Thoughts?

[LawVol]

The risks of staying vs. leaving Iraq
BY: Barry R. Posen, Boston Globe
04/19/2007


Supporters of the war in Iraq, including most recently Senator John McCain, tell us that a series of awful consequences will certainly result if US forces disengage. This argument is offered with great confidence. Yet the costs of disengagement are less certain than is often argued, and the United States can reduce the risks that these costs will arise -- and limit their consequences if they do.

Supporters of the war predict six major disasters if US forces withdraw:

Al Qaeda will take over the country. This risk is now non existent. Al Qaeda's support is strongest among Sunnis, whom the Shia outnumber by three to one. The Shia control the military, the police, and numerous militias. The United States has ramped up its operations in Baghdad in part to stop the Shia from cleansing the Sunnis from Baghdad. There will be no caliphate in Baghdad, whether Americans stay or leave.

Iraq will become a new Afghanistan, to Al Qaeda's benefit. The most extreme among the Sunni insurgents may indeed be committed to international jihad, and they may continue to work clandestinely out of Iraq, as they do today. But these jihadis will not be comfortable. Iraqi Shi'ites despise them, and even many Sunnis oppose them. US intelligence will indeed have to keep an eye on them, and special operations forces may occasionally need to sneak back into Iraq to strike at them. These are capabilities the United States has spent billions building up since Sept. 11.

The current civil war (or wars) will escalate. Fighting may indeed intensify after a US disengagement. To come to an understanding of how wealth and power in Iraq will be shared, the political forces there must measure their relative capacity and will. The United States now stands in the way of such a measurement, and the US presence delegitimizes any outcome. The promise of a certain US withdrawal date may clear the heads of some Iraqi politicians ; a negotiated settlement could start to look better to them than an escalation of fighting.

Genocide. The humanitarian consequences of this intensified fighting could be grave. But genocide happens against unarmed populations; all groups in Iraq are heavily armed. Still, the violent ejection of minorities from particular areas is likely. Instead of convincing minorities to stay in neighborhoods where they are vulnerable to murder by local majorities, the United States can help people resettle in parts of Iraq that are safer.

If the civil war intensifies, regional powers will rush in. This too is already under way, but escalation into a giant civil war is not in anyone's interest. Syria, Iran, and Turkey have Kurdish minorities which may become restive during such a war. The Saudis would likely prefer that their Sunni Arab friends make a deal, rather than wage a fight that they might lose. Even Iran, whose Shia co-religionists stand to win such a war, faces risks. The Arab Shia are not one big happy family; they kill each other in Iraq today. Most Iraqi Shia think of themselves as Arabs; heavy-handed Iranian intervention may energize their nationalist opposition.

The United States can engage diplomatically to remind the regional players of their interest in stabilizing Iraq. If the United States leaves Iraq deliberately, and under its own power, it still has cards to play.

The worst case. The civil war escalates; outsiders back their friends; their friends begin to lose, so the war escalates to become a regional conflagration. Could happen, but one should not exaggerate the military capabilities of any of the local players. They are all heavily armed, but conventional warfare is not the strong suit of any of the regional actors, with perhaps the exception of Turkey. The Saudi forces, though equipped with modern weapons, are almost surely helpless without help from western contractors. Iran's air forces are obsolete and highly vulnerable to American air attack. Moreover, Saudi Arabia and Iran are one-crop countries; each depends on oil facilities that are vulnerable to attack by the other. A kind of Mutual Assured Destruction should deter both from risking general war.

Four years of experience strongly suggests that the costs to the United States of persisting in Iraq will be significant. Whatever success is achieved there, the end result will not be the stable liberal democratic vision of the war's supporters. Rather, after lots more killing, exhaustion may set in, partial deals may be struck, and factions may retreat to tend their own battered gardens.

Call this what you will, but it cannot justify the costs incurred. And this outcome will not differ significantly from what will occur if the United States begins to disengage now.

Barry R. Posen is director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[Danny]

Do you still have the link to this article? You should post it. Thanks.

[LawVol]

The article was pasted in its entirety, but here's the link:

http://aimpoints.hq.af.mil/display.cfm?id=18122

[Merv Benson]

What were the consequences of our retreat from Mogadishu? Al Qaeda viewed it as a victory and gave it reason to believe they could force a retreat from the middle east if they attacked the US directly. I think they would view a retreat from Iraq as a beginning of a retreat from the middle east that could be turned into a rout with additional attacks on the US.

This may be speculation, but it is based on what al Qaeda's leaders have said about the other retreats and the one they expect in Iraq.

[goesh]

I recall reading a jihadist-type blog a couple of years ago and I'll never forget the respondent who said he repeatedly watched the movie Blackhawk Down because it gave him so much satisfaction seeing Americans killed. It was a good propoganda piece for them to use minus the production costs.

[John T. Fishel]

In the thread on Edward Luttwak's Harpers article we have briefly discussed academics, practitioners, and academics who also have experience as practitioners. A look at Barry Posen's CV puts him in the "pure" academic camp, in my book, despite some "think tank" experience. His article shows all the hallmarks of the classical realist IR school. Now realism does provide the single best explanatory and predictive model but it is not the be all and end all. Posen's article demonstrates the falacy of too close an adherance to clasical realism. It - and he - assumes that the adversary is a rational actor who is either a state or behaves like a state. Classical realism fails in both explanation and prediction when the adversary is pursuing irrational goals in an instrumentally rational way. It also fails when the state does not behave as a single actor following its interests - behaves like multiple actors following diverse and conflicting interests and when the actor is not a state...
As the discussion has pointed out, AQ and other jihadists are likely to interpret a US pullout as they did the Marine barracks in Lebanon or Black Hawk Down in Somalia - great victories do embolden!