Also In This Issue Related stories are available to subscribers only: National Journal: "An Ever-Whiter War" Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Social Studies: "A Bad Idea That Deserves A Try" (1/19/07) · Wealth Of Nations: "No Easy Exit From Iraq" (1/12/07) · National Journal: "Buying Time" (1/13/07) · National Journal: "Betting Their Futures" (1/13/07) · National Journal Cover Story: "Choices -- Changing Course" (10/21/06) · Poll Track: "A 'Surge' Of Support For Bush's Plan?" (1/18/07) · Ad Spotlight: "Vets Voice Opposition To Iraq 'Surge'" (1/30/07) [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web White House Fact Sheet: "The Way Forward In Iraq" · Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Testifies on Iraq Before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (1/17/07) · Council on Foreign Relations Analysis: "Can A Troop 'Surge' Save Iraq?" (1/8/07)

By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 2, 2007

President Bush's surge strategy for the Iraq war rests on the premise that all of the many participants in the conflagration -- the U.S. and Iraqi militaries, the U.S. diplomatic and aid bureaucracy, the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki,, even the U.S. Congress and certain Iraqi sectarian factions -- can pass several crucial tests. If any one of these players fails, the whole enterprise becomes riskier. If more than one falls short, the odds of success could become insurmountable. And even if all pass their exams with flying colors, the surge may still fail.

In interviews with current and former senior government officials, active and retired military leaders, and think-tank analysts of all stripes, the level of confidence in Bush's plan is, to be generous, low.

The strategy depends, first, on the readiness and relative good faith of Iraqi security forces and political leaders, especially Maliki and his government. That reliance is perhaps the Bush administration's greatest embrace of hope over experience. So many times already, the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi military and police forces, have been found wanting. After two failed campaigns to secure Baghdad, will the United States receive effective Iraqi military support this time to help clear neighborhoods? Will Iraqi police be able to provide a useful presence to hold the ground? This time, this time, senior Bush officials say, the early signs are that Maliki and the Iraqi troops may be passing the test.

Although the prime minister has often responded testily in public to increased U.S. pressure to act against the Shiite militias tied to renegade cleric Moktada al-Sadr, U.S. sources in Iraq note recent progress, some of it behind the scenes. They say that Maliki sent delegations to the holy city of Najaf last month to speak to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a relative moderate and the senior Shiite religious figure in Iraq. The Maliki delegation also visited Sadr himself.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, reached out to Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, a longtime U.S. ally, and to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the largest Shiite party in Iraq. The officials strongly encouraged the pair to back Maliki's hand in any showdown with Sadr, whose party has 32 members of parliament in the prime minister's ruling majority. The purpose of those talks, say administration sources, was to set the conditions for the crackdown on rogue elements of Sadr's Mahdi army that are responsible for some of the worst death-squad activity. In recent weeks, the Iraqi government has arrested several top Sadr lieutenants and detained more than 600 members of the Mahdi army. Sadr, normally a firebrand orator, responded in unusually quiet fashion, agreeing to end a boycott of the parliament and raising no objections to the arrests.

But even if the Shiites cooperate, the surge strategy gambles that 21,500 additional U.S. soldiers and marines are enough to control the violence in Baghdad -- a city of 6 million people -- and in the vast Sunni extremist stronghold of Anbar province. In addition, Bush is wagering that the surge won't break the back of a strained U.S. military that is reaching an equipment and readiness crisis, and that military leaders can add and extend tours for troops who are already on their third and fourth rotations in the region -- without reducing re-enlistments or dampening recruiting. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, recall, wants to expand recruiting over the next five years to increase the size of the armed forces by 92,000 troops.

By decisively redirecting the mission in Iraq from training and support back to providing security, U.S. forces also take the risk of simultaneously confronting Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. Such clashes could unite sworn enemies in their common hatred of the American "occupiers," and could spike the U.S. death toll to a degree that may be unsustainable at home.

"I believe stopping or significantly affecting the civil war in Iraq is probably beyond our capacity at this point. With the surge, we're going to face a terrible dilemma," said Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department in George W. Bush's first term, testifying recently before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If U.S. forces focus on defeating the Sunni insurgency, he said, they'll play into the hands of Shiite Iran and possibly alienate Sunni allies in the Middle East. "Or we end up going after the Shiite militias, which is taking on a much larger mission. And we would not have the Iraqi government as a partner anymore," said Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. "My principal problem with the surge is that it reinforces the interaction between American forces and the Iraqi civil war. I am increasingly persuaded that is where we don't want to be."

Furthermore, to have any chance of lasting success, the surge strategy relies on a U.S. government bureaucracy that has consistently underperformed in nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can the U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Teams competently deliver and manage rebuilding efforts in a way they haven't before? Pentagon sources say they are extremely skeptical that the State Department and other components of the multi-agency effort are up to the task.

Finally, for the surge to work, the Bush administration has to get the politics right in Iraq and in Washington. That challenge may be the greatest of all. By opting for a bold plan that relies on an unpopular boost in troops, Bush has rejected the bipartisan cover and moderate approach offered by the Iraq Study Group. The decision further isolates him politically and raises the chance of mutiny among his fellow Republicans in Congress.

"After losing their majority, many Republicans in Congress are angry that they've been made to walk the plank on Iraq for too long, and some feel that the case for a change of strategy should have been made one or even two years ago," said Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "So if the surge doesn't work, this starts to look a lot like Vietnam. Bush has to seriously worry about a 'Nixon scenario,' where a delegation of senior Republicans comes to the White House to pull the plug. At that point, it becomes nearly impossible to sustain our presence in Iraq."

If the politics in Washington are bad, the verifiably byzantine politics in Iraq present huge challenges for the White House. Anthony Cordesman, the longtime Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that in addition to all of the questions about the effectiveness of Iraqi troops, an even more critical question exists: "Whether we can provide the right balance of pressure and incentives to bring a deeply divided Iraqi government together.... None of that means that the new Bush strategy can't work. However, even some of the folks who helped craft it have told me privately that the odds of it working are less than even."

Michael O'Hanlon,, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution who has criticized the administration's handling of the war, nevertheless favors the surge plan. But he is skeptical that it can work in the end.

"The surge strategy raises all kinds of valid concerns, but most of those who oppose it don't have a better plan in mind, and I personally don't know what else we could do at this point that would be more productive," O'Hanlon said. Maliki's recent willingness to confront militias, he said, suggests that divided government in Washington and Democratic threats of withdrawal may finally be spurring the Iraqi politicians to action. "Somehow, we have to pull off an elaborate act where we make Iraqis fear that we're leaving, use that threat to shock them into good decisions, and then be willing to stay if they make the right moves." O'Hanlon added, however, "Even then, I would be surprised if the surge strategy were enough to turn the situation around in Iraq."

In Defense of Bush
Surge proponents, meanwhile, counter that the strategy offers the only chance of breaking the cycle of sectarian violence that has crippled political reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. No low-risk strategies are left in Iraq, they say. Calls to accelerate the handoff of security responsibilities to Iraqi forces mask the real agenda of cutting U.S. losses and shifting the blame to Iraqis, according to this view.

Frederick Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former historian at West Point. Many elements of the Bush strategy, including the surge of five brigades into Baghdad, first appeared in a December AEI report that Kagan wrote with retired Army Gen. Jack Keane.

"The surge strategy is recognition that civil war has changed the equation in Iraq, and only by dampening down the violence will you give Maliki leverage to begin taking on the militias," Kagan told National Journal. "I can't look into Maliki's soul and tell you whether or not he will take that necessary step, but getting Baghdad under control will fundamentally change the political landscape and eliminate his principal excuses for not acting. Absent greater security, he almost certainly will not do what we're asking."

Despite his support for the Bush strategy, Kagan worries that the administration has fallen short in two areas -- sending troops into Baghdad for too short a time and relying too heavily on the Iraqis' taking the lead. In their report, Kagan and Keane recommend a surge in U.S. force levels lasting 18 to 24 months, a timeline that many experts doubt is feasible given the lack of political backing at home.

"When I hear Bush administration officials talk about this being an Iraqi plan with Iraqis in the lead, it also raises a big red flag to me," Kagan said. "Iraqi security forces have not been up to the task in the past, and this plan needs to succeed even if they fail again." Although he supports Iraqi and U.S. troops working in tandem, with Iraqis "kicking down the doors," Kagan stresses that the strategy represents a fundamental change in mission for U.S. troops -- from supporting Iraqi forces to taking direct responsibility for providing security to the Iraqi people. That shift may be a tough sell at home even though he thinks it's the right thing to do. "That's in our own national interests," Kagan argues, "because it will be a disaster for the United States if Iraq continues to implode and this turns into a regional war. We should drop this rhetoric that suggests we're just doing it for the Iraqis."

The Strategy Takes Shape
The swift, and largely negative, reaction to the Bush's administration's "new way forward" in Iraq -- with at least eight Republican senators publicly condemning the decision, the Senate set to debate a resolution denouncing the plan, and 65 percent of Americans against it -- suggests just how great and unexpected a departure it represents to a war-weary country.

As recently as November, for instance, the U.S. commander with responsibility for the Middle East told Congress that he did not believe he needed more U.S. troops for Iraq; he warned, moreover, that the military lacked sufficient ground forces to sustain a significant increase. Central Command's Gen. John Abizaid conceded that the unremitting violence had already forced him to keep 15 brigades in Iraq, or roughly 140,000 troops, far more than the 10 to 12 brigades he hoped to be down to by that time.

According to insiders, Abizaid and his top commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, were privately convinced that an increase in U.S. troops would just delay the Iraqis' assumption of responsibility for their own security and would hasten the day when an unsustainable operations tempo would seriously affect U.S. ground forces. With the United States approaching the four-year mark in Iraq, they also felt that a more pervasive presence of American forces on the streets would just provoke the Iraqi people; in a poll, a majority of Iraqi respondents had already said that it was "OK" for Iraqis to kill coalition forces. Both generals were known to support the minimalist approach to troop levels that their then-boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had advocated from the outset of the Iraqi Freedom campaign.

After Rumsfeld resigned in November, however, the Bush administration launched a series of strategic reviews of the deteriorating situation in Iraq, and the White House began to listen seriously to other voices. One such adviser was Keane, a gruff and plainspoken retired four-star general who had once turned down Rumsfeld's offer to head the Army. Keane assured the White House that the Army could sustain a surge in forces with extraordinary measures if the stakes were really as high as the president insisted.

Other influential voices included a secret "colonel's group" that was conducting the Pentagon's internal review and advising the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine Gen. Peter Pace. Notably, that group included Army Col. H.R. McMaster. Last year, Bush publicly praised McMaster's pacification of the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar by means of the classic counterinsurgency tactics of "clear, hold, and build."

The White House's search for fresh ideas inevitably led to the author of the Army's updated counterinsurgency doctine [PDF], Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who is credited with successfully applying its lessons in 2003 as commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul. A refinement of the Vietnam War-era tactics designed to win "hearts and minds," the doctrine poses paradoxes reinforced in the towns and cities of Iraq, including "The more you protect your force, the less secure you are" and "The more force used, the less effective it is."

The White House accepted the Iraq Study Group's recommendation to significantly increase the number of U.S. troops embedded with Iraqi army units as a way to accelerate their training and independence, and to improve their performance. In the White House's view, adopting that strategy and adding a surge of forces in support of Gen. Petraeus's updated clear, hold, and build doctrine would achieve a more decisive break with past approaches and would underscore Baghdad's role as the center of gravity in Iraq.

So despite continued misgivings among some senior military leaders, the Bush team settled on the surge strategy. "One minute we were still debating the plan and the administration's proposed timing, and the next minute everyone was saluting and moving out. We drank the Kool-Aid," said one knowledgeable Pentagon officer. Putting more forces into Baghdad is not inherently misguided, he stressed, pointing out that a similar surge of U.S. troops before the 2005 Iraqi elections succeeded in temporarily dampening the violence.

"But the sad truth is, the president has committed us to a new strategy that we will have a very hard time sustaining beyond a window that runs roughly from late spring to late summer," the senior officer said. "Even to get there, we have had to extend and accelerate deployments for people who are on their second, third, and even fourth combat tours. Believe me, the U.S. Army is going to be turning into a pumpkin sometime in August."

Straining the Force
The extraordinary measures that the Pentagon was forced into to mount the surge underscore the internal threats facing the armed forces. Even before the surge, the Defense Department had conceded that because of equipment shortages, its only "ready" units not already deployed were those soon to leave for Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost all of that handful of units are now being rushed to the fight, raising obvious questions about what forces would be available if a crisis erupts elsewhere. On a recent stop in Afghanistan, for instance, Secretary Gates heard a plea from commanders for an additional brigade, in anticipation of a spring offensive by the Taliban. In response, the Pentagon extended combat tours in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, some 4,000 soldiers from the Minnesota National Guard's 1st Brigade, 34th Infantry Division, got the news that they have to stay in Iraq up to four months beyond the end of their one-year tour, a serious blow to the morale of citizen-soldiers and their families. Paratroopers in the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, have already "surged" into Baghdad. This "Falcon Brigade" has deployed six times on short notice since September 11, and Army officials say that many of its soldiers are beginning their third and fourth tours in Iraq. Remarkably, one of the brigade's battalions had just returned from deployment in December; those soldiers had only a few weeks at home for the holidays before deploying to Baghdad.

The administration's plan subtracts a month from the training schedule for the Army's 4th Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, based at Fort Lewis, Wash. The unit thus had to cancel its predeployment certification exercise at the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. The military considers those exercises the final exams before units are declared ready for combat. The 4th Stryker Brigade is a new unit that the Army has essentially built from scratch, and some military experts worry about canceling its "proofing exercise."

"Whether it's worth taking that risk to buy three extra weeks on the ground in Iraq, I'll leave to the ground force commander there," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who commanded units in Iraq and has two sons in uniform. "My greater concern with this plan is that it's coming awfully late, and 21,000 extra troops don't represent a truly bold surge. I'm afraid it will have a far greater impact on the U.S. Army than on security in Baghdad."

Insiders say that the clock is already ticking on getting the additional five Army brigades into Baghdad -- the heart of the surge -- and that the time period for those brigades to show some progress will run out in August. In his confirmation testimony, Petraeus said that the United States should have a good idea whether his strategy is working in Baghdad by then, and whether it is opening a window for political progress and reconstruction.

In case the president decides to sustain the surge in Iraq beyond August, the Pentagon recently changed its mobilization policy to facilitate an involuntary call-up of National Guard combat units that have already served in the war. Guardsmen have been promised five years between call-ups and would undoubtedly see such an order as a breach of faith.

"We had anticipated that units which have already served a combat tour would not be called back up for deployment until 2009," said Lt. Col. Mike Mallord, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in the Pentagon. "With the recent rule change, it certainly makes it more likely that that [the Pentagon will] be coming back at the Guard before that."

Some military planners question even more urgently whether U.S. government leaders are poised to take advantage of any lulls in the violence purchased with the sweat, blood, and lives of American soldiers. "If the rest of the government is not ready to step in when we create this temporary window of security -- and history suggests they won't be -- then we will have missed yet another critical opportunity in Iraq," said a senior officer in the Pentagon who has served two tours in Iraq. "If the extra Provincial Reconstruction Teams called for in this plan are not fully staffed and resourced, or if our ministry advisory teams are not significantly augmented, then several hundred more U.S. soldiers and marines will have died in vain as part of this plan."

The Civilian Follow-Up
When Col. McMaster was implementing his clear, hold, and build strategy in Tal Afar in 2005-06, his superiors in the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment issued an urgent request for help in the critical "build" phase of the operation. After establishing a modicum of security, commanders were trying to wean young Iraqi men off the militia payrolls. People needed to see their lives improving before they would end their support for the insurgency. But despite repeated calls to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and up the military chain of command for on-the-ground expertise in reconstruction and economic development, much valuable time was lost.

"We fought very hard to get a representative from USAID to join us in Mosul, and it took months and months before he finally arrived -- and then, his ideas for economic development were major infrastructure projects with a long-term horizon of five years or more," said Col. Peter Bayer, then-chief of staff of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment. "I kept telling him we needed to create jobs today."

The regiment got a similar response when it requested help in establishing a justice system in the area around Mosul. The Army couldn't compel the handful of Justice Department lawyers in Baghdad's Green Zone to travel to the provinces.

"My point is that in counterinsurgency, you really have to apply all of your military, economic, political, and diplomatic resources," said Bayer, who has served two tours in Iraq. "While we have applied military with a capital 'M,' there has often been a real disconnect in how other agencies, like State, Justice, Agriculture, and USAID, went about tackling the problem of reconstruction and economic development. And I can tell you from personal experience," he added, "that if we do not adequately manage and resource the creation of jobs for Iraqis in Baghdad, the new plan is also unlikely to work."

Administration officials insist they have learned from their mistakes. The White House has been deeply embarrassed by accounts -- most notably in the book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief -- detailing the selection of U.S. civilian personnel for the Iraqi reconstruction effort based on political loyalty rather than expertise. Former Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer's focus on privatizing Iraq's command economy, rather than on launching public works projects that could have provided maximum employment, was likewise a noted mistake. Experts also say that awarding contracts for major infrastructure projects to U.S. firms that employed relatively few Iraqis was another lost opportunity.

The results of those failures are evident in Iraq today. Although the United States has spent nearly $15 billion on reconstruction projects, oil output is well below prewar levels. Other testaments to well-meaning incompetence abound: Baghdad residents average only 4.4 hours of electricity per day, scores of unfinished health clinics dot the landscape, and unemployment has surged along with the escalating violence.

Security Comes First
Perhaps the biggest mistake in the effort to rebuild Iraq, in the view of some experts, was the belief that meaningful economic development was even possible absent a base level of security that was never met in Baghdad and in other parts of the country.

"Iraq today is essentially a failed state that cannot consistently enforce the rule of law, secure its own people, or even deliver services in the face of a violent civil war," said Carlos Pascual, the former coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization at the State Department. "Frankly, in such an environment, it's next to impossible to get governmental and nongovernmental civilians to come in and effectively establish programs to employ the tens of thousands of people who need jobs. If you look at Bosnia and other civil wars, what you find is that economic activities only take root after a peace accord is signed."

Bush, as part of his strategy, has asked Congress for an additional $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid for Iraq. Significantly, that figure includes $350 million for the Commander's Emergency Response Program and $400 million for a civilian version of CERP -- flexible pools of money that local commanders and U.S. government representatives in Iraq can spend at their discretion.

After the State and Defense departments reached a deal to embed Provincial Reconstruction Teams with U.S. military units -- thus settling an acrimonious dispute between State and Rumsfeld over security for the teams -- Bush also included $414 million in proposed spending to nearly double the number of PRTs in Iraq. The Iraqi government has also promised to contribute $10 billion to the reconstruction effort.

"We're going to be focused on programs like community support, working with local leaders, local figures, local projects that are Iraqi-designed, that have Iraqi stakeholders, that are designed to improve the situation at a local level," said David Satterfield, the State Department coordinator for Iraq, testifying on January 25 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Experts see signs, however, that the interagency process that has consistently failed to coalesce behind the mission in Iraq remains disjointed and even dysfunctional. Some trace much of the problem to the Bush administration's chronically weak National Security Council, which lacks the power to crack the whip and bring agencies into line on Iraq policy.

"Because of all the checks and balances in our government, the different agencies are almost designed to work against each other," said a knowledgeable former administration official. "They only really cooperate when one of two things happen: Either the president establishes a clear vision that is shared among his Cabinet and thus flows down from the top to the bureaucracy; or else he empowers the NSC and the national security adviser to step in and put a halt to any interagency squabbling. Neither of those things ever happened under this president."

Nothing, however, focuses the mind quite so much as a hanging, as the saying goes, and administration officials insist that the dire situation in Iraq and the sense that the surge strategy is the last chance to reverse the slide toward civil war have re-energized the bureaucracy to fully back the effort.

"The military has a legitimate gripe," said a senior administration official, "because classic counterinsurgency doctrine requires very close civil-military integration, and that has been very hard to achieve in Iraq for a whole host of reasons, including tight security rules that restricted the travel of many civilians assigned to the embassy in Baghdad." As part of the new strategy, he said, the administration asked all of the brigade commanders in Iraq what civil support they required, and then used their responses to develop a list of 300 civilian positions that the U.S. government needs to fill. Because it takes, on average, six months to fill such positions, however, the administration official conceded that the military would have to substitute uniformed reservists with the requisite skills in the short term until government workers or contractors can take over.

"We've worked very hard to identify all of the impediments to a closely integrated civil-military team, and we're trying to knock each of them down as fast as we can," the official said. "It's still tough going, but I think it's working better than it ever has in the past."

Many military experts who have served in Iraq remain skeptical. Where was the diplomacy, they wonder, that would have forestalled a precipitous withdrawal of roughly half of British forces from Iraq this year, with most of the remaining forces to follow in 2008? Why was the State Department unable to stave off the bungled execution of Saddam Hussein, which disastrously undercut efforts to reconcile suspicious Sunnis? What has become of the United Nations' long-planned international donor's compact on Iraq that was supposed to have made significant resources available for reconstruction?

"I see little evidence with this new surge plan that the administration has corrected its biggest failure," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Eaton. "Time and again, they've shown a tendency to focus almost exclusively on military solutions to problems, without leveraging the full economic, political, and diplomatic might of our nation."

Iraqis Step Forward
A senior U.S. officer involved in training Iraqi security forces tells this story about the Iraqi Interior Ministry, a largely Shiite organization whose police forces have been accused of numerous abuses of Sunni prisoners and of ties to Shiite death squads. Last summer, a United Nations human-rights report [PDF] concluded that 1,400 detainees at one of the ministry's notorious detention facilities displayed signs of systematic "physical and psychological abuse." U.S. officials also had widespread suspicions that two of the ministry's highest-ranking police generals were in league with Shiite militias.

In response to American concerns, Jawad al-Bolani, who was brought in as an honest broker to head the ministry, fired 3,000 employees last year, suspended an entire police brigade on suspicion of its ties to death squads, and relieved the two high-ranking generals from direct command. In November, the ministry charged 57 employees, including top officers, with practicing torture.

"Every time we have brought our concerns to Minister Bolani about corruption or militia influence, he has acted on them immediately -- so, yeah, I definitely trust him," said a senior U.S. officer in Iraq. The police force's willingness to crack down on death squads and militia activity will be crucial in the "hold" phase of the new Baghdad strategy, and U.S. commanders know they have a lot riding on Bolani and other key Iraqis. "I'm cautiously optimistic that, with the extra training we've recently given the national police brigades, if they are ever going to be ready, now is the time," the American officer said.

On the eve of his departure to Iraq, Gen. Petraeus displayed the same cautious optimism about his Iraqi partners. He had already spoken with Gen. Babakir Zebari, the chief of the Iraqi Defense Staff. He is a former commander of the Kurdish pesh merga militia and an old acquaintance of Petraeus's. Zebari is training 25,000 troops to augment the Iraqi battalions that went to Baghdad below full strength, a persistent problem in a country that lacks legal redress to punish deserters. Still, U.S. commanders report that at least three of the promised Iraqi army battalions have already arrived in Baghdad and that, contrary to some predictions, the security-starved locals have greeted the largely Kurdish units with favor.

"The situation in Iraq is dire. The stakes are high. There are no easy choices. The way ahead will be very hard," Petraeus concluded in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. "Progress will require determination and difficult U.S. and Iraqi actions, especially the latter. Ultimately, the outcome will be determined by the Iraqis. But 'hard' is not 'hopeless.' "

For four years, Iraq has rewarded pessimists at every turn. The Bush administration has put its hopes in the ability of new military leaders and a new doctrine to buy a little more time and a measure of security in Baghdad. Shiites of goodwill could use that breathing room to marginalize the most radical elements in their midst. Sunni sheiks might respond by distancing themselves from the terrorists and from hard-line Baathists. The Iraqi parliament may react by reaching a deal on sharing oil revenues equitably among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, and then begin moving toward meaningful power-sharing and a workable federation. It could all still happen.

Of course, civil wars follow their own dynamic, and they cannot necessarily be driven by outside forces or artificially imposed timelines. In the worst-case scenario, the violence will accelerate, the benchmarks will be missed and many hundreds of young American and Iraqi soldiers will perish in propping open another window to nowhere. And then, U.S. forces will almost certainly begin a long, agonized withdrawal from central Iraq.

"People always say that things have to get worse before they get better, but in the Middle East, things sometimes have to get worse before they get even worse than that," said Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations. Once the Iraqis start failing to meet U.S.-imposed benchmarks, and Washington threatens to withdraw its forces from the conflict as a result, Haass says, a dangerous chain of events will be set in motion. "We assume that by giving them a glimpse into a dark future we can convince the Iraqis to act more responsibly, and I wish that were true," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "However, I'm not so sure at this point that they won't jump into that dark future of civil war, and even regional conflict."

For the Surge to Work ... The Shiite-led government of Iraq has to crack down on its own Shiite extremists. The Iraqi military has to effectively stand its ground. The U.S. military must not become a target for both Shiites and Sunnis. U.S. military leaders have to sacrifice readiness and morale to supply the needed troops. Civilian U.S. government agencies must deliver genuine progress on reconstruction. President Bush has to play American -- and Iraqi -- politics right to give himself room to maneuver.

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