Iraq solution: the Darwin Principle

1. The Whispers and the Why Nots – by HELENE COOPER/NY Times

WASHINGTON -- SOMEONE in Vice President Dick Cheney ’s office has gotten everybody on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.

We shall call it the Darwin Principle.

The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.

Sorry, Sunnis.

The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going anywhere. But the fact that it has even been under discussion, no matter how briefly, says a lot about the dearth of good options facing the Bush administration and the yearning in this city for some masterstroke to restore optimism about the war.

As President Bush and his deputies chew over whether there’s a Hail Mary pass to salvage Iraq, it has become increasingly clear that the president will probably throw the ball toward his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice .

Make no mistake, the Rice way is a long shot as well. It’s a catchall of a plan that has something for everyone. Its goal — if peace and victory can’t be had — is at least to give a moderate Shiite government the backbone necessary to stand up to radicals like Moktada al-Sadr through new alliances with moderate Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

In this plan, America’s Sunni Arab allies would press centrist Iraqi Sunnis to support a moderate Shiite government. Outside Baghdad, Sunni leaders would be left alone to run Sunni towns. Radical Shiites, no longer needed for the coalition that keeps the national government afloat, would be marginalized. So would Iran and Syria. To buy off the Sunni Arab countries, the United States would push forward on a comprehensive peace plan in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The Rice plan seems diplomatic and reasoned. But it breaks no molds. Which is why examining the Darwin Principle better helps explain the mood of the capital right now.

“Deciding to side with the Shia is probably the most inflammatory thing we could do right now,” says Wayne White, a member of the Iraq Study Group who is now at the Middle East Institute, a research center here. “It would be a multi-headed catastrophe.”

At first glance, the idea of siding with the Shiites doesn’t seem that crazy. America has, after all, had more spectacular trouble of late from Sunni extremists like Al Qaeda and the Taliban than from Shiites, whose best-remembered attacks on Americans were two decades ago, by hostage-takers in Iran and truck bombers in Lebanon.

But Middle East experts can provide a long list of reasons why a survival-of-the-fittest theory might not necessarily be the best way to conduct American foreign policy in Iraq. First, they say, it’s always dangerous to take sides in a civil war. Second, siding with the Shiites in a Shiite-Sunni war is particularly dangerous since most of the Arab world is Sunni and America’s major Arab allies are Sunni. Besides Iraq, Shiites form a large majority only in Iran, and, well, enough said there.

If America has problems now with Muslim extremists around the world, those would likely worsen if the United States was believed to have aided the uprooting or extermination of Iraq’s Sunni population.

On Monday, a group of prominent Saudi clerics called on Sunni Muslims everywhere to mobilize against Shiites in Iraq, complaining that Sunnis were being murdered and marginalized by Shiites.

So, where is the Darwin Principle coming from?

Well, there’s no proof Mr. Cheney really even backs it. Unnamed government officials with knowledge in the matter say the proposal comes from his office, but they stop short of saying it comes from Mr. Cheney himself.

Other top officials say it is highly unlikely that the administration would pursue such a radical course. (Of course, the radical nature of the Darwin Principle is all the more reason to assume it comes from Mr. Cheney himself.) But it is difficult to imagine the administration actually publicly announcing such a course even if it decided on it.

Can you just hear President Bush’s speech to the nation? “My Fellow Americans, the United States has decided that there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq, so we are therefore going to side with the people most likely to win a fight to the death. We’ll figure out how to deal with the rest of the Arab world, where there are more Sunnis than Shiites, later.”

Still, somewhere deep inside the Beltway, someone has laid out the intellectual basis for the Shiite option. So some people with knowledge of the thinking behind the proposal were asked to explain it. None agreed to be identified, citing an administration edict against talking about President Bush’s change-of-strategy in Iraq before the president articulates exactly what that change will be. But here’s what they said:

America abandoned the Shiites in 1991 and look where that got us.
Mr. Cheney has argued that America can’t repeat what it did after the Persian Gulf war, when it called on the Shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then left them to be slaughtered when they did. The result was 12 more years of the Iraqi dictator’s iron-fisted rule, which ended up leading to war anyway.

Reconciliation hasn’t worked.
The logic of the past couple of years has been that Iraq’s Constitution and election process would bring together the Sunnis and the Shiites. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was eventually able to formulate a so-called National Unity Government in which Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds all hold key positions.

That government has proved itself to be “disappointing,” one senior administration official acknowledged delicately. And violence has continued to surge.

Maybe America can scare the Sunnis into behaving.
That’s the “stare into the abyss” strategy, another senior administration official said. He said that for the past three years, Sunni insurgent groups, and many Sunni politicians, have refused to recognize that the demographics of Iraq are not in their favor. Sunni insurgents can share the responsibility with Shiite death squads for the violence in Iraq, but the Sunnis have the most to lose in an all-out civil war, since they are outnumbered three to one. So perhaps Darwin Principle proponents — whoever they are — just want to scare Sunnis, including those in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other American allies, into trying harder for reconciliation.

Ms. Rice “does not believe we should plainly take one side over another,” said a State Department official, who said he doesn’t support the Shiite option but sees the convoluted logic of it. “But the demography of Iraq is a fact.”

The longer America tries to woo the Sunnis, the more it risks alienating the Shiites and Kurds, and they’re the ones with the oil.
A handful of administration officials have argued that Iraq is not going to hold to together and will splinter along sectarian lines. If so, they say, American interests dictate backing the groups who control the oil-rich areas.

Darwin? Try Machiavelli.
An even more far-fetched offshoot of the Darwin Principle is floating around, which some hawks have tossed out in meetings, although not seriously, one administration official said. It holds that America could actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq’s Shiites; that could deepen the Shiite-Sunni split and eventually lead to a regional Shiite-Sunni war. And in that, the Shiites — and Iran — lose because, while there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq and Iran, there are more Sunnis than Shiites almost everywhere else.


2. A War That Abhors a Vacuum -- by BEN CONNABLE

THE niceties are up for debate: phased or partial withdrawal from Iraq would entail pulling troops back to their bases across the country, or leapfrogging backward to the nearest international border, or redeploying to bases in nearby countries.

But whatever the final prescription, the debate must include a sober look at the street-level impact of withdrawal. What will become of Iraqi villages, towns and cities as we pull out? Although past is not necessarily prologue, recent experience in Anbar Province may be instructive.

American units have already withdrawn from the western Euphrates River valley — twice, in fact. As the insurgency heated up in early 2004, the Seventh Marine Regiment pulled up stakes and went to fight insurgents in eastern Anbar, leaving the rest of the province in the hands of a battalion of troops. The Marines balanced obvious risk against the possible reward of overwhelming some of the insurgent groups in the east.

The consequences were immediate and bloody. Insurgents assumed control of several towns and villages. They tortured and executed police officers, local politicians, friendly tribal leaders and informants. They murdered contractors who had worked with the Americans or the Iraqi government. They tore down American-financed reconstruction projects and in a few cases imposed an extreme version of Islamic law. Many Iraqi military units collapsed in the absence of United States support.

The insurgents celebrated their self-described victory and exploited the withdrawal for propaganda purposes. Baathist-led insurgents used the opportunity to establish training camps and weapons caches in the farmland and along the river banks while other groups, including Al Qaeda, smuggled in fighters, suicide bombers and money to support operations in Ramadi, Falluja and Baghdad. Western Iraq became a temporary haven for criminals, terrorists and thousands of local thugs who made up de facto mini-regimes in the absence of a stabilizing force.

When the Seventh Marines returned to western Anbar it was essentially forced to retake some of the towns it once controlled. Many local Iraqis were openly hostile; the battle for the hearts and minds of the population was set back months, if not years. With the politicians murdered, local civil administration was almost nonexistent and any influence held by the central government was lost.

The Seventh Marine Regiment pulled up stakes again in November 2004 to join the second fight for Falluja. Conscious of the damage done by the earlier withdrawal, the Marines left behind more troops in an effort to stem the inevitable surge of insurgent and criminal gangs; Iraqi forces were not yet ready to assume control.

Despite this Marine presence, the results were similar. What had been rebuilt in the summer crumbled in the fall.

The two withdrawals left the western Euphrates River valley in a shambles. At the end of 2005 the Marines were forced to conduct sweep and clear operations from Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, to the Syrian border town of Husayba. As they pushed west they uncovered hundreds of weapons caches, elaborate insurgent propaganda centers, carefully camouflaged training camps, suicide vehicle factories and complex criminal networks that were feeding a steady stream of money to insurgents and terrorists across the country. Marine units settled back in, spread out and brought attack levels to unprecedented lows.

Since 2005, the situation in Anbar has significantly deteriorated. But as bad as things have become, American and Iraqi forces retain some degree of control in even the most turbulent areas. The border cities of Husayba and Qaim are relatively stable and have effective security and government. Falluja, also stable, is a model for Iraqi-American military cooperation. Advisers are embedded with Iraqi units across the province. American-supported tribes are beginning to combat Al Qaeda in Iraq in the east. Anbar is down but not out, thanks to the American troops along the Euphrates River.

American presence might be likened to a control rod in a nuclear reactor: Leave it in place and the potential energy of the insurgents and criminals is mostly kept in check; remove it and the energy becomes kinetic. Withdrawal of United States presence from any town or city in Anbar will almost certainly lead to the creation of safe havens for western Iraq’s impenetrable snarl of foreign fighters, nationalist insurgents and local thugs. Many abandoned cities and towns would come to closely resemble the Falluja of mid-2004.

If American forces conduct even a phased withdrawal before the full certification of Iraqi Army battalions, those units incapable of sustaining independent operations would be forced to pull back alongside their minders, or collapse as their logistics and fire support lifelines disappeared. Most local police forces would scatter, be co-opted or slaughtered wholesale, as they were in 2004.

Insurgents of all stripes would make the most of the combined American and Iraqi withdrawal, harassing the departing convoys with homemade bombs and small-arms fire. Videos of insurgents dancing in the streets would become prevalent on the Internet and international television. No public relations campaign could succeed in painting an early phased withdrawal as anything but a strategic defeat.

“Redeployed” in large bases far from the enemy centers of gravity, American troops wouldn’t be able to keep insurgent groups from forming semi-conventional units. This pattern has repeated itself countless times across Iraq and follows historic guerrilla-warfare models: insurgents exploit any safe haven to strengthen and train their forces. The longer they are left alone, the stronger they become. As our presence in the countryside diminishes, our ability to gather intelligence and to protect valuable infrastructure, communications lines and friendly tribal areas will deteriorate rapidly.

Should the Iraqi Army stay in place as American units withdraw, the American advisers embedded within these units probably would have to be removed, leaving nobody to control air support, coordinate unit pay from Baghdad, supervise the monthly convoys to take troops home on leave, prevent gross violations of the Geneva Convention or shore up shaky leadership. Given patient support, most of these units eventually will develop the capacity to conduct independent operations. However, some adviser teams already report that their Iraqi counterparts have said they intend to desert if the Americans leave too soon.

Although Anbar may be the most violent province in Iraq per capita, it is relatively free of the sectarian tensions found in Baghdad and the center. The confusion caused by withdrawal would be compounded as religious, militia and political loyalties divided inadequately prepared military and police units. Full-scale ethnic killing would become a very real possibility.

For some, the collapse of Iraqi society into Hobbesian mayhem is inevitable no matter how many American troops remain on the ground. A few argue that disintegration of the Iraqi state actually would bring about the national catharsis that seems so elusive today — that absolute civil war would be a greater good.

This cold calculus ignores the very real impact of an American withdrawal on the people we now protect. Any debate that does not consider the bloody reality we would leave in our wake does a disservice to the people of Iraq and the troops who have fought so hard to defend them.

(Ben Connable is a major in the Marine Corps.)