President Bush meets with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Thursday in an air of crisis.
Our position in Iraq has continued to deteriorate. The civil war has worsened. The Sunni insurgency in Anbar is as strong as ever. Maliki demonstrates almost daily his dependence on the anti-American thug Moqtada al-Sadr, who has suspended (for now) his participation in the government in protest of the Bush meeting. Maliki’s government continues to be corrupt and ineffectual. Meanwhile, here at home support for the war steadily sags, and, contrary to the conventional wisdom, it is conceivable that Democrats will agitate to cut off funding for the war should we continue on our downward slide in Iraq.
At this crucial moment, Washington has turned to a bout of wishful thinking dressed up by a bipartisan commission and the presence of Bush-family fixer James A. Baker III. The Jim Baker–Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group is reportedly going to recommend that the Bush administration talk to Syria and Iran as a way to ease our trouble in Iraq. This idea is less realpolitik than childishness. Syria and Iran have no incentive to help us in Iraq, where they are fomenting the violence. So long as we are losing there, we have zero leverage. The only possible reason they could have to cooperate, or pretend to cooperate, with us would be to get us to surrender our strategic position in the region entirely by implicitly blessing a Syrian reoccupation of Lebanon, or Iranian possession of a nuclear weapon.
But such is the political and media momentum behind the Baker-Hamilton commission, and the weakened state of a President Bush fresh from his electoral “thumping,” that Bush will be hard-pressed to ignore the commission’s recommendations entirely. He may at least have to engage in some form of window-dressing talks with Syria and Iran — knowing it will go nowhere — at the same time he plays up, for his purposes, the commission’s likely recommendation that we not cut and run from Iraq. This will provide Bush what might be his last chance to create progress on the ground in Iraq before domestic political support for the war collapses.
The linchpin in Iraq continues to be Baghdad. Our latest attempt to secure the city predictably failed for want of U.S. troops. Again and again in Iraq, our troops have cleared areas of insurgents, only to have them return when the troops vacate the areas or hand them over to incompetent Iraqi security forces. This is what just happened in Baghdad. Bush must send a substantial number of additional troops to Baghdad in a bid to restore a semblance of order to the city.
It is said that we don’t have the troops to send. No less a personage than General Abizaid has said any surge could only be temporary. There is no doubt that extending rotations and sending troops back into Iraq for the third time would be a severe strain on the military. Nor can there be any doubt that trying to fight two post-9/11 wars with a pre-9/11-sized military was a historic mistake, for which President Bush will be judged harshly. But if there is any cause that calls for straining the military, it is an attempt to keep from losing a war. A loss in Iraq would lead to a drastic worsening of our position in a strategically crucial part of the world, undermine our prestige worldwide, and perhaps lead to the creation of terrorist safe havens.
It may turn out that more troops won’t make a difference, that Iraq is on an inexorable slide toward chaos. But, so far, U.S. troops have made a difference wherever they have been deployed within Iraq. It is often said that there isn’t a military solution in Iraq, only a political one. This is partly correct. Long-term stability will require some sort of deal and reconciliation between the Shiites and the Sunnis. The government will have to purge itself of its criminal and radical elements. And Shiite militias will have to disarm.
But the security situation and Iraqi politics have a dynamic relationship, one influencing the other. As the violence has worsened, the politics of the country have worsened too, with Sadr gaining influence at the expense of Grand Ayatollah Sistani. If we can stabilize Baghdad by thwarting the Sunni insurgency, Maliki might get some breathing space and the Shiite radicals might find their support weakening. That would create the conditions for disarming the militias, which only get stronger as Sunni insurgents continue their sickening campaign of mayhem.
We have had to engage in a constant process of downgrading our expectations in Iraq. Now a representative government that is stable enough to survive and is not an arm of Iran looks like an outcome fervently to be hoped for. Bush has to act decisively while he still can, lest he be forced into merely managing our defeat.
