Can Iraq be Fixed?
Politicians dance around this question, but here's the reality: It will take U.S. troops years of work, and success is hardly a sure bet
The United States is also wearing out the tools it needs to win. The U.S. military is straining under the burden of keeping 130,000 troops in Iraq, even as commanders in many sectors say they cannot afford reductions. U.S. money is running out, too. The $21 billion in reconstruction aid from Congress is almost all in the process of being spent. And few on Capitol Hill are eager to come up with more, even though Iraq's needs--$100 billion to build a modern infrastructure, according to World Bank estimates--far outstrip its own oil revenues.
When U.S. troops first headed toward Baghdad in the spring of 2003, the Bush administration offered soaring rhetoric about forging a model democracy that would help transform the Middle East. That dream might not be dead yet, but the Bush administration has been gradually defining down success. "The standard is not going to be 'no violence,'" Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, tells U.S. News. "What you can hope for is an Iraq where there are effective security forces that are controlling and taking responsibility for security throughout Iraq and where the marriage of political leadership and security forces is sufficient to deal with insurgents and terrorists so that it does not interfere with the operations of government." But even this more tempered definition of victory might not be achievable--leading some to say the United States should just back off. "I argue it is easier to work with the reality rather than try to put back together a country that for its entire 80-year history has been a failure," says Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat who has advised Iraq's Kurdish leaders. He advocates allowing the Kurds to go the final mile to form their own independent state in the north, while tolerating a Shiite Muslim theocracy in the south. But even Galbraith, author of the new book The End of Iraq, concedes there is no easy way to draw the lines. "There is no solution to Baghdad," he says, "other than this awful civil war."
Baghdad, home to nearly a third of Iraq's population, is the key to Iraq. "It's the largest Sunni city, the largest Shiite city, and the largest Kurdish city," says Andrew Krepinevich, at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. "It's a variation on that old phrase about New York: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere."
Not all the news in Iraq is bad. The unity government has held together so far and is beginning to tackle some thorny issues. Oil exports have hit a post-invasion high, while electricity in Baghdad is finally on the upswing. The insurgency appears to have been at least temporarily weakened in the wake of Zarqawi's death. Even U.S. casualties dipped in July. In the view of the White House, this leaves sectarian violence as the major obstacle. "If we can get beyond that challenge," says a senior administration official in Washington, "we feel pretty good about the progress we're making on other things."
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