by Patrick Lang (bio below)
Senator Joe Biden has “stepped up to the plate” to give us an outline of what American plans in Iraq should be over the next year and a half. As a leading contender for the Democratic Party nomination for president it is suitable that he should do so.
In this Washington Post OP/Ed piece, he lays out a strategy which is not based on conditionality, that is, he does not say, as the administration says, that we will not withdraw from Iraq until the Iraqis indicate that they are ready for us to leave, and that we agree that they are ready.
No, he says that there are “X” number of specific but difficult things to be done as part of a deliberate program of withdrawal, and that then we will be gone. Perhaps we will leave a “small” force in the country, perhaps we will leave a somewhat larger force in an adjoining country, perhaps we will leave a large force somewhere “over the horizon” in the Indian Ocean area, but essentially we will be gone from Iraq in 18 months to two years.
The difficulties he foresees are all real and daunting:
- The internal politics of this state made up of many nations remain very divided. The reported “feelers” from Iraqi insurgents to members of the government are, nevertheless, encouraging, and point to a situation in which the Iraqi elements in the revolt might be “split off” from the international Jihadi elements.
- The new Iraqi forces have yet to prove themselves capable of holding population centers cleared of insurgents for them by American forces. The Iraqi forces also have to prove themselves capable of recruiting and operating forces made up of Sunni Arabs. The technique of using Kurdish or Shia Arab troops to police and defend Sunni Arab towns against Sunni Arab guerrillas and terrorists is a “loser.”
- Biden’s belief that Iraq’s neighbors all share an interest in a united and stable Iraq seems baseless to me. This may be true of Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but it is a “shaky” presumption when applied to Turkey, Iran and Syria.
Continued below …
As long as Syria is under severe pressure from the US in the direction of regime change, there will be a considerable faction in the government in Damascus that favors making or allowing trouble in Iraq as a distraction for the US.
Turkey has irredentist inclinations in the north of Iraq. Turkey has never fully accepted the “Arabness” of Mosul or Kirkuk, much less the idea that only Iraq has “interests” in these places and the oil fields in the area. The treatment of the Turkmen minority of Iraq is a continuing excuse for Ankara’s aversion to acceptance of Iraqi re-distribution of lands and towns in the north. Turkey’s aversion to the consolidation of Kurdish political institutions is well known and will undoubtedly not disappear.
Iran has been relatively quiescent in the period of our occupation of Iraq. They see our time in the country as temporary and likely to lead to a weakening of the power of all the Sunni Arab states in the region. The last Iranian election did not lead (as the Bush Administration expected) to a Western inclined youth revolution. Instead, it brought to power a hard-line Islamic Revolutionary government headed by a man who calls for our withdrawal and for the destruction of our major non-Islamic ally, Israel. Do we imagine that the Iranians are going to stand idly by while a government inclined to the US consolidates power in Baghdad?
Are these obstacles and difficulties so great as to make Biden’s outline “moot?” I think not. We are now in Iraq. We are not in some other situation which we would have preferred. It is time for the “loyal opposition” to oppose. Biden’s plan should provide an “umbrella” of thought under which to do so.
Pat Lang
Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
I’m glad Biden is beginning to push. I think he should be more ambitious. 18 months is too long.
I’d like to see us start to draw down immediately after the new parliament is seated and (hopefully) ratifies the constitution. I hope they tinker with it before ratifying it, because in its current form I don’t think it is very suitable. But that’s for them to decide.
I’d like to see us substantially out of Iraq by the end of summer. The problem of staying once the government is seated is that it will undermine the perceived legitimacy of the new government. If Iraq is going to hold together at all these next round of elections have to have good participation from all groups, be seen as largely clean elections, and then the new government needs to put some distance between themselves and the US and British troops. The longer we stay the uglier the breakup will be.
It is a very good sign the worm has turned, when even the unrelenting Dem hawks are re-positioning. Finally, it looks as if the dialogue has moved beyond “digging in our heels”.
I just read Biden’s Op-Ed and there are so many holes in it. For instance:
Hello! That is just one short paragraph but look at what he is saying. He is suggesting that we can/must bring all three factions together – in six months! Not possible. It isn’t like we and they haven’t tried over the last year plus and have got no where. What does Biden suggest is going to change that? The man is playing air guitar with no background music.
And bolster reconstruction efforts? I think stopping the insurgency has something to do with that and there is no light at the end of the tunnel that’s going to happen. Especially in six months. Plus from what I have read a lot of the reconstruction money is gone – likely disappeared up a column of Halliburton smoke. So Biden wants reconstruction – – Show me The Money.
And then accelerate the training of Iraqi forces? According to General William E. Odom (Retired), he feels that we are basically training and equipping people for an inevitable civil war. The more we train the worse it will be. Not to mention the infiltration of insurgents we have already seen.
Sorry Joe but you are sounding an awful lot like what we have already been hearing from BushCo for over three years now – Same tune, Different Air Guitar, No real music.
I can’t disagree with Patrick Lang that Biden’s “Plan” provides an “umbrella” of thought under which to oppose us remaining in Iraq – but that umbrella is so full of holes it is laughable. Personally I think Murtha’s “umbrella” – Concern For the Troops – is much more sincere and resonates more genuinely with the public.
I didn’t mean to suggest Biden is on target, merely the fact that talk of withdrawal is gaining some momentum. Biden will always be behind the curve on Iraq, but his latest comments illustrate that the dialogue is moving from a discussion of if to considering when- even amongst the hawks.
This was a HUGE step for Biden. Tiny by our standards, but huge for him.
This is impressive — both Biden’s piece and Pat’s analysis of it.
Good for Joe! Good for Pat! We’re starting to get somewhere.
P.S. I learned a new word from Pat:
Turkey has irredentist inclinations …
Good one!
Susan you are impersonating Pat again.
I’m hopelessly absentminded. Forgive me all!
Incentives Analysis (there is actually a course on this at Harvard Business School) reveals a disturbing reality.
Despite the rhetoric, the incentives of the Shia are to NOT stand up. With Americans, instead of Shia, taking bullets from Sunnis, the Shia have every incentive to delay setting up an effective force. It reminds one of the old adage about the ’67 war…the rest of the Arabs were willing to fight the Israelis right down to the last Egyptian soldier. The answer is some kind of tough love, making them stand up because they have no other choice, while avoiding the Lebanonization (militia-ization?) of Iraq.
The military is breaking, but it has strong incentives to avoid anything that looks like defeat or retreat.
The politicians on both sides are the worst. THeir incentive is to game the elections, not necessarily to do the right thing, whatever the heck that is.
My guess is that the establishment is looking at a 2.5 year pullout tarted up to look like a lot of it is happening this year, before the midterms. What they will actually do is pulldown the extra force sent in to manage the elections, plus a bit more as part of a normal troop rotation, Of course they will PR this maneuver as the beginning of a broad pullout. But with replacements going back in right after the election.
The feelers from the secular Sunni may have some relationship to the fact that they can’t possibly have a high level of comfort being involuntarily allied with the Islamic fanatics. So there is hope.
Among the many interesting things that Richard Holbrooke said to Charlie Rose the other night was that reducing troop numbers will NOT do the trick for the American people.
Holbrooke contends that the number that matters now to the American public is the number of casualties.
He said Americans won’t know from 140,000 to 90,000. But they do know 2,100.
The main thing, he said, is to get the casualty numbers down.
Interesting. But can the losses be stopped? Even if we do an urban withdrawal, can’t they just follow us, and lob mortars into our bases?
I actually just logged back into Boo because I realise, in catching up on my reading that lots of other people, like Digby, have posited the false withdrawal hypothesis. I apologise fo the waste of bandwidth. I wonder if there is some metric to look at to ascertain whether the pulldown is real or not, say by focussing on certain specialty units or pieces of equipment?
We probably need to analyze this in terms of the media.
The American people will hear the headlines about the “false” withdrawals.
But, also — if Holbrooke is correct — on all of their local TV and radio and newspaper news, they’ll continue to see the stories of the local soldiers whose bodies have been returned home.
Every time I see a story about a local soldier’s death — or that silent showing of photographs on PBS Newshour (which rips me up more than if their stories were told) — it cuts through me.
Rips thru me too. I look at the ages. When I see 19, I just want to vomit. Does one know enough of life to commit to such a project at 19? Does one know enough to commit one’s life to an elective war vs a war of national survival? Maybe these kids are a lot more mature than i was at 19. People used to say i was 40 the day i was born. Can’t see informed consent at 19.
That was I! God almighty …
Bush is about to get into the act too, according to this LA Times story:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-withdraw26nov26,0,7710697,full.story?coll=la-hom
e-headlines
In September, there was testimony from the generals that there were about 700 Iraqis at Level One readiness. Now Bush is going to declare them the best little army in Mesopotamia. Explaining how that is the case should do wonders for his credibility.
Anyway, the horse (discussion of withdrawal) is definitely out of the barn and won’t go back inside.
I think the key politically here as Bush tries to backpedal on Iraq will be to ask the simple question:
“What was it all for anyway?”
No amount of spin will hide the mess that’s been created there. The American people will now be watching much more closely to see if this experiment in nation building was a success. As Susan pointed out the dead and wounded will continue to come home for quite a while. After that the car bombings, unrest and ultimate civil war will rage on.
The Dems simply have to ask: Why? … for that question Bush and his minion can never give the true answer.
What the rest of the world says here
Biden must push for withdrawal performance metrics that will trigger funding shutoffs if violated.
I’d be interested to know how many people here at BooTrib believe there will be a significant drawdown of US troops in Iraq in advance of next year’s elections here in the US. (By significant drawdown I mean a drawdown of many more soldiers than the 20,000 or so extra who recently deployed because of the elections.)
Joe Biden’s remarks on this subject seem perhaps more designed to provoke such a policy than they seem rooted in any reality-based appraisal of this Bush/Cheney regime.
As someone remarked above, I’d also be interested to know what leverage, either diplomatic or otherwise, Biden would apply to “forge a sustainable political compromise” between the different main groups in Iraq. What incentives might help persuade all major parties that cooperation will take them farther than civil war and the fight over the country’s resources?
I agree with Pat Lang that Biden’s remarks may provide a schematic of sorts upon which further discussion, analysis and problem solving strategies might coalesce, but in order for this to occur and be productive, the flaws and incomplete parts of the scheme need to be revealed and addressed responsibly as soon as they become evident. Failing to do this will just throw the whole plan into the realm of the samekind of unreality and delusion in which the Bush regime operates. In short, any plans based on fundamental flaws in the analysis are doomed to remain “inoperative”.
agreeing with Biden, and it is not unrealistic, in my opinion, that there will be some accelerated activity to facilitate privatization and covertization, as well as more troops getting furloughs before being redeployed to Syria and elsewhere, depending on the rate and direction of crusade expansion.
Even some Republicans, I think, are beginning to understand the value of presenting policies in terms more palatable to the domestic audience.
speeches from the well echoing Biden’s perspectives, but, even though many Repubs may see the advantage of presenting such views in their electoral campaigns, it is the Bush regime psychopaths, led by Cheney, who are the arbiters on this strategy one way or the other, and the rank and file Repubs are almost as afraid of crossing them as the Dems are.
I’ll eat my hat if the US troop presence falls below 130,000 by the end of next year.
I’m going to be a total cynic here.
The Iraq war was proposed by the neocons back in the 90’s as a foreign policy to improve our position in the Middle East, but it has always been about nothing but US domestic politics as implemented by Bush/Rove. By Rove to pull Bush’s bacon out of the fire after the colossal failure of 9/11 and advance the Repub party at all costs. By Bush as some sort of warped “stick it to your dad/create a legacy” head game. They will change course as soon as these agendas are threatened. The last thing they are concerned about is what really happens to Iraq or even if it ultimately ended up advancing US interests in the region.
I’m predicting the WH will do a 180 on Iraq at least six months before the 2006 elections. I’m not sure what the spin will be (it will be along the lines of it’s not our fault, we are not responsible), we need to watch for them to float a variety of spin on the water and they will use whatever gains the most traction to protect their interests. Bush/Rove and Cheney (the real neocon true believer) found each other to be the best tools to reach their goals at first, but the alliance will probably fall apart as first Bush throws Cheney overboard and then has his brain removed by criminal indictment. What little foreign policy is left or involved will amount to little more than a nervous twitch from Ms. Rice and a generous heaping of whatever spin is in play.
The end result is that we will abandon Iraq to whatever comes next. The players in Iraq no doubt realize this is a likely result and are already hedging their bets by consolidating their positions internally and forming alliances with the regional powers. If we’re lucky we’ll see Iran score big with pseudo control of the region (much like Syria/Lebanon), Turkey avoid internal trouble and Syria use the mess to reassert control of Lebanon. If we are unlucky we will see the beginning of tremendous turmoil in the whole region which will spread in one fashion or another to the rest of the world. (Serious war in the region will tank the world economy and may provide the terrorist access to enough people, money, and weapons to make events like 9/11 all too common)
The discussion about withdrawal is over and we’re now into implementation. It’s time for the Congress to start acting as an independent branch of government working for the country rather than as willing tool of the executive branch. If we can get the Dems to stick together and get enough crossover moderate Repubs on board we may be able to drive foreign policy and the budget to correct this mistake as much as we can. The Congress (lead by the Dems) must continue to drive this agenda. Quite frankly, we need to stop the war in Iraq by pulling the military out, but we cannot abandon Iraq afterward. We have to stand up in the UN and say we got rid of a dictator but inflicted tremendous harm on Iraq and others and we are sorry, that we are obligated to right our wrongs as best we can and help the Iraq people rebuild their country and their lives. Then we ask for UN help.
OK, I stopped being a cynic in the last paragraph and started being a dreamer, but it’s real to expect the WH to screw up the withdrawal as badly as they have screwed up everything else so the first goal is to pull them out of the driver’s seat and have somebody else at the wheel. We need to figure out how to do that and where we’re going. I don’t want the neocons turning the ship of state into a clown car anymore.