The war that dare not speak its name

The war that dare not speak its name
By Jacob Weisberg
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: September 28 2006 03:00 | Last updated: September 28 2006 03:00


The biggest problem that the US faces is the war it is losing in Iraq. The most shocking aspect of the national election it is holding in six weeks is that the candidates are not discussing what to do about it.

The reasons for ignoring the elephant in the room are apparent. Republicans in tight races cannot easily disown President George W. Bush's policies, but they may be able to change the subject. Focusing on what to do now highlights the catastrophe Mr Bush has created and his lack of any plausible strategy for fixing it. Republican politicians would rather frame the campaign around local issues or the larger question of security, under which Mr Bush hopes to subsume Iraq.

Democratic candidates avoid talking about the future in Iraq based on a different calculation. For them, Mr Bush's past deceptions and mistakes are winning issues. But they share a problem with Republicans, which is that they do not have a clue what to do next either. Some bandy aboutthe term "redeployment", the favoured euphemism for withdrawal. Butfor Democrats, any explicit talk about a pull-out raises the old spectre that they are defeatists, weaklings and generally squishy on terrorism.

Outside the confines of the campaign - and inside various think-tanks, magazines and foreign policy circles - one finds an assortment of provocative ideas about Iraq policy. Somewhere to the right of Mr Bush, William Kristol and his fellow neo-cons argue that we can still win, but only if we send more troops to secure the country. Their plan has the advantage of honesty about how little the Iraqi military forces that America has been trying to train are able to accomplish without us. It has the disadvantage of being utterly unrealistic about America's remaining military, financial and political capabilities.

Others who still imagine that some sort of American victory is possible include Andrew Krepinevich, Jr, a promoter of the so-called oil-spot approach to counter-insurgency. This theory, which envisages creating secure enclaves for Iraqi civilians instead of playing "whack-a-mole" with terrorists, is what the Pentagon has theoretically been trying to do in Iraq for at least the past year. It forms the basis for the "clear, hold and build" concept at the core of the National Security Council's November 2005 National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. Mr Krepinevich's plan is supposed to allow for a gradual drawdown in troops by relying on Iraq forces to do the "hold" part of the job. It also anticipates taking more than a decade to succeed and runs up the challenge of maintaining political support for a long war of attrition.

Closer to the centre we find a variety of interesting, complicated, lesser-evil solutions. The most compelling of these is the case for a decentralised, federalised Iraq advanced by Leslie Gelb and Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware. Mr Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, proposes that we put our weight behind a more radical version of decentralisation than the one embodied in the current Iraqi constitution. This would mean an Iraq divided into three parts: autonomous Kurdish, Shia and Sunni regions, with a weak central government to divvy up oil revenues and serve common interests. Mr Gelb's plan envisages withdrawing most of our troops by the end of 2008, while leaving a "small but effective residual force" in Iraq indefinitely. In a recent book entitled The End of Iraq, Peter Galbraith, a former ambassador to Croatia and advocate for the Kurds, puts forth a more drastic version of this. Mr Galbraith calls for the partition of Iraq into three separate countries, a democratic Kurdistan, a Shia theocracy in the south and a God-only-knows regime in the Sunni triangle. But Mr Galbraith trips over the same insoluble problem Mr Gelb does: Iraq's populations are mixed up, especially in Mosul, Kirkuk and Baghdad. Any form of ethnic division would mean an exchange of populations, large-scale communal violence and the endless tensions that followed partition in India and Israel.

Moving toward the liberal side, Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official, has been arguing for a "strategic redeployment", or staged withdrawal of nearly all US forces by the end of 2007. Mr Korb wants to get out of Iraq in large part to save the beleaguered volunteer army. He calls his withdrawal scheme "the best among bad options" and argues that the Bush administration "has left us no better choice".

Further to the left is the 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who wants America and Britain to withdraw all their troops by June, 2007 and begin making reparation payments. Mr McGovern's plan does not begin to come to grips with what might happen after a precipitous departure - civil war, genocide and a wider regional conflict. But it does have the advantage of candour. As with Vietnam, Mr McGovern wants us to admit we have lost and come home.

Reviewing these proposed strategies suggests another, less partisan reason why House and Senate candidates seem so disengaged from the question of what to do in Iraq. The best that America's leading foreign policy thinkers have been able to come up with is a grim choice among forms of failure. In a country of optimists, no politician wants to deliver that message.

The writer is editor of Slate.com