Related Stories More from National Journal: • Congress: September Status Quo • The Brits: Pulling Out • Sunnis: Local Politics, Sunni-Style

By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Sept. 14, 2007

Even as Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were testifying before Congress this week, trying to put time back on a Washington clock that is winding down on the Iraq war, an on-the-ground commander put the stakes in perspective with a pointed message from Baghdad.

"Militarily, we have achieved about as much as possible, essentially stalling a civil war," the officer wrote in a private e-mail to a reporter. "Unfortunately, the military efforts to stabilize the security situation and stop the sectarian violence cannot address the underlying grievances between the warring parties. The political process must move forward to allow for a sense of inclusion within this Iraqi government. If it does not happen shortly, the window of opportunity created by local security initiatives within Sunni areas and neighborhoods will close."

The Iraq war bypassed another major turning point this week, essentially renewing its lease on American blood and treasure. In that sense President Bush's recent analogy equating Iraq to Vietnam was apt. In Vietnam, the United States was said to have fought not one 10-year war but rather 10 one-year wars because of constantly revolving leadership, changing tactics, and shifting strategic goalposts. Similarly, Iraq has always seemed to its architects to be just half a year away from rounding a decisive corner.

Six months would surely be enough to defeat a few regime "dead-enders." Then Iraqi forces could stand up, so that U.S. troops could stand down. Elections just over the horizon would usher in a functioning democracy. An insurgency on its "last legs" should finally collapse. Constitutional reforms would pacify recalcitrant Sunnis.

At this week's supposed turning point, top U.S. officials reported to Congress on the "surge" in U.S. forces that was designed to buy breathing room for Iraqi officials to reach benchmarks toward a top-down political reconciliation. And once again the benchmarks went unmet, the goalposts shifted, and the light glimpsed at the end of the tunnel turns out to be another six-month stretch of treacherous road in Iraq. In half a year's time, the U.S. can seriously begin drawing down its forces in Iraq to pre-surge levels, Petraeus and Crocker told Congress, the better to buy additional breathing space -- this time for a bottom-up national reconciliation.

If the message of forbearance to a war-weary American public was the same, it was delivered with a sobering recognition of the further difficulties that no doubt lay ahead. "There will be no single moment when we can proclaim victory, and the turning point [in Iraq] will likely be recognized only in retrospect," Crocker testified [PDF], nevertheless urging continued patience. "Our current course is hard. The alternatives are far worse."

Given the constantly shifting tactics and strategies in Iraq, and the wildly variant views of the war in Washington, keen observers would do well to keep their eye on the one constant on which virtually everyone agrees: At its core, the conflict is a political argument about power and resources -- which group has them, in what measure, and how they are to be shared.

Elusive Reconciliation
This summer's National Intelligence Estimate [PDF], the recent Government Accountability Office report [PDF] on political benchmarks in Iraq, and the congressionally mandated commission headed by Gen. James Jones all clearly indicated that little progress had been made toward a political settlement; absent such a deal that reconciles the fundamental disagreements between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in Iraq, the war will rage on.

"The most important task [for the United States] is to reinforce what it is already doing to push Iraq's leaders toward political conciliation and compromise," Anthony Cordesman, the longtime Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in his recent report, "America's Last Chance in Iraq." "Unless Iraq's major factions can reach some kind of modus vivendi, U.S. military gains and aid activity cannot have a lasting impact, and 'strategic patience' becomes an exercise in futility."

What stands out from the testimony of Crocker and Petraeus, and interviews with senior Bush administration officials, U.S. military commanders, and independent experts, is the degree to which they have all essentially given up on the ability of national politicians in Iraq to reach a meaningful political reconciliation any time soon.

Certainly the issues behind the political benchmarks that Congress wrote into law are profound to Iraqis, touching on the very nature of the Iraqi state and the relationship between the central government and the provinces; on power- and revenue-sharing arrangements among the regions and various ethnic factions; and on settlement of decades' worth of grievances between Sunnis, including former members of Saddam Hussein's fascist Baath Party, and viciously oppressed Shiites and Kurds. Despite constant arm-twisting and prodding by senior Bush administration officials and the best diplomats in the U.S. Foreign Service, Iraqi politicians have shown themselves to be unable or unwilling to forge consensus on such basic issues in the time allotted.

"There are a couple of schools of thought on why the Iraqi politicians have been unable to compromise, the first being that the interests of the three main groups are so diametrically opposed that compromise is unlikely," said Daniel Byman, a former CIA and White House official who now directs the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University. "I tend to believe instead that the ethnic communities themselves have become so fractured with infighting that it's hard for any politician to make a concession, lest he be branded a traitor and abandoned by the rest of the community. That leaves the United States in a very difficult position, because we can continue to try and strong-arm individuals to reach the deals we want, but in the end they may not have control over their own constituencies. It's a lack of capability rather than will."

Faced with that unpleasant reality, U.S. officials in Iraq have shifted to pursuing the overarching goal of political reconciliation with a bottom-up approach based on the success of the "Anbar Awakening." Though relatively little understood, this fundamental change in strategy has profound implications for the war effort, suggesting new priorities and holding out the prospect of both great promise and grave risks.

Such a bottom-up approach would, for instance, reorder the priority of the various political benchmarks, with the holding of provincial elections leapfrogging to the top of the list. U.S. officials believe that the Anbar model is already accomplishing on the ground many of the goals that other political benchmarks, such as de-Baathification reform, oil-revenue-sharing legislation, and an amnesty law, were intended to address.

"What we've witnessed this year is that even without the legislative benchmarks, we're seeing progress on the ground with the Anbar model that many of the laws were designed to achieve," said a senior administration source. De-Baathification reform and amnesty, for example, were originally designed to drive a wedge between Sunni nationalists and Al Qaeda in Iraq, he said, something that is happening through tactical alliances with Sunni sheiks in Anbar and the hiring of more than 20,000 local Sunnis for Iraqi security forces. "In the long term, it will still be important to codify a basic vision of power-sharing with legislation at the top, but those grievances are still being worked out," he said. "And in the meantime, I'd much rather have bottom-up progress on the ground rather than paper deals at the top."

Exploiting Success
To supporters, the shift to a bottom-up strategy for achieving political reconciliation is a classic example of exploiting success on the battlefield. After U.S. forces and Sunni sheiks formed those tactical military alliances to drive Qaeda forces from Anbar, for instance, U.S. commanders used the relationships and their sway with the central Iraqi government to get many of the former Sunni insurgents jobs with local security forces. They also opened lines of communication between the Sunni sheiks and the Shiite-dominated central government, resulting in the recent flow of nearly $150 million in reconstruction funds from Baghdad to Sunni areas. The Anbar model has been replicated in three other Sunni provinces and even in some Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, suggesting to some experts that the back of the Sunni insurgency has been effectively broken.

Gen. Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff and a key architect of the surge strategy, returned recently from Iraq. "The original goal of the Sunni insurgents was to drive the Shiite government in Baghdad out of power, but they are exhausted by fighting U.S. forces, Iraqi security forces, Shiite militias, and now Al Qaeda. They've realized they can't win that fight or achieve their political objectives through armed violence," he said, speaking at a recent symposium hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "So while we're stuck in this groove called 'benchmarks,' and can't seem to see beyond it, the political movement that is bubbling up from the local and provincial levels is already so powerful that it's having a profound impact on the national government. Over time, I think it will lead to national reconciliation in some form."

As an example, despite failing to reach agreement on an oil-revenue-sharing law, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki recently transferred $120 million in reconstruction and compensation funds to Anbar province, and $38 million to the mixed-ethnic city of Baquba, where U.S. forces and the local Sunni sheiks allied recently to drive out Qaeda forces, which have subsequently fled to the Diyala River Valley.

"Even though many of these same Sunnis were trying to violently overthrow his regime months ago, Maliki is making accommodations with them," Keane said. "So the real challenge for Maliki and the United States is to try and harness this [Anbar awakening] movement that is growing much faster than any of us predicted, and connect it to the central Iraqi government in meaningful ways."

Grave Risks
Although U.S. officials in Iraq had little choice but to shift to a more bottom-up approach, the administration's failure to make significant progress on the imperative behind the surge -- political reconciliation -- is viewed by some critics as a fundamental and potentially fatal flaw in the current strategy. Once again a number of experts detect in the Bush approach an over-reliance on military means to achieve political ends, without a corresponding diplomatic offensive such as that called for by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group [PDF].

"We needed not only a military but also a diplomatic surge as well, which is why we recommended a carefully orchestrated diplomatic offensive that brought all relevant international, regional, and local players into the process in order to achieve reconciliation," Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the study group and head of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, told National Journal. "Personally, I don't think you should have military operations without a diplomatic framework, but I still think there are a lot of people in the Bush administration opposed to that idea. They still hope to resolve Iraq's problems primarily through military action, and there is a great reluctance to undertake an integrated diplomatic approach."

Another potential drawback to the bottom-up approach is that it represents a more gradual and painstaking strategy for a war that is rapidly running out of support in Washington, where the political clock is ticking toward November 2008 and perhaps the ultimate turning point. Some experts worry that the strategy will allow the administration to continue to simply "muddle through" in Iraq until Bush leaves office. That would squander the leverage that might be gained by using inevitable U.S. troop withdrawals -- such as the reduction of 30,000 troops by next summer that Bush was expected to announce -- as a bargaining chip in reconciliation talks.

"The problem with the Bush strategy is, the surge is being used as a means to a strategic end that it can't achieve, because they have no diplomatic mechanism and are unwilling to apply leverage to forge a political reconciliation," said former Ambassador Dennis Ross, a Middle East expert who served in the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations. Like the Iraq Study Group, Ross recommends an international reconciliation conference in which the United States uses its newfound relationships with Sunni sheiks and a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops as leverage to close a deal.

"The fulcrum of the Iraq Study Group recommendations was that the United States needs to provide help to those willing to reach reconciliation, and withdraw help from those who are not willing, and that includes Maliki," said Ross, author of "Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World." The Dayton Accords ending the mid-1990s Balkans wars, he said, showed that such a careful balance of coercion and diplomacy can work. "But it takes incredible orchestration and a full-time effort juggling a lot of different actors at the same time, and the Bush administration hasn't been willing to do that. I don't understand why, other than diplomacy is not their strong suit and maybe they think it's too hard."

There is also an element of expediency to the recent shift in strategy that sounds warning alarms for some experts. U.S. officials are unable to forge a meaningful political reconciliation, so they shift to tactical alliances with erstwhile insurgents in the Sunni provinces regardless of the potential for hardening Iraq's ethnic divide. They are unwilling to engage Iran in a multilateral setting where Tehran might be pressured to temper its meddling in Iraq, so U.S. forces and Iranian agents engage in an escalating series of tit-for-tat arrests and reprisals. Unless carefully calibrated to achieve the strategic goal of political reconciliation, such tactical moves have the potential to make the situation in Iraq much worse.

"My concern with [this week's] hearings is the man who wasn't there," said James Dobbins, a former special envoy to Afghanistan. "Iraq won't be stabilized except in the context of a regional arrangement that brings all of its neighbors into the project, yet Crocker and Petraeus have no responsibility for relations with neighboring states. And as long as the United States and Iran view Iraq as a zero-sum contest for regional influence, then Iraq will remain in turmoil and we will remain bogged down."

Although the shift to a more bottom-up strategy could conceivably move the various parties toward reconciliation, Dobbins worries that it could also have the opposite effect. "The U.S. is now essentially arming all three sides in a contest for power at the national level," he said. "At some point, if we are not successful in tying the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis into some reconciled national whole, we will have simply fueled and created the conditions for a much more structured and violent civil war."

Martin Indyk, the head of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution and a former Middle East troubleshooter, also believes that by focusing on tactical military gains, the Bush administration's new approach may mask a strategic failure of the first order.

"I don't believe even if we buy more time by continuing the surge that it will produce a political reconciliation," Indyk told National Journal. By insisting on early elections, he said, the United States ushered into power a Shiite majority that had been suppressed by Sunnis for centuries, and they are not about to share power or risk losing those gains. "Nor are the Sunnis about to accept Shiite dominance, notwithstanding their minority status," Indyk said. "Both sides will find support for those views in Iraq's neighbors, Iran supporting the Shiites and the Saudis supporting the Sunnis. So it reminds me of the old nursery rhyme: All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

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