Part I
The Vietnam Solution
Robert Dreyfuss
June 28, 2005
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.
Editor's note: This piece is the first in a two-part series. Read Part II: An Iraqi Peace Process .
Comparisons between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are coming fast and furious now, so let's consider one more. There is an apt parallel between the way we got out of Vietnam and the way that we will get out of Iraq—sooner or later.
Public opinion is turning sharply against the war, even though mainstream Democrats and most Republicans are mostly sticking with the victory-in-Iraq strategy. The conditions in Iraq and here at home are strikingly similar to those we saw surrounding Vietnam at the end of the Johnson administration. Those looking for an exit strategy, take note.
In Vietnam, by the spring of 1968, it was clear to just about everyone—including our intelligence agencies—that the war was lost. The Tet Offensive made it obvious that the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong weren't being defeated or decimated. The United States insisted that it would never talk directly or negotiate with the communist North and their allied partisans in South Vietnam, insisting that the quisling regime in Saigon was the lawful government. So the war dragged on for another five years, killing tens of thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese.
Finally, during 1972-1973, the United States did what it had previously said it wouldn't do: it essentially abandoned its puppet government in South Vietnam and began direct talks with the Vietnamese communists. The communists were magnanimous enough to give the United States a face-saving way out, rather than forcing Washington to admit that it was surrendering. And we left.
And today?
Once again, it is obvious to all—again, including our intelligence agencies—that the war in Iraq is lost. Once again, like the Tet Offensive, the recent wave of bloody assaults across Iraq has made it clear that the resistance, far from being in its "last throes," is not being defeated. Once again, a Nixon-like American administration is refusing to sue for peace. Though Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has admitted that U.S. authorities in Iraq have been conducting an on-again, off-again dialogue with some elements of the insurgency, it is not nearly enough. The United States is talking, but not negotiating—instead, it is trying to find a few disparate elements of the resistance in order to get them to support the U.S.-installed Iraqi interim government. Such take-it-or-leave-it dialogues are doomed to failure, since all they can produce are a few more Sunni quislings who will immediately become targets of the insurgency themselves. For the most part, the United States continues to insist that all potential olive branches from the resistance be delivered to the offices of the interim (and utterly illegitimate) ersatz government in the modern-day Saigon that is Baghdad.
It is perfectly clear what the United States has to do. It must abandon its deformed offspring in Baghdad, the hapless regime of Shiite fanatics and Kurdish warlords, and pray that it can establish direct talks with the people it is fighting.
There is no other exit strategy.
As in Vietnam, it's likely—given the bull-headedness of the administration—that the United States won't seek the sort of face-saving deal that it struck to end the war in Vietnam for years. My guess is, it won't dawn on them until deep into 2007, when the imminence of the 2008 elections concentrates their minds wonderfully. But by then, the United States will have spent another $100 billion or more, lost at least 1,000 more men and women killed, and forced the death of another 30,000 or more Iraqis. To avoid that, it's time for the foreign policy establishment—the graybeards, the think-tankers, and above all, Howard Dean and the Democratic Senate leaders—to catch up with public opinion on Iraq. Why wait another two years? Why not do now what we are going to do anyway then?
Over the past two weeks, I've had extended conversations with former diplomats and intelligence officers about Iraq. To a man (and woman), they were pessimistic, and blackly so. Over the past 18 months, one of them told me, the intelligence community put out two National Intelligence Estimates on Iraq and an additional major supplement, all of which told the White House the truth: that the war in Iraq is not going well, and is likely to get worse. So the administration knows the truth, at least if they choose to believe their spies and analysts. (Of course, the work product of the spies and analysts may get worse if the new bosses—John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and Porter Goss, the CIA director—have their way. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, spent his days penning happy-talk propaganda about how well the war was going, which got back to Secretary of State Colin Powell last year and almost, almost persuaded him that the war was winnable.) But, just as "intelligence and facts" were being fixed around policy in 2002, it appears that in 2005, the Bush administration is once again ignoring its intelligence community and choosing to portray the war as progressing along nicely.
Can the United States make a deal with the resistance now? The way do it would be through Amman, Jordan, where the king has myriad ties to the Sunni resistance, to the former Baathists, to tribal leaders, to Sunni businessmen, to the Iraqi clergy. If asked, King Abdullah of Jordan could host a peace conference along the lines of the Paris peace talks, where the United States and the Iraqi resistance would be the main players, and the fictional Iraqi government could attend if they were told, politely, to be quiet and listen.
Doing this would, admittedly, have a high degree of difficulty. First, it is not at all clear that the mostly Sunni resistance is ready to coalesce into a party ready for talks with the United States. Unlike Vietnam, there is no Hanoi-style central committee to run the show. "It may be too early for the resistance to come together like that," said one former U.S. intelligence official with wide-ranging experience in the Middle East. "But if they are, Amman would be the right place to try it." To make it work, the United States would have to induce a wide spectrum of the insurgent leadership to come into the peace-talks umbrella, from the Sunni tribal leaders to the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Association of Muslim Scholars to the former Baathist military men to the community-based street fighters in places like Mosul, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Tikrit and Fallujah (but, of course, not including the Zarqawi jihadists, who are irredeemable). So far, those few timid Sunnis who've agreed to join the Iraqi government or to take part in the constitution-writing exercise merely open themselves up to be branded as collaborators, so the coalition we end up talking with needs to include all but the most incorrigible Islamists or else it will shatter.
A second problem, even more serious, is that by announcing we are ready to talk, we may convince the resistance that they have everything to gain. "If we say we are ready to talk, then the insurgents may conclude that it is in their best interest to keep fighting," says another former U.S. intelligence official with years of experience with Iraq. That's true—but it is a chance we will have to take, since they will keep fighting anyway. This problem is the precise analog to the problem of setting a fixed date for a U.S. withdrawal, namely, that if we do so then the resistance will simply lie low until then and wait us out. That, too, does not seem to me to be a strong argument against our setting a date for a withdrawal. But, in terms of exit strategies, a political solution that is reached through an accommodation with the mostly Sunni resistance seems a better way to go than to imagine a precipitate withdrawal. Still, if the talks can't be organized, we have no choice but to cut and run—that is, to declare victory and get out.
Abandoning the current Iraqi government is not as big a deal it might seem. First of all, although few journalists treat it as such, it is a temporary, interim government anyway—expressly designed to disappear once a constitution is ratified and new elections held. Second, there is no one who believes that the Talabani-Jaafari regime in Baghdad would last a week without U.S. forces there to prop it up. When I asked a former U.S. official about comparisons between the Saigon and Baghdad regimes, he said without hesitation that the regime in Saigon in the 1960s and early 1970s was far better organized and more stable than the current Iraqi one. The South Vietnamese government commanded a massive army and police force, a national bureaucracy and provincial governments with a solid economic base; the current Iraqi one has none of that.
The fact that the United States has already tried a limited dialogue with the Iraqi resistance is not a great surprise. Such talks have been reported periodically since last year, and some elements in the CIA are undoubtedly pursuing tentative, olive branch-type talks with resistance leaders both directly and through intermediaries in Jordan, Syria, through former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and via Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, during Allawi's tenure, steps in this direction already took place. But without the imprimatur of the United States, none of these intermediaries can have any real credibility with the hard-core resistance, since Bush's recent statements ("We will settle for nothing less than victory!") don't allow any wiggle room for peace talks. Still, the Iraqi resistance knows (as does the U.S. intelligence community) that eventually Washington is going to have to make a deal, or just get out.
Back to the Vietnam analogy: In the end, it was a combination of continuing military stalemate and heavy losses, along with ever-angrier public opinion, that made it impossible to continue the war any longer. Despite the turn in the polls, at this stage in the Iraq war things aren't there yet. However, the steady drumbeat of U.S. casualties, hitting hard in small towns in red states like Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado and Texas, is fast souring public opinion. The dead are former high school track stars and Main Street businessmen from the U.S. Army reserves and the National Guard, and their deaths are making painful headlines and causing sorrowful memorial services from coast to coast, and ordinary Americans are getting the message. Bush, however, is not getting the message. Like the phalanx of American foreign policy Wise Men—the Clark Cliffords and Averill Harrimans of the 1960s—who read the riot act to LBJ after Tet, today's establishment, including the Democrats, has to demand that Bush start to reality in Iraq, and not to the fantasies that the neoconservatives sold him on in 2001.
Part II
An Iraqi Peace Process
Robert Dreyfuss
June 29, 2005
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.
Editor's note: This piece is the second in a two-part series. Read yesterday's article, The Vietnam Solution.
Getting out of Iraq, it seems, is a lot harder than going in.
In the previous installment of this two-part series, I suggested that the only way to get out of Iraq is to make a deal with the Iraqi resistance. That is a difficult task at best, implying as it does a 180-degree about-face in U.S. policy thus far. Naturally, there is little indication that the Bush administration is thinking about such a step, although from time to time there have been reports—such as those mentioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld this week—of exploratory talks between U.S. authorities and some resistance forces. To the extent that such talks are geared toward bringing insurgents into the current interim government, the administration is just extending the war.
It has not dawned on Washington yet that talking directly to the resistance (and bypassing the current Iraqi interim government) is the only real exit strategy—but that is what it will take. The United States can do it now, i.e., sometime in 2005, or will do it—with a far weaker hand, and after thousands more die—in 2007 or so. The war itself is lost—only the White House doesn’t know it yet.
The fact that Bush, Cheney, et al. aren’t calling for talks with the insurgents is bad enough. What’s worse is that the left, liberals and mainstream Democrats aren’t calling for such talks to begin. Many Democrats, even those who opposed the war, are now among those calling for the United States to stay in Iraq until victory, whatever that is—and no matter how unlikely it may be. Others, who are willing to consider an early exit strategy, victory or not, are held back by other fears. Many of them seem persuaded by the argument that whatever the merits of invading Iraqi in 2003, we are now engaged there and cannot abandon Iraq to the mess that we’ve made. They worry that if the United States withdraws from Iraq, the result will be an all-out civil war among three major ethnic and religious blocs. (It’s facile to argue that Iraq is already wracked by civil war; yes, there is widespread terrorism, a guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation forces, and periodic clashes between Sunnis and Shiites. But it hasn’t reached anything like civil war proportions yet, and it might: Things could get far, far worse.) Maybe it’s too late for the United States to be able to do anything to prevent the outbreak of such a catastrophic civil conflict. But because there is so much at stake, it’s worth a try.
So here is my take on how to do it.
First, we have to offer unconditional talks—like the Paris peace talks in 1972 with Hanoi—with the other side. We have to assemble all the intelligence we have about the insurgency, its leaders and its various factions to make sure that when we end up in talks we are, in fact, talking to the right people. In this case, the “right people” will be mostly Baathists, both civilian and military, along with tribal and clan leaders. There have been scattered reports about the emergence of a neo-Baath party in various Sunni strongholds, and there is at least one report that a rudimentary Baathist newspaper is being published clandestinely in Iraq. (See Juan Cole’s “Informed Comment” blog for more on this.) Some former senior Baathists, such as Naim Haddad, are said to be involved, and other former top Iraqi officials are widely believed to be coordinating parts of the resistance. Some of them are allegedly based in Syria, and some in Jordan, according to the Iraqi National Congress and other (more reliable) sources. Some are in Europe. But most lead forces rooted deep in Iraq. If King Abdullah of Jordan, backed by the United Nations, were to make an unconditional offer to host a gathering of vetted resistance leaders in Amman, in order to begin talks with the United States, it is likely that, over time, the majority of the secular (non-jihadist) resistance would send representatives.
Second, to demonstrate good faith in the talks, and to create room for a Sunni leadership to emerge openly, we must issue an amnesty that is as wide-ranging as possible. It should cover tens of thousands of former Baath and Iraqi government officials for pre-2003 charges, except for a handful of very senior Iraqi officials and those who can be convicted of atrocities with hard evidence. And it should cover resistance fighters, except for those terrorists convicted of atrocities against civilians. The United States needs to take the death penalty off the table for Saddam Hussein and other top officials, free some of the high-value prisoners who cannot be specifically linked to killings, and release most, if not all, of the more than 10,000 detainees held in Abu Ghraib and the two other prison camps in Iraq run by U.S. authorities. (Despite Iraq’s so-called sovereignty, the United States still runs these facilities.) Ironically, when the previous and current Iraqi interim governments sought similar, but smaller, amnesties, the United States moved to block them.
Third, with regard to the Kurds, the United States must make clear that an independent Kurdistan is out of the question. Period. The Kurds can exist happily in a federal Iraqi structure, but a land-locked, oil-free Kurdish state is not viable. Such a state would necessarily be expansionist, needing to absorb Iraq’s northern oil fields and key cities such as Kirkuk and Irbil. That, in turn, would be an intolerable provocation to the vast majority of Iraqis—Sunni and Shiite—and to Iraq’s neighbors, especially Turkey. The way to do this is for the United States to proclaim its commitment to a unitary Iraq, meanwhile telling the Kurds privately, but in no uncertain terms, that they must abandon any hope of declaring independence.
Fourth, the Shiites. What the United States has done since 2003 is to catapult to power two fundamentalist Shiite parties, SCIRI and Al Dawa, who do not represent the majority of Iraq’s Shiite population of 15 million. Anyone who understands Iraq knows that Iraqi Shiites, especially its urban contingent, are not religious fanatics. However, by supporting SCIRI and Al Dawa and their armed paramilitaries, first in exile as part of the Iraqi National Congress and then as puppets of the occupation, Washington has imposed a thuggish religious caste on a largely secular population. It’s not too late to reverse this. The Kurds are strongly secular, and many Sunnis have multiple ties to important Shiite figures. The confessional ethnic and religious partition of Iraq since 2003 is mostly of America’s doing, and to undo it the United States must create room for Kurdish leaders and Sunnis to make alliances with Shiites not loyal to the minority SCIRI-Dawa hard core. Simply halting the favoritism that the United States has shown toward the two Iran-backed Shiite parties would get the process underway.
These steps would all serve as confidence-building measures to allow U.S. talks with the resistance to move forward. The central demands of the resistance leaders will be for an American withdrawal and a fairly distributed share of power in Baghdad. Once the talks are underway, attacks on U.S. forces—from snipers, explosive devices, etc.—would halt almost overnight, isolating the Zarqawi-style terrorists whose brutality and fanaticism have already alienated many Sunni resistance leaders.
Most Iraqis know that the idea of partitioning Iraq—the “Yugoslav solution”—is not viable. An expansionist Kurdistan would be a formula for unending conflict. A rump Sunni state, also landlocked, would not be viable, either. And who would control the Iraqi capital? Control of Baghdad, a legendary Arab city and the very symbol of Iraq, would pit Sunnis against Shiites in an urban struggle that would make the division of Beirut look like a picnic. Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt would intervene militarily to support the Sunnis, and Iran would back the Shiites. It would be bloody in the extreme.
To start it all, the United States should support the idea of postponing the Iraqi constitutional process until a new constellation of powers emerged in Baghdad. (Most analysts believe that the constitution process cannot solve many of the thorny problems Iraq faces now anyway. And the three-province veto built into the process means that the three Kurdish provinces can shoot it down. Alternately, the two Sunni provinces and Baghdad can combine to block the constitution, something that looks more and more likely.) President Talabani and Prime Minister Jaafari can continue to run the puppet government until a real one is established, but no one should have any illusions that the Talabani-Jaafari regime has any legitimacy.
At a the conference in Amman that I’ve proposed, the United Nations should run the show. Europe, Russia and Iraq’s six neighbors can participate as observers. And the United States ought humbly to take its place on one side of the table, as it did during its retreat from Vietnam.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050628/the_vietnam_solution.php
The Vietnam Solution
Robert Dreyfuss
June 28, 2005
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.
Editor's note: This piece is the first in a two-part series. Read Part II: An Iraqi Peace Process .
Comparisons between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are coming fast and furious now, so let's consider one more. There is an apt parallel between the way we got out of Vietnam and the way that we will get out of Iraq—sooner or later.
Public opinion is turning sharply against the war, even though mainstream Democrats and most Republicans are mostly sticking with the victory-in-Iraq strategy. The conditions in Iraq and here at home are strikingly similar to those we saw surrounding Vietnam at the end of the Johnson administration. Those looking for an exit strategy, take note.
In Vietnam, by the spring of 1968, it was clear to just about everyone—including our intelligence agencies—that the war was lost. The Tet Offensive made it obvious that the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong weren't being defeated or decimated. The United States insisted that it would never talk directly or negotiate with the communist North and their allied partisans in South Vietnam, insisting that the quisling regime in Saigon was the lawful government. So the war dragged on for another five years, killing tens of thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese.
Finally, during 1972-1973, the United States did what it had previously said it wouldn't do: it essentially abandoned its puppet government in South Vietnam and began direct talks with the Vietnamese communists. The communists were magnanimous enough to give the United States a face-saving way out, rather than forcing Washington to admit that it was surrendering. And we left.
And today?
Once again, it is obvious to all—again, including our intelligence agencies—that the war in Iraq is lost. Once again, like the Tet Offensive, the recent wave of bloody assaults across Iraq has made it clear that the resistance, far from being in its "last throes," is not being defeated. Once again, a Nixon-like American administration is refusing to sue for peace. Though Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has admitted that U.S. authorities in Iraq have been conducting an on-again, off-again dialogue with some elements of the insurgency, it is not nearly enough. The United States is talking, but not negotiating—instead, it is trying to find a few disparate elements of the resistance in order to get them to support the U.S.-installed Iraqi interim government. Such take-it-or-leave-it dialogues are doomed to failure, since all they can produce are a few more Sunni quislings who will immediately become targets of the insurgency themselves. For the most part, the United States continues to insist that all potential olive branches from the resistance be delivered to the offices of the interim (and utterly illegitimate) ersatz government in the modern-day Saigon that is Baghdad.
It is perfectly clear what the United States has to do. It must abandon its deformed offspring in Baghdad, the hapless regime of Shiite fanatics and Kurdish warlords, and pray that it can establish direct talks with the people it is fighting.
There is no other exit strategy.
As in Vietnam, it's likely—given the bull-headedness of the administration—that the United States won't seek the sort of face-saving deal that it struck to end the war in Vietnam for years. My guess is, it won't dawn on them until deep into 2007, when the imminence of the 2008 elections concentrates their minds wonderfully. But by then, the United States will have spent another $100 billion or more, lost at least 1,000 more men and women killed, and forced the death of another 30,000 or more Iraqis. To avoid that, it's time for the foreign policy establishment—the graybeards, the think-tankers, and above all, Howard Dean and the Democratic Senate leaders—to catch up with public opinion on Iraq. Why wait another two years? Why not do now what we are going to do anyway then?
Over the past two weeks, I've had extended conversations with former diplomats and intelligence officers about Iraq. To a man (and woman), they were pessimistic, and blackly so. Over the past 18 months, one of them told me, the intelligence community put out two National Intelligence Estimates on Iraq and an additional major supplement, all of which told the White House the truth: that the war in Iraq is not going well, and is likely to get worse. So the administration knows the truth, at least if they choose to believe their spies and analysts. (Of course, the work product of the spies and analysts may get worse if the new bosses—John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and Porter Goss, the CIA director—have their way. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, spent his days penning happy-talk propaganda about how well the war was going, which got back to Secretary of State Colin Powell last year and almost, almost persuaded him that the war was winnable.) But, just as "intelligence and facts" were being fixed around policy in 2002, it appears that in 2005, the Bush administration is once again ignoring its intelligence community and choosing to portray the war as progressing along nicely.
Can the United States make a deal with the resistance now? The way do it would be through Amman, Jordan, where the king has myriad ties to the Sunni resistance, to the former Baathists, to tribal leaders, to Sunni businessmen, to the Iraqi clergy. If asked, King Abdullah of Jordan could host a peace conference along the lines of the Paris peace talks, where the United States and the Iraqi resistance would be the main players, and the fictional Iraqi government could attend if they were told, politely, to be quiet and listen.
Doing this would, admittedly, have a high degree of difficulty. First, it is not at all clear that the mostly Sunni resistance is ready to coalesce into a party ready for talks with the United States. Unlike Vietnam, there is no Hanoi-style central committee to run the show. "It may be too early for the resistance to come together like that," said one former U.S. intelligence official with wide-ranging experience in the Middle East. "But if they are, Amman would be the right place to try it." To make it work, the United States would have to induce a wide spectrum of the insurgent leadership to come into the peace-talks umbrella, from the Sunni tribal leaders to the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Association of Muslim Scholars to the former Baathist military men to the community-based street fighters in places like Mosul, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Tikrit and Fallujah (but, of course, not including the Zarqawi jihadists, who are irredeemable). So far, those few timid Sunnis who've agreed to join the Iraqi government or to take part in the constitution-writing exercise merely open themselves up to be branded as collaborators, so the coalition we end up talking with needs to include all but the most incorrigible Islamists or else it will shatter.
A second problem, even more serious, is that by announcing we are ready to talk, we may convince the resistance that they have everything to gain. "If we say we are ready to talk, then the insurgents may conclude that it is in their best interest to keep fighting," says another former U.S. intelligence official with years of experience with Iraq. That's true—but it is a chance we will have to take, since they will keep fighting anyway. This problem is the precise analog to the problem of setting a fixed date for a U.S. withdrawal, namely, that if we do so then the resistance will simply lie low until then and wait us out. That, too, does not seem to me to be a strong argument against our setting a date for a withdrawal. But, in terms of exit strategies, a political solution that is reached through an accommodation with the mostly Sunni resistance seems a better way to go than to imagine a precipitate withdrawal. Still, if the talks can't be organized, we have no choice but to cut and run—that is, to declare victory and get out.
Abandoning the current Iraqi government is not as big a deal it might seem. First of all, although few journalists treat it as such, it is a temporary, interim government anyway—expressly designed to disappear once a constitution is ratified and new elections held. Second, there is no one who believes that the Talabani-Jaafari regime in Baghdad would last a week without U.S. forces there to prop it up. When I asked a former U.S. official about comparisons between the Saigon and Baghdad regimes, he said without hesitation that the regime in Saigon in the 1960s and early 1970s was far better organized and more stable than the current Iraqi one. The South Vietnamese government commanded a massive army and police force, a national bureaucracy and provincial governments with a solid economic base; the current Iraqi one has none of that.
The fact that the United States has already tried a limited dialogue with the Iraqi resistance is not a great surprise. Such talks have been reported periodically since last year, and some elements in the CIA are undoubtedly pursuing tentative, olive branch-type talks with resistance leaders both directly and through intermediaries in Jordan, Syria, through former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and via Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, during Allawi's tenure, steps in this direction already took place. But without the imprimatur of the United States, none of these intermediaries can have any real credibility with the hard-core resistance, since Bush's recent statements ("We will settle for nothing less than victory!") don't allow any wiggle room for peace talks. Still, the Iraqi resistance knows (as does the U.S. intelligence community) that eventually Washington is going to have to make a deal, or just get out.
Back to the Vietnam analogy: In the end, it was a combination of continuing military stalemate and heavy losses, along with ever-angrier public opinion, that made it impossible to continue the war any longer. Despite the turn in the polls, at this stage in the Iraq war things aren't there yet. However, the steady drumbeat of U.S. casualties, hitting hard in small towns in red states like Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado and Texas, is fast souring public opinion. The dead are former high school track stars and Main Street businessmen from the U.S. Army reserves and the National Guard, and their deaths are making painful headlines and causing sorrowful memorial services from coast to coast, and ordinary Americans are getting the message. Bush, however, is not getting the message. Like the phalanx of American foreign policy Wise Men—the Clark Cliffords and Averill Harrimans of the 1960s—who read the riot act to LBJ after Tet, today's establishment, including the Democrats, has to demand that Bush start to reality in Iraq, and not to the fantasies that the neoconservatives sold him on in 2001.
Part II
An Iraqi Peace Process
Robert Dreyfuss
June 29, 2005
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.
Editor's note: This piece is the second in a two-part series. Read yesterday's article, The Vietnam Solution.
Getting out of Iraq, it seems, is a lot harder than going in.
In the previous installment of this two-part series, I suggested that the only way to get out of Iraq is to make a deal with the Iraqi resistance. That is a difficult task at best, implying as it does a 180-degree about-face in U.S. policy thus far. Naturally, there is little indication that the Bush administration is thinking about such a step, although from time to time there have been reports—such as those mentioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld this week—of exploratory talks between U.S. authorities and some resistance forces. To the extent that such talks are geared toward bringing insurgents into the current interim government, the administration is just extending the war.
It has not dawned on Washington yet that talking directly to the resistance (and bypassing the current Iraqi interim government) is the only real exit strategy—but that is what it will take. The United States can do it now, i.e., sometime in 2005, or will do it—with a far weaker hand, and after thousands more die—in 2007 or so. The war itself is lost—only the White House doesn’t know it yet.
The fact that Bush, Cheney, et al. aren’t calling for talks with the insurgents is bad enough. What’s worse is that the left, liberals and mainstream Democrats aren’t calling for such talks to begin. Many Democrats, even those who opposed the war, are now among those calling for the United States to stay in Iraq until victory, whatever that is—and no matter how unlikely it may be. Others, who are willing to consider an early exit strategy, victory or not, are held back by other fears. Many of them seem persuaded by the argument that whatever the merits of invading Iraqi in 2003, we are now engaged there and cannot abandon Iraq to the mess that we’ve made. They worry that if the United States withdraws from Iraq, the result will be an all-out civil war among three major ethnic and religious blocs. (It’s facile to argue that Iraq is already wracked by civil war; yes, there is widespread terrorism, a guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation forces, and periodic clashes between Sunnis and Shiites. But it hasn’t reached anything like civil war proportions yet, and it might: Things could get far, far worse.) Maybe it’s too late for the United States to be able to do anything to prevent the outbreak of such a catastrophic civil conflict. But because there is so much at stake, it’s worth a try.
So here is my take on how to do it.
First, we have to offer unconditional talks—like the Paris peace talks in 1972 with Hanoi—with the other side. We have to assemble all the intelligence we have about the insurgency, its leaders and its various factions to make sure that when we end up in talks we are, in fact, talking to the right people. In this case, the “right people” will be mostly Baathists, both civilian and military, along with tribal and clan leaders. There have been scattered reports about the emergence of a neo-Baath party in various Sunni strongholds, and there is at least one report that a rudimentary Baathist newspaper is being published clandestinely in Iraq. (See Juan Cole’s “Informed Comment” blog for more on this.) Some former senior Baathists, such as Naim Haddad, are said to be involved, and other former top Iraqi officials are widely believed to be coordinating parts of the resistance. Some of them are allegedly based in Syria, and some in Jordan, according to the Iraqi National Congress and other (more reliable) sources. Some are in Europe. But most lead forces rooted deep in Iraq. If King Abdullah of Jordan, backed by the United Nations, were to make an unconditional offer to host a gathering of vetted resistance leaders in Amman, in order to begin talks with the United States, it is likely that, over time, the majority of the secular (non-jihadist) resistance would send representatives.
Second, to demonstrate good faith in the talks, and to create room for a Sunni leadership to emerge openly, we must issue an amnesty that is as wide-ranging as possible. It should cover tens of thousands of former Baath and Iraqi government officials for pre-2003 charges, except for a handful of very senior Iraqi officials and those who can be convicted of atrocities with hard evidence. And it should cover resistance fighters, except for those terrorists convicted of atrocities against civilians. The United States needs to take the death penalty off the table for Saddam Hussein and other top officials, free some of the high-value prisoners who cannot be specifically linked to killings, and release most, if not all, of the more than 10,000 detainees held in Abu Ghraib and the two other prison camps in Iraq run by U.S. authorities. (Despite Iraq’s so-called sovereignty, the United States still runs these facilities.) Ironically, when the previous and current Iraqi interim governments sought similar, but smaller, amnesties, the United States moved to block them.
Third, with regard to the Kurds, the United States must make clear that an independent Kurdistan is out of the question. Period. The Kurds can exist happily in a federal Iraqi structure, but a land-locked, oil-free Kurdish state is not viable. Such a state would necessarily be expansionist, needing to absorb Iraq’s northern oil fields and key cities such as Kirkuk and Irbil. That, in turn, would be an intolerable provocation to the vast majority of Iraqis—Sunni and Shiite—and to Iraq’s neighbors, especially Turkey. The way to do this is for the United States to proclaim its commitment to a unitary Iraq, meanwhile telling the Kurds privately, but in no uncertain terms, that they must abandon any hope of declaring independence.
Fourth, the Shiites. What the United States has done since 2003 is to catapult to power two fundamentalist Shiite parties, SCIRI and Al Dawa, who do not represent the majority of Iraq’s Shiite population of 15 million. Anyone who understands Iraq knows that Iraqi Shiites, especially its urban contingent, are not religious fanatics. However, by supporting SCIRI and Al Dawa and their armed paramilitaries, first in exile as part of the Iraqi National Congress and then as puppets of the occupation, Washington has imposed a thuggish religious caste on a largely secular population. It’s not too late to reverse this. The Kurds are strongly secular, and many Sunnis have multiple ties to important Shiite figures. The confessional ethnic and religious partition of Iraq since 2003 is mostly of America’s doing, and to undo it the United States must create room for Kurdish leaders and Sunnis to make alliances with Shiites not loyal to the minority SCIRI-Dawa hard core. Simply halting the favoritism that the United States has shown toward the two Iran-backed Shiite parties would get the process underway.
These steps would all serve as confidence-building measures to allow U.S. talks with the resistance to move forward. The central demands of the resistance leaders will be for an American withdrawal and a fairly distributed share of power in Baghdad. Once the talks are underway, attacks on U.S. forces—from snipers, explosive devices, etc.—would halt almost overnight, isolating the Zarqawi-style terrorists whose brutality and fanaticism have already alienated many Sunni resistance leaders.
Most Iraqis know that the idea of partitioning Iraq—the “Yugoslav solution”—is not viable. An expansionist Kurdistan would be a formula for unending conflict. A rump Sunni state, also landlocked, would not be viable, either. And who would control the Iraqi capital? Control of Baghdad, a legendary Arab city and the very symbol of Iraq, would pit Sunnis against Shiites in an urban struggle that would make the division of Beirut look like a picnic. Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt would intervene militarily to support the Sunnis, and Iran would back the Shiites. It would be bloody in the extreme.
To start it all, the United States should support the idea of postponing the Iraqi constitutional process until a new constellation of powers emerged in Baghdad. (Most analysts believe that the constitution process cannot solve many of the thorny problems Iraq faces now anyway. And the three-province veto built into the process means that the three Kurdish provinces can shoot it down. Alternately, the two Sunni provinces and Baghdad can combine to block the constitution, something that looks more and more likely.) President Talabani and Prime Minister Jaafari can continue to run the puppet government until a real one is established, but no one should have any illusions that the Talabani-Jaafari regime has any legitimacy.
At a the conference in Amman that I’ve proposed, the United Nations should run the show. Europe, Russia and Iraq’s six neighbors can participate as observers. And the United States ought humbly to take its place on one side of the table, as it did during its retreat from Vietnam.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050628/the_vietnam_solution.php
