Iraq: No perfect solution

The situation in Iraq is a mess and is going to be around for some time to come regardless of how much Americans want it to go away. Even the war in Afghanistan is not going well with no end in sight. As former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke explained in an interview in Der Spiegel last month:

President George W. Bush cannot win the war during his presidency, which only has 19 months left. He will then hand over the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan to the next president. The next president of the United States will inherit two wars. That's never happened before in history. In fact, the next president of the United States will inherit the worst opening day position in international affairs of any incoming president in American history.

All the candidates for President have their own plans to resolve the two wars, particularly Iraq. But Anne Applebaum warns in today’s Washington Post that there is no perfect solution to the problem of Iraq and a lot of potential disasters in any plan whether it is escalation, staying the course, limited disengagement, or complete withdrawal:

Out in the world, there are shades of gray. Here inside the Beltway, there are black-and-white solutions. And everybody who is anybody has a plan for Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has a three-point plan; Barack Obama has a "move the soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan" plan. House Democrats have a plan to take most troops out by next March; Senate Democrats have a plan to take them out by April. Some Senate Republicans want the president to shrink the size of the U.S. military in Iraq; other Senate Republicans want to let the surge run its course. Search the Web, listen to the radio and watch the news, and you can hear people arguing that if only we had more troops, fewer troops or no troops at all, everything would be okay again.

What is missing from this conversation is a dose of humility. More to the point, what is missing is the recognition that every single one of these plans contains the seeds of potential disaster, even catastrophe.

More troops? I hardly need to elaborate on what's wrong with that plan, since so many in Congress do so every day. But for the record, I'll repeat the obvious: More troops means more American casualties, maybe many more casualties. Worse, the very presence of American soldiers creates strife in some parts of Iraq -- angering Iraqis, motivating al-Qaeda, sparking violence. Besides, we've tried the surge, and the surge hasn't brought the results we wanted. And, anyway, the surge simply can't be maintained, let alone expanded: There aren't that many more troops to send, even if we wanted to send them.

Fewer troops? This plan sounds like a reasonable compromise: neither surge nor cut-and-run, just leaving a few guys on the ground to train the Iraqis, guard the border and fight the terrorists. It also sounds a touch naive: So, in the midst of a vast civil war, small groups of Americans will withdraw to some neutral outposts and announce that they would no longer like to be shot at, please? Both "guarding the border" and "fighting terrorism" are hard to do effectively without involving ourselves in wider political and ethnic struggles.

There is also trouble with the "train the Iraqis" part of the plan, as Stephen Biddle spelled out in The Post last week, since "training Iraqis" invariably puts us in the middle of military conflict. Besides, fewer Americans could mean more Iraqi violence; more Iraqi violence could mean more American casualties -- not to mention more Iraqi casualties -- which defeats the purpose of the plan altogether.

No troops? Though deeply appealing to the "we told you so" crowd, this plan is clothed in the greatest degree of hypocrisy. How many of the people who clamor for intervention in Darfur will also be clamoring to rush back into Iraq when full-scale ethnic cleansing starts taking place? How many will take responsibility for the victims of genocide? I'm not saying there will be such a catastrophe, but there could be: Mass ethnic murders have certainly been carried out in Iraq before. Other possibilities include the creation of an Iranian puppet state or an al-Qaeda outlaw state; or there might merely be a regional war involving, say, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, just for starters, and maybe Israel and the Gaza Strip as well. Perhaps these things would never have happened if we hadn't gone there in the first place -- but if we leave, we'll be morally responsible.

The current situation in Iraq did not happen over night. It has taken five years of deterioration under the noses of the Bush administration (particularly the disastrous management by Paul Bremer – the administration’s occupation Czar) as well as a history predating the 2002 invasion (that the administration did not seem to be aware) of a country that did not come together naturally with people who shared a common ethnicity, language and religion but put together with pieces of the former Ottoman Empire by the victories Allies following World War I. Outsiders put this country together and outsiders are now holding it together.

There is no perfect solution to this mess.