Michael O'Hanlon Joins The Argument Against Withdraw From Iraq On A Timetable

Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, whose article on Iraq in the NYT in July, 2007, "A War We Might Just Win." , was pivotal in reducing pressure on the Bush administration to end the surge before it could work, have now weighed in again on the topic of Iraq. Fresh from a recent trip, and joined in their article this time by Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, they see the "timeline" approach and a large-scale withdraw of U.S. troops by 2010 as risking all the gains that have been made in Iraq to date. They explain why the security gains have occurred - the surge - and the tenuousness of those gains in the absence of a significant presence of U.S. troops this morning in the op-ed pages of the NYT. Key to maintaining the peace for the next few years is the fact that it is the U.S. military presence that is trusted by all sides and whose presence both dampens the thoughts of trying to take advantage of one's neighbours and largely insures the validity of the next two rounds of scheduled elections at the provincial and national level.

This from Mr. O'Hanlon, Pollack and Biddle:

ALMOST everyone now agrees there has been great progress in Iraq. The question is what to do about it.

Democrats led by Barack Obama want to take a peace dividend and withdraw all combat brigades by May 2010. Republicans like John McCain want to keep troops in Iraq until conditions on the ground signal the time is ripe. And now the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has endorsed a timetable for withdrawal, though he seems to favor a somewhat slower pace than the Democrats propose.

If the Iraqi government tells us to leave, we should go. But this would be a bad deal for both Iraqis and Americans. Iraq is indeed much more secure than it was two years ago, thus it seems safe to suggest timing goals for significant withdrawals. Yet having recently returned from a research trip to Iraq, we are convinced that a total withdrawal of combat troops any time soon would be unwise. . . .

Violence in Iraq declined because the key combatants were either defeated in the field or agreed to cease-fires. These cease-fires were not accidents or temporary breathing spells. They were a systematic response to a new strategic landscape created by 2006’s sectarian bloodletting, the American surge last summer, the defeat of Al Qaeda’s forces in Anbar Province and the decision by battered Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias that fighting no longer served their interests. The underlying strategic rationale behind these stand-downs gives reason to believe that they are sustainable rather than ephemeral.

But this does not make the peace inherently stable. Wary former combatants are constantly on the lookout for signs — real or imagined — that rivals mean to take advantage of them. The cease-fires, moreover, are extremely decentralized: more than 200 tribal and regional groups have reached individual agreements with the United States to stand down from fighting; in time, some will inevitably test the waters to see what they can get away with, or will misinterpret innocent behavior from neighbors as threatening and retaliate.

A leader of one group of Sunni tribesmen who had switched allegiances and took up arms against Al Qaeda made this point at a meeting we had at Salman Pak, a military base south of Baghdad. He told us he was worried about encroachment onto his territory “from several directions” — apparently meaning he didn’t trust his Sunni neighbors any more than he trusted his traditional Shiite rivals. Left on their own, minor local flashpoints could easily spiral into a renewal of widespread violence.

For now, the American combat presence plays a critical role in enforcing the terms of these cease-fire deals and damping escalatory incentives from spoiler violence. Iraqi government security forces, while they demonstrated improved effectiveness this spring in places like Basra and the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, cannot yet play this role themselves.

In part this is because they are still not trusted by all cease-fire participants. To many Sunnis in particular, a government military commanded by a Shiite regime is not yet trustworthy enough to be tolerated without an American presence to keep it honest. To some extent, this is changing: for example, the National Police have replaced three-fourths of its leaders over the last year or so and now have more than a proportionate share of Sunnis in command positions.

But full reconciliation will take time. On our recent trip, we heard several Sunni sheiks — one was a brother of Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, the Americans’ staunchest ally in Anbar until he was assassinated last fall — talk about their newfound regard for Prime Minister Maliki. However, some also discussed their convictions that most other Shiite politicians were “bums” at best and agents for Iran at worst. American troops, by contrast, are generally trusted, if not necessarily loved.

Troop loyalty is not the only concern. The Iraqi security forces are simply not yet able to operate effectively without United States air support, combat advisers and help with logistics and intelligence. When Iraqi units with no American embeds tried to take the port city of Basra last spring, they were turned back in mass confusion, and it required United States combat help to save the day.

American combat troops are also critical for political progress in Iraq. There has been real political change in Iraq — but less from the grand bargains imagined by many Americans and more through thousands of informal, local decisions by war-weary groups and individuals opting to put the past behind them. The pressure from this “bottom up” process has also translated into top-down progress. Over the past year the Iraqis have passed critical amnesty, de-Baathification and provincial-powers laws, as well as a federal budget — all of which had been previously seen as hopelessly deadlocked.

But to capitalize on this progress the next two rounds of elections — provincial races this fall and a national contest next year — must go smoothly and be seen as legitimate. The elections will create losers as well as winners, breeding a grave risk of instability in an immature polity. American combat troops are needed to protect polling places from terrorism, and even more important, from voter intimidation, fraud and the perception that the results were rigged.

Over time, the need for United States contributions will diminish. The longer violence stays down, the more Iraqis’ expectations of one another will improve. Groups of former insurgents being gradually integrated into the Iraqi security forces should become more trusting of the government. And as their technical proficiency and self-sufficiency increase, the need for partnership with American combat units will decrease.

Ideally, progress will also be made on such key issues as the resettlement of four million people now displaced by violence, the equitable sharing of Iraq’s future oil revenues, and a resolution of disputed internal borders in places like the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. But this won’t happen overnight: a stable post-election environment cannot possibly be established until after next year’s elections. If current trends continue, major reductions in American troop levels will be possible — but to begin large-scale drawdowns, much less to complete them, before mid-2010 is to run serious risks.

What can be done, then? One possible model is provided by Anbar Province, which has gone from being Iraq’s most violent region in 2006 to arguably its best today. In 2007, the United States had 15 maneuver battalions in Anbar. Today it has six — far fewer, but nothing close to zero. Several hundred marines remain as advisers with Anbar’s two Iraqi Army divisions; Americans still do some joint patrols with Iraqi forces (if fewer than before), and many Americans work with provincial police and border-security forces. Anbar offers a model for large — though gradual and partial — withdrawals across Iraq that can preserve stability in the process.

American experiences in Bosnia and Kosovo are also instructive. A key to stability in the Balkans has been the presence of outside peacekeepers to enforce the deals that ended the fighting. Yet the number of peacekeeping troops had fallen by about 50 percent four years after the cease-fires were reached in both cases. The Balkan peacekeeping job was easier in some important ways, as it was built on a formal peace treaty among just a few major parties, whereas Iraq’s newfound partial stability is built on scores of local cease-fires signed in 2006 and ’07. It seems clear that withdrawing troops faster from Iraq than we did from Bosnia and Kosovo could be very risky.

Still, the Balkan experience suggests a serious prospect for major withdrawals — perhaps on the order of half the American troop presence — in the next two to three years. Thereafter, if current trends continue, reductions might proceed roughly on the Balkan schedule — with barely 10 percent of the original force expected to be remaining a decade after the end of major hostilities.

Why, then, does Prime Minister Maliki want an earlier withdrawal of United States combat forces? Part of the answer may lie in simple overconfidence: as Americans may recall from the spring of 2003, victory can easily be declared too soon. Another factor, however, surely lies in Iraqi domestic politics. With elections looming, Mr. Maliki and other members of the current government hope to demonstrate that they brought about the end of the occupation and the return to normality during their term.

Mr. Maliki in particular has sought to position himself as the symbol of Iraqi sovereignty, and surely hopes to supplant his young rival Moktada al-Sadr, the standard-bearer for Iraqi nationalism. What better way to do this than to champion a timetable for an American withdrawal, especially when the security forces that would replace the Americans are under his command and his Shiite faction enjoys the preponderance of power in Iraq?

It would be tragic, however, to allow American haste and Iraqi political opportunism to undermine a real chance for long-term stability in Iraq. Perhaps an early withdrawal would succeed, and today’s system of cease-fires would survive a rapid United States drawdown. But much important work remains to be done in Iraq. And to believe that it can be done without the longer presence of a significant number of American combat troops requires a degree of optimism that could well end up making “Mission Accomplished” look as premature today as it was in 2003.

Read the entire article. It is unfortunate that PM Maliki chose such a pivotal time to act with hubris and overconfidence.

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Michael O'Hanlon - Assessing Success In Iraq

At the American Prospect, the editors ask "how important was the surge?" This after Obama who, in order to suggest that his judgement in opposing the surge was not as grossly poor as in reality it was, has shown the even worse judgment in denigrating the importance of the surge, crediting the lions share of the success to the Anbar Awakening and Sadr's cease fire, as if both were unrelated to the surge. I've answered this question several times, but Michael O'Hanlon has the most articulate and accurate answer to date.

What was the most important factor in the dramatic turnaround in Iraq over the past year or so (a period during which violence rates have declined by at least 75 percent and about half of key legislative goals have been partially or fully satisfied, even if much remains to be done?) There is room for some debate in this matter, to be sure, but only so much. It seems incontrovertible to me that several major factors, including certainly the surge, were hugely important--and also synergistically important, in that the sum of effects was much greater than the sum of the parts.

Certainly the Sunni Anbar Awakening gets high marks. It was the first thing to happen in the last two years of major note. It brought much of the core of the insurgency into alliance with the United States and Iraqi government, and over time it spread to the Baghdad belts and increasingly to the north of Iraq.

However, it was the United States that organized the Awakening tribes into a coherent military and policing effort.

It was the United States, with Iraqi Security Forces, that cleared cities like Ramadi -- and unlike in past efforts, kept forces there afterwards to preserve the stability and keep extremists like al-Qaeda in Iraq out of the places from which they had been driven. It was the United States that sufficiently intimidated Muqtada al-Sadr into realizing a ceasefire better served his interests than would a renewal of battle. It was American and Iraqi security forces that, in larger numbers than before and with new operational guidelines and tactics, built blast barriers near markets, put up concrete dividers along sectarian fault lines in Baghdad, created joint security stations and started walking the streets to protect the Iraqi population, and conducted raids on insurgent safehouses and weapons caches at two to three times the rate of previous years (largely due to improved intelligence made possible by a safer, friendler, better protected population). And through all these combined efforts, it was largely the United States that was able to figure out which Iraqi commanders needed to be purged -- and that then put pressure on the Iraqi government to replace them.

On balance, many things were important, but the surge and the associated emphasis on better protection for the Iraqi population were crucial -- and absolutely necessary to the huge progress that has been made.

Yeah. What he said.

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Michael O'Hanlon's Suicide Hotline

The Democrats’ mantra of defeat in Iraq, their refusal to acknowledge the reality wrought by the surge, and their continued attempt to surrender legislatively has senior Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon trying to lead his Democrats back from the brink of Copperhead suicide. O’Hanlon long ago saw the changing reality in Iraq and understood why victory there was of great importance. Now he is trying to find some way for his Democrats to extricate themselves from their complete embrace of defeat. He suggests that the Dems adopt what seems more than a bit shameless historical revisionism.

Writing in the USA Today, O’Hanlon muses

Rarely in U.S. history has a political party diagnosed a major failure in the country's approach to a crucial issue of the day, led a national referendum on the failing policy, forced a change in that policy that led to major substantive benefits for the nation — and then categorically refused to take any credit whatsoever for doing so.

O’Hanlon posits the tenuous position that it was only the Democratic takeover of Congress that led Bush to adopt the surge strategy. He suggests the Democrats rely on his suggested narrative to now claim credit for the success in Iraq. Shameless? - you bet. Welcome? - very much so if they would now, as he also suggests, begin playing an affirmative role in making Iraq a success rather than their current course of "rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory" by attempting "to mandate an end" to operations in Iraq.

We now have a realistic chance, not of victory, but of what my fellow Brookings scholar Ken Pollack and I call sustainable stability. Violence rates have dropped by half to two-thirds in the course of 2007, the lowest level in years. Iraq is still very unstable, but it has a chance.

Despite this progress, many Democrats are inclined to provide Bush the roughly $12 billion a month he requests for Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008 only if the money is devoted narrowly to counterterrorism and bringing home U.S. troops. This is a mistake.

On strategic grounds, it appears that we now have an opportunity to salvage something significant in Iraq. Given sectarian tensions and brittle Iraqi institutions, this almost surely requires us to execute a gradual drawdown of U.S. forces there rather than an abrupt departure. In political terms, it would be rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory to mandate an end to an operation, however unpopular, just when it is showing its first signs of progress.

Democrats should change course. Rather than demand an end to the operation no matter what, they should continue to keep up the pressure for positive results in Iraq. They can retain their anti-war stance, emphasizing that their default position is that U.S. troops should soon come home absent continued major progress. . . .

Read the article here. O’Hanlon makes a series of recommendations for attaching strings to funding that would allow for the Democrats to maintain an anti-war patina while playing a positive role in making Iraq a success. It’s a reasonable argument and one certainly in the best interests of America's national security and foreign policy. But it is one with little, if any, chance of being implemented.

While O’Hanlon has grasped the reality of Iraq, he has not grasped the reality that he is fundamentally different from his neo-liberal compatriots. O’Hanlon is an anachronism – a classical liberal. His Democratic compatriots are almost entirely neo-liberals who have ejected classical liberalism’s defining quality – intellectual honesty - in favor of the calculus of partisan power. And they long seen defining Iraq as an abject failure a the key to that calculus. With intellectual honesty no longer at issue, facts, reality, and indeed, any interest beyond attainment of partisan power are of no importance.

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