The rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq will not be easily improved, but to do so we must have a different plan from what currently exists. This message was delivered by a panel discussion of distinguished foreign policy experts held at the Center for American Progress.
Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus and Board Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress, participated in the panel. Morton Halperin, also a Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress, moderated. The panel was introduced by Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta.
In his introduction, Podesta highlighted the current security and reconstruction difficulties in Iraq, drawing particular attention to the recent upsurge in violence. Criticizing the “failure to plan a post-invasion success strategy,” he said that “mistakes in Iraq have served to strengthen our adversaries and make us less safe.” Those sentiments were supported by Halperin, who said “we’re hearing less about success and more about avoiding catastrophe.”
The question of what to do next was picked up by the panelists. Gelb found the administration’s current plan unacceptable. “It’s a policy that can’t win,” he said. “It can only lose slowly.” He cited the decision to end economic reconstruction funding at the end of this year, restrictions on democracy-building nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the decreased street presence of U.S. troops as evidence of a strategy by President Bush to not “lose on his watch.”
This assessment was echoed by Korb, who drew attention to Iraq’s negative impact on broader national security goals. “We’re not at war with terrorism,” he said. “Terrorism is a tactic= We’re at war with radical jihadists, and if you stay in Iraq you’re going to make it harder to win the war against radical jihadism.” Using Iran and Afghanistan as prime examples, Korb argued that we cannot afford to have so many military resources invested in Iraq. The U.S. presence in Iraq is actually counterproductive, he said, because we are providing ready recruiting incentives for Al Qaeda. Furthermore, the quality of people in the army is declining; manpower is stressed because there is “tremendous pressure on recruiters to meet their quotas in an unpopular war.”
Korb advocated strategic redeployment, which entails a set date for withdrawal and a redistribution of our military in the Middle East to better protect America. He said that a timetable will “give the Iraqis an incentive to do what they need to do” in making political arrangements and securing the country. A commitment to leave would also, according to Korb, “diffuse part of the insurgency” since “a lot of people are fighting our troops there because they don’t believe that we’re going to go.”
Gelb favored a U.S. role in crafting a better political solution before withdrawing troops. In building Iraqi anti-insurgent capability, he said, “the answer is not more arms and better training. The answer is a government that troops will fight and die for. The key is a political settlement.” It is his hope that by being a strong and active leader, the United States can help broker a decentralized power-sharing arrangement to accommodate Iraq’s diverse factions. Iraq, Gelb said, will “end up partitioned and decentralized either by war or by negotiations. We owe it to ourselves — we owe it to Iraqis — to figure out a compromise.”
The key to both positions were the questions of how effective an incentive a definitive date for U.S. withdrawal would be, and how active a role the United States should take in shaping the Iraqi government. Both panelists agreed that a new approach is badly needed if we are to have any chance of success. “Almost anything you do in Iraq,” Gelb said, “is going to be a long shot.” But no matter what the prospects, Korb emphasized that we must make hard decisions based on “what’s best for the United States and our security.”
