When faith-based policy bumps up against reality--as it has in Iraq--where does it turn? To reality-based policy? Or, desperately, to an analogy-based policy that tries to cram reality into the terms of a superficially similar historical precedent--even if it is a precedent of failure? In the case of Iraq evidently the latter, argues Stephen Biddle, in "Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006).
[I]f the debate in Washington is Vietnam redux, the war in Iraq is not. The current struggle is not a Maoist "people's war" of national liberation; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics. Although it is being fought at low intensity [sic] for now, it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices.
Unfortunately, many of the policies dominating the debate are ill adapted to the war being fought. Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse. Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it. Washington must stop shifting the responsibility for the country's security to others and instead threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in order to force them to come to a durable compromise. Only once an agreement is reached should Washington consider devolving significant military power and authority to local forces.
Biddle thinks the present strategy--"as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down"--is a ticket to disaster. Unfortunately, Biddle's suggestion that US troops maintain martial law until such time as "an agreement is reached" between Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish factions seems no more promising. But first, more of Biddle's analysis:
Communal civil wars, in contrast [to Maoist people's wars], feature opposing subnational groups divided along ethnic or sectarian lines; they are not about universal class interests or nationalist passions. In such situations, even the government is typically an instrument of one communal group, and its opponents champion the rights of their subgroup over those of others. These conflicts do not revolve around ideas, because no pool of uncommitted citizens is waiting to be swayed by ideology. (Albanian Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis knew whose side they were on.) The fight is about group survival, not about the superiority of one party's ideology or one side's ability to deliver better governance.
The underlying dynamic of many communal wars is a security problem driven by mutual fear. Especially in states lacking strong central governments, communal groups worry that other groups with historical grievances will try to settle scores. The stakes can be existential, and genocide is a real possibility. Ideologues or nationalists can also be brutal toward their enemies -- Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge come to mind -- but in communal conflicts the risk of mass slaughter is especially high.
Whereas the Vietnam War was a Maoist people's war, Iraq is a communal civil war. This can be seen in the pattern of violence in Iraq, which is strongly correlated with communal affiliation. The four provinces that make up the country's Sunni heartland account for fully 85 percent of all insurgent attacks; Iraq's other 14 provinces, where almost 60 percent of the Iraqi population lives, account for only 15 percent of the violence. The overwhelming majority of the insurgents in Iraq are indigenous Sunnis, and the small minority who are non-Iraqi members of al Qaeda or its affiliates are able to operate only because Iraqi Sunnis provide them with safe houses, intelligence, and supplies. Much of the violence is aimed at the Iraqi police and military, which recruit disproportionately from among Shiites and Kurds. And most suicide car bombings are directed at Shiite neighborhoods, especially in ethnically mixed areas such as Baghdad, Diyala, or northern Babil, where Sunni bombers have relatively easy access to non-Sunni targets.
...
The biggest problem with treating Iraq like Vietnam is Iraqization -- the main component of the current U.S. military strategy. In a people's war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense because it undermines the nationalist component of insurgent resistance, improves the quality of local intelligence, and boosts troop strength. But in a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire. Iraq's Sunnis perceive the "national" army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids. And they have a point: in a communal conflict, the only effective units are the ones that do not intermingle communal enemies....
The solution? Biddle writes:
the United States must bring more pressure to bear on the parties in the constitutional negotiations. And the strongest pressure available is military: the United States must threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to coerce them to negotiate. Washington should use the prospect of a U.S.-trained and U.S.-supported Shiite-Kurdish force to compel the Sunnis to come to the negotiating table. At the same time, in order to get the Shiites and the Kurds to negotiate too, it should threaten either to withdraw prematurely, a move that would throw the country into disarray, or to back the Sunnis.
Hmm. Threaten the Shi'tes and Kurds with "premature" withdrawal (three years into this)? Haven't the Shi'ites got friends to the north, in Iran? --but Biddle never mentions Iran, nor for that matter any of the other powers in the region. That's why Biddle proposes an alternative threat to the Shi'ites: play ball or we'll back the Sunnis. How's that?
Washington should consider trying to accelerate the emergence of a credible Sunni leadership by endorsing a wider amnesty for former Baathists and insurgents and learning to tolerate nepotistic tribal leaders. Washington should also avoid setting any more arbitrary deadlines for democratization...
Wider amnesty for former Ba'athists...forget democracy for now...and what of Sadaam and his henchmen? ("...or else we'll restore Sadaam?") Well, as Biddle confesses:
Putting such a program in place would not be easy. It would deny President Bush the chance to offer restless Americans an early troop withdrawal, replace a Manichaean narrative featuring evil insurgents and a noble government with a complicated story of multiparty interethnic intrigue, and require that Washington be willing to shift its loyalties in the conflict according to the parties' readiness to negotiate. Explaining these changes to U.S. voters would be a challenge. Washington would have to recalibrate its dealings with Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds with great precision, making sure to neither unduly frighten nor unduly reassure any of the groups. Even the most adroit diplomacy could fail if the Iraqis do not grasp the strategic logic of their situation or if a strong and sensible Sunni political leadership does not emerge. And the failure to reach a stable ethnic compromise soon could strain the U.S. military beyond its breaking point.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons to think such a plan could work. Most important, the underlying interests of all local parties would be far better served by a constitutional compromise than by an all-out war.
Biddle's solution, a "constitutional compromise" with "ironclad power-sharing arrangements protecting all parties," would surely be preferrable to all-out war. But so would a forcable partition of Iraq, or the installation of a (relatively benign) dictatorship, or any number of other, less tidy solutions. The list of communal civil wars that have been choked off by "ironclad power-sharing" deals is not a lengthy one. More typically, one side prevails and imposes its will on the losers, and any ensuing "constitutional compromise" is the victor's to design. It seems that faith-based foreign policy leads to messes that reality-based policy is powerless to fix.
[Update: The occupying US command is reportedly trying to purge the Iraqi police of Shi'ite militants while at the same time delivering an infusion of Sunni trainees. Biddle's observation:
[T]he harder the United States works to integrate Sunnis into the security forces, the less effective those forces are likely to become. The inclusion of Sunnis will inevitably entail penetration by insurgents, and it will be difficult to establish trust between members of mixed units whose respective ethnic groups are at one another's throats. Segregating Sunnis in their own battalions is no solution either. Doing so would merely strengthen all sides simultaneously by providing each with direct U.S. assistance and could trigger an unstable, unofficial partition of the country into separate Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish enclaves, each defended by its own military force.
No wonder that even the Panglossian Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Gen. Peter Pace, was ready to confess on Meet the Press (Mar. 5) that "anything can happen," and that--although things are "going well" rather than badly--he "wouldn’t put a great big smiley face on it."]
[Further update: In the LA Times (Mar. 7), the US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalizad, states bluntly: ""We have opened the Pandora's box and the question is, what is the way forward?" (A great big smiley face for Pandora's box, anyone?)]
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