Iraq goals without illusions

Barack Obama vows to pull all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq by mid-2010.  John McCain promises victory in Iraq by inauguration day 2013, permitting those troops' departure.  Both approaches to Iraq are, in some sense, self-referential, with America the central reference -- in one case, to wash America's hands of a grinding and globally detested war that should never have been launched; in the other, to demonstrate to the rest of the world American grit and perseverance in freedom's march.  Neither has spoken about what he expects Iraq to become as the far-off superpower recalibrates its policy toward the country.  And politically they'd probably be crazy to.

But somebody should be  asking that question. 

Now, full disclosure is in order.  I'm unabashedly among those who strenuously opposed Washington's march to war in 2002-03, insisted an unprovoked invasion would be illegal and turn the world against the U.S., and believed it would trigger a Lebanon-like shattering of Iraq.  And so it was.  But it was a lot easier to know not to get into a war than it is to know how to get out of it.  While a prompt repudiation of George Bush's war may help speedily resuscitate America's global standing, it might prove disastrous for Iraq.  Is there any soft landing for war-torn Iraq that can reasonably accommodate the fierce urgency of getting out now?

Ellen Laipson, now president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, suggests that there is--but not so fast.  In a new paper for The Century Foundation, America and the Emerging Iraqi Reality: New Goals, No Illusions, she argues that the first step is for Washington to "accept more modest outcomes for the U.S. investment there."  There can be no guarantee that Iraq will be more peaceful, less sectarian, or more pro-American than it was when the United States attacked the Baathist state in 2003.  Even with a grim determination to stay the course as many years as necessary, Iraq in the end is likely to be more violent, less secular, and more anti-American than when shock and awe began.  Get used to it -- reality #1.

Washington's temptation has been to prescribe new remedies to Iraqis when its previous prescriptions failed.  We demand dozens of benchmarks as conditions for a continued military presence most Iraqis resent (even if many fear its precipitous withdrawal), and offer unsolicited advice about their country's partition.  Enough is enough, warns Laipson.  "The time for social engineering is over.  Events in Iraq will be determined by powerful currents within Iraqi society and politics that are less and less susceptible to outside manipulation or influence."

Laipson exudes the Washington insider's confidence that, regardless of their public positions and "rhetorically effective sound bites" now, the presidential candidates will surely "privately understand one cannot change course too abruptly."   But if this means that the candidates don't mean to do what they say, she may be proved wrong--and I hope she is. 

Obama, for one, has won his party's nomination based in large part on his antiwar commitment.  He can hardly disillusion his enthusiastic base, pry continued war appropriations from an antiwar Congress, or win renewal of his party's majorities there if the United States is still militarily engaged in Iraq at the 2010 midterm elections. 

McCain would have more flexibility to wait it out, since that's what he's committed to do, but at the price of unremitting rancor with both the Congress and the democratic world.  Moreover, McCain faces the greater risk from what may be the one enduring positive legacy of the Bush belligerency: the possible rooting of democratic practice in this fractious Arab country. Reality #2 is that Iraqis don't like having foreign troops occupying their country (even if our troops are more professional and more fair-minded than Iraq's own)--and in free elections, politicians play to public passions.

Laipson notes that even the current Iraqi parliament, controlled by sectarian parties, "has become a more serious institution with rigorous debates over serious issues" (though those debates don't often translate into agreed solutions).  And she reminds us that Iraq's provincial and parliamentary elections this fall and next year could turn on demands to send our soldiers packing, which would be awkward for the Arizonan. 

Certainly we have had a warning in the explosion of Iraqi outrage, even among members of the coalition backing the pliable Nuri al-Maliki, at the Bush administration's highly detailed plans for locking in a U.S. military involvement in their country unrestrained by Iraqi law or leadership.  And Laipson warns too that the outsized U.S. embassy that a tone-deaf Bush administration is building has, not to put too fine a point on it, a "neo-colonial" odor.

Laipson calls for a carefully paced disentanglement and U.S.-Iraqi relations as "normal" as Washington has with any other country in this quite abnormal region.  She is starting a useful debate about that pace and what may constitute normalcy.  And we should assume that what candidates are telling voters this year will set the parameters for what they will do--one as president and the other still as senator--next year.