sectarian lines) are not reading off the same script.

That impression was reinforced Thursday when Interior Minister, Jawad al-Bolani, a Shi'ite, issued an arrest warrant for leading Sunni cleric Harith al-Dari, accusing him of fomenting terrorism and sectarian violence. Al-Dari is the head of the influential Muslim Scholars Association, who while condemning terror attacks on Iraqi civilians has nonetheless openly backed insurgent attacks on U.S. forces as "legitimate resistance." The arrest warrant was greeted with howls of protest by the Sunni parties participating in the government, who denounced it as a sectarian attack. Some Sunni leaders even warned that if it were not rescinded, they would quit the government.

Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd, hastened to distance the government from the warrant, perhaps mindful of the importance of leaders such as al-Dari for the government to have any real chance at tamping down the insurgency through a political accommodation of the Sunnis. And the government tried to stem the controversy Friday by clarifying that it had only issued an investigation warrant, not an arrest warrant; one official insisted that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki didn't know that any warrant was going to be issued. But the damage has already been done. It didn't help matters that the announcement had been made in a dramatic late-night television appearance by the Interior Minister, who warned that "this is the government's policy against anyone who tries to foment division among Iraq's sects." After a meeting of ministers on the security situation reportedly broke down into a Sunni-Shi'ite shouting match on Tuesday, President Jalal Talabani has moved to convene an urgent conference of Iraqi political leaders to address the crisis. >

But the failures of the Iraqi government are only one part of the challenge facing the Administration in setting an Iraq policy capable of delivering stability and offering the prospect of bringing home American troops. What are widely believed to be the Baker group's basic assumptions — that the U.S. can no longer achieve the goals defined by the Bush Administration at the outset of the war; that achieving stability will require a regional consensus in which Iran and Syria would be important stakeholders — have already entered conventional wisdom in U.S. debates over Iraq. Since the U.S. election, talk-shows and op-ed pages are filled with proposals ranging from partitioning Iraq to backing a friendly authoritarian regime taking power, from "phased withdrawal" of U.S. troops to force the Iraqis to get the job done to sending thousands more troops in the hope of reversing the slide into chaos. But Baker has made clear that there is no simple formula that can fix the mess in Iraq — the reality on the ground has already moved beyond U.S. control.

While the U.S. remains the single largest power center in Iraq, that power is not sufficient to impose Washington's will. There are too many other actors in the field who have enough influence of their own, or in combination, to prevent the U.S. from prevailing. Those power centers range from the Sunni insurgency and the Shi'ite militias to the Iraqi government and Iraq's neighbors, first and foremost Iran.

So, whatever direction Baker proposes, it is less likely to be a comprehensive blueprint than a process for the various stakeholders in Iraq to build consensus on how to establish a measure of stability. And that will necessarily be a long and drawn-out discussion, during which the security needs will remain unchanged and urgent. That may have been why President Bush's basic message on Iraq this week boiled down to this: Don't expect results in a hurry.


3. The Story Behind The Iraq Study Group
How Va. Lawmaker Pushed for Panel
By Lyndsey Layton/Washington Post

On his third trip to Iraq, in September 2005, Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) knew the American mission was imperiled.

"We were up in Tikrit and went to a hospital, and it was guarded with guns and security to the point they were pushing weapons into women's faces," Wolf said. "I saw we can't be successful if we're going into an operating room with pistols and weapons."

That's when the congressman from Vienna first began to think about the need for "fresh eyes" to scrutinize U.S. policy regarding Iraq. Quietly, he went to the White House and presented his plan: a bipartisan commission of well-respected policymakers to bore deeply into the Iraq dilemma and recommend solutions.

"If you ordered an Erector Set and you were trying to build it before Christmas and you got stuck and someone else came along, they might just see immediately what needs to be done," Wolf said. "Or if you had a health-care problem, you'd want a second opinion. It's all about fresh eyes on a target."

The result is the Iraq Study Group, led by Republican former secretary of state James A. Baker III and Democratic former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (Ind.), who was a vice chairman of the panel that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The group has taken on greater relevance after midterm elections marked by widespread voter dissatisfaction with Iraq, and it will play a decisive role in reshaping the U.S. position on Iraq, according to lawmakers and administration officials.

Initially, the White House was cool to the idea, Wolf said. But he was able to win over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld followed, as did national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. "Rice's support was key," Wolf said. "But I had to have the support of everybody or there would be no way to do this."

The composition of the study group was also crucial.

"You had to get a group not connected to the administration, people who were not going to be campaigning and who could come to a consensus," he said. "We wanted a bipartisan group, people senior enough that they weren't looking to get placed in a law firm or good job. The test was: Do you love your country?"

The study group, composed of five Democrats and five Republicans, was created in March to assess the situation in Iraq, its impact on the surrounding region and its consequences for U.S. interests. The group's work has been guided by several smaller committees of experts on topics such as the economy and reconstruction, military and security, and political development.

Wolf got Congress to appropriate $1 million for the project. To select the panel's members, he turned to the U.S. Institute for Peace, an independent nonpartisan organization created and funded by Congress. One of its goals is to promote stability after a conflict.

"It's a tremendous dilemma, a difficult situation" in which Congress "was looking for alternatives and the fall election was reinforcing the polarization of attitudes," said Richard H. Solomon, president of the institute. "We were creating the study group to build a political middle."

Wolf said he hopes that the group's recommendations, expected to be delivered to President Bush and Congress next month, will reconnect a nation splintered by war.

"When our country is together, we're strong -- Truman and Roosevelt showed that," he said. "When we're divided, I think the country's going to be in trouble. I hope something good comes from this, that we can develop consensus."


4. Flaws Cited in Effort To Train Iraqi Forces
U.S. Officers Roundly Criticize Program
By Thomas E. Ricks/Washington Post

The U.S. military's effort to train Iraqi forces has been rife with problems, from officers being sent in with poor preparation to a lack of basic necessities such as interpreters and office materials, according to internal Army documents.

The shortcomings have plagued a program that is central to the U.S. strategy in Iraq and is growing in importance. A Pentagon effort to rethink policies in Iraq is likely to suggest placing less emphasis on combat and more on training and advising, sources say.

In dozens of official interviews compiled by the Army for its oral history archives, officers who had been involved in training and advising Iraqis bluntly criticized almost every aspect of the effort. Some officers thought that team members were often selected poorly. Others fretted that the soldiers who prepared them had never served in Iraq and lacked understanding of the tasks of training and advising. Many said they felt insufficiently supported by the Army while in Iraq, with intermittent shipments of supplies and interpreters who often did not seem to understand English.

The Iraqi officers interviewed by an Army team also had complaints; the top one was that they were being advised by officers far junior to them who had never seen combat.

Some of the American officers even faulted their own lack of understanding of the task. "If I had to do it again, I know I'd do it completely different," reported Maj. Mike Sullivan, who advised an Iraqi army battalion in 2004. "I went there with the wrong attitude and I thought I understood Iraq and the history because I had seen PowerPoint slides, but I really didn't."

Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, told Congress last week that he plans to shift increasing numbers of troops from combat roles to training and advisory duties. Insiders familiar with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group say that next month the panel will probably recommend further boosts to the training effort. Pentagon officials are considering whether the number of Iraqi security forces needs to be far larger than the current target of about 325,000, which would require thousands more U.S. trainers.

Most recently, a closely guarded military review being done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff laid out three options for Iraq. It appears to be favoring a version of one option called "Go Long" that would temporarily boost the U.S. troop level -- currently about 140,000 -- but over time would cut combat presence in favor of training and advising. The training effort could take five to 10 years.

Despite its central role in Iraq, the training and advisory program is not well understood outside narrow military circles. Congress has hardly examined it, and training efforts lie outside the purview of the special inspector general on Iraq reconstruction. The Army has done some studies but has not released them. Even basic information, such as how many of the 5,000 U.S. military personnel involved are from the National Guard and Reserves, is unusually difficult to obtain.

But the previously unreported transcripts of interviews conducted by the Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., offer a view into the program, covering a time from shortly after the 2003 invasion until earlier this year.

One of the most common complaints of the Army officers interviewed was that the military did a poor job of preparing them. "You're supposed to be able to shoot, move and communicate," said Lt. Col. Paul Ciesinski, who was an adviser in northern Iraq last year and this year. "Well, when we got to Iraq we could hardly shoot, we could hardly move and we could hardly communicate, because we hadn't been trained on how to do these things." The training was outdated and lackadaisical, he said, adding sarcastically: "They packed 30 days' training into 84 days."

Sullivan, who advised three infantry companies in the Iraqi army, called the U.S. Army's instruction for the mission "very disappointing."

Nor were the officers impressed by some of their peers. Maj. Jeffrey Allen, an active-duty soldier, noted that all other members of his team were from the National Guard, and that his team was supposed to have 10 members but was given only five. He described his team as "weak . . . in particular the brigade team chief."

A separate internal review this year by the military's Center for Army Lessons Learned, based on 152 interviews with soldiers involved in the training and advisory program, found that there was "no standardized guideline" for preparing advisers and that such instruction was needed because "a majority of advisors have little to no previous experience or training."

Lt. Col. Michael Negard, a spokesman for the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, the headquarters for training, said he has not seen the Lessons Learned report and so does not know whether the training has been improved or standardized since that report was issued.

After arriving in Iraq, advisers said, they often were shocked to find that the interpreters assigned to them were of little use. Ciesinski reported that at his base in western Nineveh province, "They couldn't speak English and we would have to fire them."

Nor were there enough interpreters to go around, said Sullivan. "It was a real juggling act" with interpreters, he said, noting that he would run from the headquarters to a company "to borrow an interpreter, run him over to say something, and then send him back."

But he was better off than Maj. Robert Dixon, who reported that during his tour in 2004, "We had no interpreters at the time."

The Center for Army Lessons Learned study, whose contents were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, found one unit that learned after 10 frustrating months that its interpreters were "substandard" and had been translating the advisers' instructions so poorly that their Iraqi pupils had difficulty understanding the concepts being taught.

Trainers and advisers also reported major problems with the Army supply chain. "As an adviser, I got the impression that there was an 'us' and 'them' " divide between the advisers and regular U.S. forces, said Maj. Pete Fedak, an adviser near Fallujah in 2004. "In other words, there was an American camp and then, outside, there was a bermed area for the Iraqis, of which we were part."

Replacing basic office materials was one of the toughest problems advisers reported. "Guys would come under fire so they could get computer supplies, paper and things like that," Sullivan said. "It was a surreal experience."

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, a staff officer with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 who worked with Iraqi units, came away thinking that the Army fundamentally is not geared to the task of helping the advisory effort.

"The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host-nation institutions," he told the interviewers, "yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations: combat operations."

Advisers found that the capabilities of Iraqi forces "ran the gamut from atrocious to excellent," as it was put by Lt. Col. Kevin Farrell, who commanded an armored unit in east Baghdad last year and this year.

Many worried that the Iraqi units being advised contained insurgents. An Iraqi National Guard battalion "was infiltrated by the enemy," said Maj. Michael Monti, a Marine who was an adviser in the Upper Euphrates Valley in 2004 and 2005.

Some advisers reported being personally targeted by infiltrators. "We had insurgents that we detected and arrested in the battalion that were planning an operation against me and my team," Allen said.

But Iraqi officers may have had even more to fear, because their families were also vulnerable. "I went through seven battalion commanders in eight weeks," Allen noted. Dixon reported that in Samarra both his battalion commander and intelligence officer deserted just before a major operation.

Iraqis also had some complaints about their U.S. advisers, most notably that junior U.S. officers who had never seen combat were counseling senior Iraqi officers who had fought in several wars. "Numerous teams have lieutenants . . . to fill the role of advisor to an Iraqi colonel counterpart," the Lessons Learned report stated.

Farrell, the officer in east Baghdad, said some advisers were literally "phoning in" their work. Some would not leave the forward operating base "more than one or two days out of the week -- instead they would just call the Iraqis on cellphones," he said.

Dixon was grim about the experience. "Would I want to go back and do it again?" he asked. His unambiguous answer: "No."

Yingling came to a broader conclusion. He recommended an entirely different orientation in Iraq, both for trainers and for regular U.S. units. "Don't train on finding the enemy," he said. "Train on finding your friends, and they will help you find your enemy. . . . Once you find your friends, finding the enemy is easy."


5. UNREALISTIC – by George Packer/Nw Yorker

We are all realists now. Iraq has turned conservatives and liberals alike into cold-eyed believers in a foreign policy that narrowly calculates national interest without much concern for what goes on inside other countries. The Republicans had their neoconservative spree and emerged this month from its smoking wreckage, in Iraq and at the polls, with nothing to steady them except the hope that two aging condottieri from the first Bush Presidency, James A. Baker III and Robert Gates, can lead the way out. These are the same men who, fifteen years ago, abandoned Afghanistan to civil war and Al Qaeda, allowed Saddam to massacre his own people, and concluded that genocide in the Balkans was none of America’s business. They are not the guardians of all wisdom. At some point, events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security—that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils. But, for now, Kissingerism is king.

And the Democrats? Since winning the midterms, they have been talking about the endgame in Iraq with a strangely serene sang-froid. Last week in the Times , John M. Deutch, who was the director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton, praised the nomination of Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld, and added, “The consequences of withdrawal need not be catastrophic to American interests in the region.” Also last week, on National Public Radio, Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who was an early supporter of withdrawal, casually offered that, if Iraq were to fall apart in the wake of an American departure, “I don’t think it’ll be any worse” than the partition of the Indian subcontinent. A million people are estimated to have died in 1947 during the movement of Muslims and Hindus across the newly drawn India-Pakistan border. Sixty years and several wars later, the two countries confront each other in a nuclear standoff, trade charges of subversion, and periodically exchange fire in the Kashmiri Himalayas.

What America will gain in return for leaving Iraq, according to Murtha and other Democrats, will be the holy grail of realism: stability. “They have more confidence in their people than they do in ours,” Murtha said of the Iraqis. “And I’m convinced there’ll be more stability, less chaos.” Former Senator George S. McGovern recently laid out a plan, in an essay he co-wrote in Harper ’s, that amounts to a series of non sequiturs: American withdrawal, followed by the evaporation of the insurgency, followed by an influx of foreign police, followed by American-funded reconstruction. A letter signed by leading House and Senate Democrats and sent to the President on October 20th called for “beginning the phased redeployment and transitioning the U.S. mission in Iraq by the end of the year.” It also called for the Administration to pressure Iraqis to reach “a broad-based and sustainable political settlement.” The letter represented a united Democratic position on Iraq, with signatories ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Joseph Biden, but the common front came at the expense of common sense: if American troops start leaving no matter what Iraqis do, with what additional leverage will the U.S. compel them to do what they haven’t yet done?

It is true that the presence of American troops is a source of great tension and violence in Iraq, and that overwhelming numbers of Iraqis want them to leave. But it is also true that wherever American troop levels have been reduced—in Falluja and Mosul in 2004, in Tal Afar in 2005, in Baghdad in 2006—security has deteriorated. In the absence of adequate and impartial Iraqi forces, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have filled the power vacuum with a reign of terror. An American withdrawal could produce the same result on a vast scale. That is why so many Iraqis, after expressing their ardent desire to see the last foreign troops leave their country, quickly add, “But not until they clean up the mess they made.” And it is why a public-service announcement scrolling across the bottom of the screen during a recent broadcast on an Iraqi network said, “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians not comply with the orders of the Army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

The argument that Iraq would be better off on its own is a self-serving illusion that seems to offer Americans a win-win solution to a lose-lose problem. Like so much about this war, it has more to do with politics here than reality there. Such wishful thinking (reminiscent of the sweets-and-flowers variety that preceded the war) would have pernicious consequences, as the United States fails to anticipate one disaster after another in the wake of its departure: ethnic cleansing on a large scale, refugees pouring across Iraq’s borders, incursions by neighboring armies, and the slaughter of Iraqis who had joined the American project.

With the Democrats about to take over Congress, the Iraq Study Group preparing to release its report, a team of military officers drafting new strategies at the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld heading into an ignominious retirement, the war has reached a moment of reckoning in Washington. Though it may well be too late, politically a new Iraq policy is finally possible. It should use every ounce of America’s vanishing leverage to get the Iraqi factions, including insurgent and militia leaders and their foreign backers, to sit together in a room, with all the vexing issues of political power and economic resources before them. The U.S. government should announce that decisions about troop levels, including withdrawal, would depend on, not precede, the success or failure of the effort. An official involved with the Democratic congressional leadership said last week that political compromise and a gradual lessening of violence could allow the U.S. to reduce its numbers over the next eighteen months to thirty thousand troops, with other countries, including Muslim ones, convinced that it’s in their interest to fill the gap with peacekeepers. If America is already heading for the exit, no one will want to have anything to do with Iraq except to pick at its carcass.

Ultimately, it’s up to the President. The man who still holds that office may not want a new policy. And even if he does, it may not work. We may have to accept that the disintegration of Iraq is irreversible and America’s last remaining interest will be to leave. If so, we shouldn’t deepen the insult by pretending that we’re doing the Iraqis a favor. Even realism has an obligation to be realistic.


6. Going Long In Iraq -- by Robert Dreyfuss/TomPaine.com

Last week, the situation in Iraq took another major turn for the worse. That might seem impossible, since the level of carnage and destruction is so immense already that it’s hard to imagine things getting worse. But get worse they did, when the ministry of the interior —the death squad-dominated, Shiite-run agency that has become a factory for torture and murder—announced that it was seeking the arrest of Iraq’s top Sunni cleric, Harith al-Dari, who heads the Muslim Scholars Association.

Widely seen as someone who is close to the Sunni-led resistance in Iraq, Dari is hardly a radical. But that didn’t dissuade Iraq’s interior minister. “We have proof that he is involved in terrorism,” said a ministry spokesman. That announcement provoked a storm of outrage from those Sunnis, including moderates and centrists, who’d decided earlier this year to take part in Iraq’s political process rather than remain outside, and many of them immediately threatened to shut down the Iraqi government and boycott parliament. “We have to decide if we want a state, or not,” said Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president, who would have done better to acknowledge that indeed, Iraq has no state at all. Indeed, over the past few days, terrorists—real ones, and the Shiite variety—launched brazen attacks against two government ministries, raiding the Iraqi education ministry and kidnapping scores of employees, and then kidnapping the deputy minister of health.

The worsening crisis in Iraq lends desperate urgency to efforts in Washington to find a solution. While the capital awaits the report of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, in December or early January, the die-hards and dead-enders in and out of the Bush administration are making one last push for, well, one last push. All reason to the contrary, they’re pushing the notion that the United States has to prepare for one more Alamo-like last stand in Iraq.

Such an effort was on display last week, when I attended the November 15 hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which heard testimony from General John Abizaid, the beleaguered, political commander of Centcom, who placidly declared his support for staying the course. But Abizaid was pressed by Senator John McCain, from the Republican side, and Senator Joseph Lieberman, from the—well, from what?—to explain why it wouldn’t be a good idea to send at least another 20,000 American troops to Baghdad in order to prevent defeat.

It’s an idea that appeals to neoconservatives, above all, who are pained to see their vaunted Iraqi experiment collapse in failure. The most vocal proponent of the idea is Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, though Kagan wants to send 50,000, not 20,000, and fast.

And apparently a review, now nearing completion under General Peter Pace at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is lurching in that direction. According to the Washington Post, Pace’s review is leaning toward the idea of a year-long commitment of several tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and Marines, on top of the 150,000 there now, in a last-ditch effort to secure Baghdad and Anbar province. Once that task is neatly done, they’d start bringing the boys home.

It shouldn’t need saying, but it does: This won’t work. Abizaid himself politely told McCain and Lieberman that the United States doesn’t have the forces, and even if they did, the Iraqi government doesn’t want a bigger occupation than the one they’ve got. Other experts say that chances are slim that even 50,000 more U.S. troops would help stabilize Iraq. And, of course, the whole idea is politically tone deaf. Having voted overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq on November 7, the American people would be puzzled to see an escalation.

As I observed the day after the midterm election, the vote was an unalloyed mandate to U.S. government to get out of Iraq. Many Democrats, from Russ Feingold to Carl Levin to Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha, seem prepared to act on that mandate. Although their power goes only so far, when measured against a recalcitrant White House, with every passing day it becomes harder to argue that the continuing to station U.S. forces in Iraq provides a stabilizing presence.

Whether this informs the deliberations of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group is unclear. Deadly, costly, and unwinnable, it is war that has imprinted an indelible stain of shame on the pages of American history. (You know a war is going badly when even Henry Kissinger says that it can’t be won .) President Bush, stumbling through Asia, is playing sphinx. “I haven't made any decisions about troop increases or troop decreases, and won't until I hear from a variety of sources,” he told reporters in Indonesia. Well, there is no shortage of “sources” with plans. But it’s scary, indeed, with the situation in Iraq getting worse with each passing day, to think of George W. Bush spinning the wheel and picking one.

(Robert Dreyfuss is an Alexandria, Va.-based writer specializing in politics and national security issues. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005), a contributing editor at The Nation , and a writer for Mother Jones ,The American Prospect and Rolling Stone . He can be reached through his website, www.robertdreyfuss.com)