The trouble is that the Iraq Study Group is ultimately providing false hope for an extended war. Its assessment is appropriately bleak. For example, “Key Shia and Kurdish leaders,” the commission finds, “have little commitment to national reconciliation.” Now, given that these leaders comprise the Iraqi government, one might think that would lead to the conclusion that Iraq is doomed to an intensifying sectarian conflict, and unless one believes it is in the United States’ interest to pick a side in someone else’s civil war, that means it’s time to go home. Instead, the commission, despite its own better judgment in its report, is gearing up for what Hamilton called “one last chance at making Iraq work.” It’s hard to see what’s responsible about this.
Yes. Sure. But…there is one problem. America’s wise-men (plus Near Eastern expert Sandra Day O’Connor) are scared to death. Our Muslim allies are scared to death. The Israelis are scared to death. And things are bad now, but they seem manageable. That is, things seem manageable until you start looking at things like troop rotations, equipment maintenence, projected costs for the Veteran’s Administration, and public opinion. In the end, the Iraq Study Group got it right before they got it wrong.
Current U.S. policy is not working, as the level of violence in Iraq is rising and the government is not advancing national reconciliation. Making no changes in policy would simply delay the day of reckoning at a high cost.
The Iraq Study Group offers a false hope by providing changes that purport to do more than ‘delay the day of reckoning’. Yet, it reality, they do not offer anything more than delay.
More Ackerman:
The commission quotes a senior U.S. general as saying that the Iraqis “still do not know what kind of country they want to have.” The bottom line, the commission says rather aptly, is “there are many armed groups within Iraq, and very little will to lay down arms.” Put differently, each side believes it has more to gain through war than through negotiation.
The commission is right about this. Where it goes wrong is in its recommendation that we should be actively supporting an Iraqi political process that is hostage to such dysfunction and sectarian chaos. After all, if none of the relevant actors within the Iraqi government or in the political structure at large is interested in peace, pressuring them to just make nice with one another isn’t going to work.
Correctumundo.
I don’t want be a downer, but someone needs to talk sense to (waning) power, here. Individual Iraqis may want peace but, collectively, they do not want peace. And if our aim is peace, then it makes little sense for us to be training and arming the Shi’a in a country devolved into all out sectarian conflict. It might seem all abstract and antiseptic when you look at it from afar, but Baghdad is a city that suffers mortar attacks at night only to wake up to eighty to a hundred headless, tortured corpses each morning. This is not something we want to arbitrate. And our leadership lacks all the requisite good will and curiosity to have any chance as peacemakers.
We really need to get a grip. I know that the Establishment is terrified. They should be terrified. I’m terrified. But I know a losing strategy when I see one. I don’t want any more soldiers to die just to put off the day of reckoning. Let that day come soon. And we can finally take a reckoning of our leadership and our Establishment…and what they have wrought, and begin to fashion a better day.
