Via Jim Henley, the impressive troika of Stephen Cook, Ray Takeyh, and Suzanne Maloney says we don't need to fear a regional war if we leave Iraq.
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Stay Calm
30 Jun 2007 10:28 am
Comments (24)
I'm happy to pull a number out of my ass if you don't mind the stinky smell.
Seriously, a percentage chance, as in, quantified? How would such a number be meaningful?
Your willingness to cut and run in the face of an impossible modeling problem is of a piece with your foreign policy commitments, Henley.
The 'don't cut and run' folks will be saying that again and again (the 78 rpm record has the needle stuck in one groove) until Bush cuts and runs, and then they'll be saying that the liberals stabbed Iraq (and the US) in the back - ignoring who and how we got involved in the first place, how badly the war-proponents fucked up the actual on-the-ground situation, and that they'd broken our Army and Marine Corps for likely a decade with an impossible mission. Or maybe they'll cover up their imbicity with another war next door in Iran - or both responses.
The highly probable outcome in Iraq that we seem not to be doing anything about is Turkey and Iran vs Iraqi Kurds in the north. That is completely forseeable and no amount of 'how could we have foreseen that' bullshit will cover it up.
As for the other neighbors in the key fight: Shia versus Sunni - an implosion or fragmentation of Iraq isn't very likely for the reasons stated in the IHT article (
You can always find a reason for saying any change from a disastrous policy would be more disastrous. That's called a quagmire - see Vietnam.
At base, Iraq today (and since the end of WWI) isn't a country of shared destiny. The Brits created modern Iraq with a map, ruler and pencils. Just how bad would a divided-up former Iraq be in reality? (Except for the 'Kurdish problem')
Jim from Portland:
1) How exactly are the Army and Marines 'broken'? You would think having hundreds of thousands of newly battle-hardened troops would strengthen both organizations.
2) If they are broken, why exactly would you care? Is there another country you're jonesing to invade in the next ten years?
If they are broken, why exactly would you care? Is there another country you're jonesing to invade in the next ten years?
Some people understand Defense to be about, well, defense. Our military has other reasons for being than simply striking out randomly at crap countries, or generating excellent footage for Toby Keith's latest video. Someone might, at least theoretically, attack us. And we might want to respond.
Mr. Henley,
So your contribution to the discussion is: "I have no idea what's going to happen, nor am i even willing to try to take an educated guess, which basically means that what ever I propose to do about the problem is based on...nothing."
Well - thanks for your input.
What each side needs to do is lay out the probability (with confidence intervals if possible) of what they believe is going to happen.
and
nor am i even willing to try to take an educated guess
Oh, yeah, those are comparable statements.
"Someone might, at least theoretically, attack us. And we might want to respond."
Who? And why would we want or need to respond with ground troops?
Who? And why would we want or need to respond with ground troops?
I think the Al Qaeda / Afghanistan example would be the fairly obvious one here.
You would think having hundreds of thousands of newly battle-hardened troops would strengthen both organizations.
This is idiotic. Battle-hardened sounds nice and all. Of course in reality it often means troops with debilitating physical and/or mental injuries.
Then of course there is the whole thing of morale. . .
"I think the Al Qaeda / Afghanistan example would be the fairly obvious one here."
The example of a regime being toppled by a handful of U.S. Special Forces troops backed by precision air power and working with local proxies?
"This is idiotic. Battle-hardened sounds nice and all. Of course in reality it often means troops with debilitating physical and/or mental injuries."
Troops with debilitating injuries don't stay in the military; the overwhelming majority of troops who serve in combat have not suffered debilitating injuries. Combat experience makes the Army and Marines stronger. Troops who reenlist during wartime are, by definition, more committed. Thousands of tactical lessons learned are incorporated into training and doctrine as combat veterans rotate to training roles; equipment that is demonstrated to be vulnerable is phased out; more effective equipment is phased in; etc.
Troops with debilitating injuries don't stay in the military.
Thus the quickly breaking military.
Troops who reenlist during wartime are, by definition, more committed.
This is hardly true by definition. You obviously don't know many members of the enlisted. The ones I know that reenlist do so for many reasons. A certain level of commitment is one, although usually not a primary reason. And even those that do reenlist because of their commitment to the military hardly have the best impression of the status of the military today.
I think your points are probably best refuted by the numerous instances of retired and even remarkably currently serving high level officers that have publicly commented on the extremely strained nature of our armed forces -- primarily the Army. Of course, I'm sure you have more insight than them.
The example of a regime being toppled by a handful of U.S. Special Forces troops backed by precision air power and working with local proxies?
The apparently not so obvious for some example being in response to your question -- an at least plausible situation in which we could be attacked and want or need to respond with ground forces. We wouldn't necessary have the Northern Alliance or its equivalent in the future.
Finally, there is of course the fact that we are relying heavily on the National Guard in our foreign operations. Never a good sign of the strength of the Army.
OK, I'll give a stab at predictions with confidence intervals. i want to stress that "confidence intervals" in this case are a measure of my confidence and of course not based on watching the iraq conflict play out multiple times and computing statistical confidence intervals.
So, first off let's imagine that we arrange a phased withdrawal with US intentional combat operations ended by next summer and the large majority of the troops out of iraq by September, 2008, just in time for the US elections. If we're going to be out before the new president, that's the obvious time to do it.
As soon as the iraqis see that we're going to go, we lose almost all influence with them. As it is, the advisors that Bremer appointed are still in charge of the iraqi government administration, right? The iraqi government can't get rid of them without a 2/3 vote. But as soon as they hear we're going, those guys need to find a new protector. Similarly with iraqi police and army. The ones who're fighting are under our orders, but if we're leaving why should they risk anything for us?
Once we say we're leaving our main leverage is we can still do airstrikes on anybody we want, any time. If we want to we can find a van at a market and hit it with a missile and tell the survivors it was a car bomb, and if they can tell the difference still nobody will believe them who wouldn't believe them if they were lying. So we'll still have that advantage -- we can rain death from the air, on anybody.
So, what happens? Everybody in the area has an incentive to reach an agreement, which they can't do while we're in charge. But can they do it when we don't stop them? The shias and sunnis can't work things out while there's a government in place that doesn't represent sunnis. And the terms of office are 4 years. Will they dissolve the government and call for new elections? I dunno, probably not. But they could. I'd give it 30% chance. I'm not real sure, maybe it's 10% or maybe 40%.
How many sunnis are there? The old CIA estimate was 60% shia, 20% sunni, 20% kurd. But recent polls have been turning up more like 55% shia, 30% sunni, 12% kurd. It makes a difference. 3:1 versus less than 2:1. Regardless, nobody is set up for aggressive warfare. Move on the roads and you can get IEDed. Even if one side has more artillery squirrelled away they may have trouble getting it into place to shell enemy cities. So as far as open violence is concerned, if they go that route they should spend some time sorting themselves out (ethnic-cleansing) and after that they don't have good attacks. The sunni/shia violence ought to die down fairly quickly.
But they can harass each other. The shia government is still in charge of moving most of the food, and it can (and has) shut off food to places it doesn't like. Sunnis will have to get food shipments through turkey, syria, jordan, saudi arabia, and kuwait. At present food shipments are likely to be bombed by the USAF on the presumption that they're arms smuggling, and we might keep doing that to help the shias starve out the sunnis. But the shias have to live there, and they might not want to be too mean to their nearby neighbors. As long as they have to follow our strategies they don't get the choice. Will they feed the sunnis? I put it at 30%, but it might be as high as 60%.
But then, there's the matter of paying for food shipments. If it's war then the saudis are likely to pay for food. But say that sunnis keep the oil from flowing, how much food can shias pay for? And it doesn't have to be sunnis. Get somebody -- anybody -- who can sabotage the oil or keep it from being sabotaged, and a lot of people will want to pay them to sabotage it on some particular schedule. There's a whole lot of money to be made in oil futures, and a little of that money could leak into iraq. What's the chance iraq gets so poor they can't feed themselves if they want to? I think that's around 10% but it could be as high as 30%.
Kurds. Nobody likes the kurds except the USA, which has betrayed them at least twice before. They put up with it because getting our help for awhile followed by another betrayal is the best offer they ever get. Would turkey really attack? I put it at 50%, depending partly on how much the kurds support sabotage etc inside turkey. Would iraq try to protect the kurds from turkey? I dunno. No idea. Maybe after the turks hurt them a lot, iraq might step in to occupy kurdistan in place of the turks. That might be acceptable to turkey and iraq and who knows, maybe even to the kurds. It wouldn't be an issue except with some americans who'd be upset about us betraying the kurds yet again. The kurds don't have any friends. Israel has gotten stuff from them -- escorts to spy on iran etc -- but they don't have much to offer israel and israel doesn't have much to offer them. They're mostly muslims anyway. Except for some bitter americans I expect the whole issue to mostly just disappear, nobody cares about the kurds.
I agree that no other nation wants to occupy iraq. The iranians are making a big deal about being fair and honest and not violating international law. They can't invade iraq without admitting they're doing it and being an aggressor against a nation that's temporarily down. So I think the chance of them doing it is around 0%, but I could be wrong and it could be as high as 15%. Similarly syria. Syria has nothing to gain by invading iraq except possibly to solve their immigrant problem. But if the USAF stops bombing sunnis and if the food holds out then it will be safe for iraqi refugees to go back to iraq very soon. Syria certainly gains nothing by occupying shia or kurd areas. Given their own shia/sunni split they'd do better not to take sides.
So the USA could give weapons to one side or another and hope they suppress everybody else. I'd estimate 80% chance we try that. But who do we support? Not sadrists. Probably not dawa. Not any of the sunni factions. Kurds, of course, but they aren't ready to attack, they need whatever they can get, to defend. We just won't have any credible friends to support in iraq. Presumably we'd support some sunni faction, somebody who claims to be against al qaeda. But we can't give them helicopters and we can't give them sufficient armor to give them a credible attack, so it doesn't matter a whole lot.
What about the iraqi army? I figure it will split up to join various militias. Its training won't be particularly valuable without US logistics. The training depends on the supplies that iraqis can't provide. So it will become increasingly irrelevant.
So putting it all together -- we pull out. The iraqi government collapses further. Maybe they don't get a quorum. Maybe they agree to new elections. Maybe they hang on for awhile. Do they try to distribute the food widely? If so, and if Sadr etc can offer a real peace to sunnis, matters are likely to settle down. If they try for war then they're likely to get a hundred-year war. Nobody's in good shape to settle it by genocide but they can hurt each other enough to make long, long memories. Iraq could wind up like the balkans. I put it at 30% they give a serious try at making peace, and 25% they actually achieve enough peace to build on. If they don't manage a peace the other 75% they hurt each other badly with blockade and sabotage, and wind up with multiple warring nations that each chase out or kill the wrong sort of people who happen to be there. Nobody else gets deeply involved because everybody in the world except the USA knows better.
The kurds try to keep enough weapons and munitions together to ward off the turks, who very likely won't be warded off. Bad things happen in kurdistan, with no effects in other countries besides turkey.
The USA does more-or-less-random airstrikes and gives arms to more-or-less-random factions, with little effect beyond increasing the death rate. Maybe we do some raids from kuwait which likewise have little effect beyond a bit more violence and destruction.
Back in the USA, any bad results -- the problems of the kurds, starvation, partition, or a functional new government, practically any plausible outcome -- will get Republicans to blame Democrats for our defeat. It's all the Democrats' fault. They didn't believe hard enough and so TinkerBelle died.
The likelihood of a regional war is obviously much less than the Bush administration portrays. Their scenarios implicitly assume the US has withdrawn all of its ofrces from the region, which no Democratic candidate is advocating.
The leaders of all those regimes are rational actors, and while rational actors can and do miscalculate, the calculations for escalating the conflict for them don't seem all that close of a call.
So much of this cock-up can be covered by quotes from Alien. Here's one for Harry-
"Say, maybe you ain't been keeping up on current events, but we just got our ass kicked."
35,000 casualties. Over half of the officers choosing not to re-up.
And- on the bright side- increasing numbers of black kids deciding that maybe a career in the infantry ain't for them. Good for them- it's pretty plain from our current "leadership" that most infantrymen will not become president.
And- on the bright side- increasing numbers of black kids deciding that maybe a career in the infantry ain't for them. Good for them- it's pretty plain from our current "leadership" that most infantrymen will not become president.
Well, do the math. Say one infantryman gets elected at age 35. A second at age 39. 43, 47, 51, 55, 59, 63, 67, 71, 75, 79, 83. That's 13 infantrymen from one generation. I guess you could double that if they all get impeached.
Out of how many infantrymen total? Most infantrymen will never become president, completely independent of our leadership. There are just too many of them.
"At base, Iraq today (and since the end of WWI) isn't a country of shared destiny. The Brits created modern Iraq with a map, ruler and pencils. Just how bad would a divided-up former Iraq be in reality? (Except for the 'Kurdish problem')"
Best post of the day, spot on. The political class can't let go of Iraq, yet stubbornly refuses to even consider partition, which is the best (though still poor) chance they have of salvaging anything from their idiotic war.
Kafka, the iraqi government is opposed to partition. Sadr and his people are opposed. Dawa and their people are opposed. and the sunnis are opposed. A majority in the parliament are firmly opposed, although I get the impression they aren't as concerned about keeping the kurds.
Kurds seem kind of ambivalent about leaving iraq or staying officially with iraq to help keep the turks away.
So, do we want to impose a partition? Maybe we stage a coup and a partition at the same time?
Of course, officially we aren't doing an occupation now. We're assisting the official iraqi government get on its feet. If we throw away the iraqi government we throw away our official legitimacy too. But that might not matter. It isn't like we have any significant allies in iraq. The british are reducing their numbers and the australians are getting ready to pull out. And we can veto anything the UN tries to do about it. So what if the rest of the world goes back to calling it an occupation? It won't affect us at all, just words. And of course the iraqi public will have as much loyalty to our strongman as they do to this travesty of a democratic government. Nothing to lose but some hypocrisy. Probably.
But it's an open question how long it takes people to form a nation. "Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth" We had a nation people would die for in less than 90 years. And a lot of people were loyal to the confederacy in less than 5 years. I think that's mostly gone now, but a generation ago it wasn't. If there had been a real opportunity for the South to rise again, it might have happened.
And yet, people who were loyal to Virginia or to South Carolina were willing to change their form of government even while they were loyal to their people. First independence, then confederation, then national government. For South Carolina, confederation again. And if you count the sort of changes that would take a revolution in some countries -- FDR-Truman to Eisenhower, say -- we've been revolving like a bowling ball.
I'd say, let the iraqis partition if they want to, and don't try to make them partition if they don't want to. But I have to admit, iraq partitioned would be best for israel.
This seems like a classic example or working backwards to support your conclusion. The authors, in attempting to rebut "cut and run" critics, are ignoring or brushing aside any evidence which doesn't fit the case they want to make (like the Kurds and militant fighters, the possibility that rational actors, a dubious assertion in the first place, mght make mistakes or otherwise fail despite their rationality, the possibility that semi-autonomous agencies within the related governments, like the Iranian Pasdaran and the Saudi Interior Ministry, might not hew to the official policy, and the tempting prospect of several billion barrels of oil beneath a failed state).
And the idea that Middle Eastern governments shy away from intervening in thei neighbors' affairs is laughable. They give cursory mention to Afghanistan and Lebanon while ignoring Yemen completely. Not to mention the Iran and Iraq war and the numerous clashes between Iraq and Kuwait.
Craigo, of course there's no inevitability here.
Still, it's plausible that middle east governments will avoid direct fights over iraq. What would it get them?
Saudi arabia could bring in egyptian troops through saudi arabia, but that would mean having a lot of egyptian troops in saudi arabia. Not good, and how much control would they have over egyptian troops in iraq? Iran could send in troops but if iranian troops go where they aren't wanted the locals will treat them like US troops. Not good. Syria doesn't need the hassle, syria needs their iraqi refugees to go home. And the refugees will go home easiest when there's peace, at least in the particular places they came from. Nobody benefits from a spreading war except israel. The israelis might find a sneaky way to develop an arab-against-arab or arab-against-persian war, but it's plausible nobody would fall for it.
Of course it's possible things will go very bad. By the logic of self-interest and altruism both, WWI should not have happened. Somebody should have figured out a way to call it off, and nobody did. But the claim here isn't that everything is guaranteed to come up sweetness and light and Santa Claus with a sackful of ponies when we pull out. The claim is that it probably won't expand into a regional war.
Comments closed July 14, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
There may be some validity to both arguments - pro-regional and anti-regional conflict. What each side needs to do is lay out the probability (with confidence intervals if possible) of what they believe is going to happen.
The Bush administration is being dishonest when it says that Iraq will implode. The probability is NOT 1009%. In fact, it's likely much less. On the other hand, the anti-regional conflict proponents also need to say what they think the likelihood is.
Comparing the probability of further conflict with the harm associated with us staying would help us better understand if we should or shouldn't.
Posted by Adi Nadimpalli | June 30, 2007 2:25 PM