Playing a Real Bad Hand
No one could envy President Bush in trying to sell his new plan for Iraq. He has lost the confidence of the nation, the Congress, and an increasing number of his own Republican Party members, for the inept way we allowed the military triumph in Iraq to disintegrate into an ignominious failure. For the president to admit having made errors in Iraq is fine, but it is also galling because many of the mistakes made there were foreseen and warned of; the warnings fell on utterly deaf ears.
Fundamentally, the Bush administration failed to heed the cautionary guidance given before the war that Iraq's long-simmering sectarian tensions would boil over once we attempted to plant democracy in that hard and alien land. Conceivably, with a strong hand at the center in a post-Saddam Hussein federal system, "democracy" would not have led, as it has, to Shiites with a 60 percent-plus majority, with newly disenfranchised Sunnis provoked to violence to protect what they could of their formerly dominant position.
Egged on by Iran, Shiite leaders in Baghdad have broken virtually every promise. Oil revenues have not been divided to give the Sunnis a stake. Reconciliation after centuries of Sunni oppression became a lost cause when Shiite militias were given a free hand. Moqtada al-Sadr, the young firebrand Shiite, was allowed to deploy his Mahdi Army in Baghdad while Shiites in the police force formed death squads and engaged in the systematic killings of Sunnis. At the same time, by our precipitate decision to disband the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi police, and the Baath Party, we further heightened Sunnis' fears-then provided them with the arms and men to organize their insurgency. Under that cover, al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Musab al-Zarqawi, blew up the Golden Mosque in Samara, one of the most holy Shiite places, which provoked a feverish new wave of reciprocal attacks on Sunnis.
Beating the odds. American forces-even the thousands more the president plans to dispatch now-cannot stop this sectarian war. The Iraqis must do it. The new Bush plan relies heavily on Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to start keeping his promises for a change. Maliki will have to show that Shiite criminals will be dealt with just as Sunni terrorists are and push through a fair sharing of oil money. He must demonstrate once and for all that he understands that an integral part of "democracy" is protecting minority rights.
Sunnis, for their part, must understand that their centuries-old domination of Iraq cannot be restored but that there is a place for them in a liberated Iraq. The Kurds, with longer experience in government, must show patience as their Arab brothers wrestle with these issues. But nothing good can happen without security, which is the sine qua non for success.
The big question now is whether security can be won by deploying some 22,000 troops, focused primarily on the killing ground of Baghdad. Too little, too late? Maybe, although the new military leadership under Gen. David Petraeus offers the best chance that we have.
Yes, the odds are forbidding. But any evaluation of Bush's plan must also look to the consequences of the alternatives-sticking to the same benighted path or pulling out. An American withdrawal would expose 27 million Iraqis to a vicious maelstrom of violence, an explosion of hatreds that will run like a wildfire through the Middle East. Iran would move to take over southern Iraq and its oil reserves and expand its influence in the region, especially on Lebanon and Syria. A resurgent Iran would menace all the Sunni Arab countries. Moderates across the Muslim world would be undermined, extremists empowered. Terrorists could establish a base in Iraq to attack us just as they did from Afghanistan, but this time with major economic resources-nearly 10 percent of the world's known oil reserves are in Iraq. This would give them an operating base not on the periphery of the Middle East but in its heart. The Kurds, meanwhile, could declare their independence, attracting millions of their brethren in Syria and Iraq, risking a war with Turkey.
How the American venture in Iraq fares will determine the direction of the global war on terrorism. Arab governments are convinced that Iran is banking on a forced U.S. withdrawal because so much of the public and so many in Congress don't fully understand the ramifications of a defeat in Iraq. Many are justly skeptical that Iraqis can end the sectarian violence after four years of failure. But President Bush is right about the stakes. We cannot just turn our backs on Iraq and hope for the best.
Because of the terrible mismanagement of the war, alas, the president will have a tough time persuading the American people and the Congress that they should trust his new team finally to get it right. The fundamentals have not changed. Americans will still have to do the fighting and the dying if Iraq's leaders continue their pernicious ways of feuding and failing.
This story appears in the January 22, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.