The Present Dilemma

Marc Lynch appears on a Cato panel and comes away with a great post. First on the intellectual laziness and dishonesty pervading our culture:

I gave my usual argument about what happened in the Sunni areas, which I won't recapitulate here. I concluded with my mind-boggling experience yesterday of watching an American neoconservative on al-Jazeera lecturing a Sunni Iraqi tribal shaykh - in English - about what is really going on in the Sunni tribal areas, and warned against believing our own propaganda about the Sunni areas.

But of course, Lynch is an Arabist, so you don't want to trust him. Then, he channels James Dobbins:

He argued that no civil war can ever be resolved if the country's neighbors don't want it to be resolved; the US can either contain Iran or stabilize Iraq, but it can't have both.

This seems important to me, and at least one reason to believe that withdrawing from Iraq might change things in that country for the better. Iran's interests are better-served by a stable Iraq than by a chaotic, violent Iraq. But Iran's interests are better-served by a chaotic, violent Iraq than by a stable Iraq that collaborates with American efforts to overthrow the Iranian government.

I would love to see a large-scale diplomatic rapprochement with Iran, but barring such an unlikely reversal of alliances (and as Dan Drezner and I agree on BHTV we probably don't want to see someone as inept as Bush even try super-ambitious diplomacy), the best thing we could probably do for Iraq in this regard is to just make it not be a proxy ground for US-Iranian conflict. The idea that Iran would adopt an attitude of indifference to events in an adjacent country is ridiculous, as is this notion that they'll adopt such an attitude if we complain loud enough. For the US, by contrast, not occupying Iraq is a very realistic option.

Comments

Why does a stable Iraq automatically translate into Iraq as a vassal of the US? A stable Iraq necessarily means the lessening of American influence, as well as Iranian influence.

But I think you're right about Bush attempting diplomacy. He's (hopefully) discredited the very idea of preemptive invasion and the armed imposition of 'democracy'. Perhaps we should keep him from similarly de-legitimizing diplomacy and peacemaking for future generations.

Then again, a resolution to the debacle would be nice.

Posted by Philippe | September 21, 2007 1:34 PM

I'm not sure why you assume that Iran's leadership wants a stable Iraq; they favor Chaos in Gaza and Lebanon, and the leadership has an apocalyptic world view in which chaos will bring about the coming of the hidden imam. Iran's people would likely favor stability; their leadership - not so much.

Posted by James Robertson | September 21, 2007 2:03 PM

Actually, the infuriating thing about Bush is that he actually has pretty good diplomatic skills. Look at how he has cultivated Putin, Vicente Fox, and Tony Blair. In terms of his personality, he can be a likeable, somewhat goofy person.

Where he loses foreign leaders is on substance-- he doesn't back up the personal charm with any policy changes tht the foreign leaders can take back to their people. So they eventually sour on him because he can't deliver.

And, of course, the other problem with Bush is that he doesn't pursue diplomacy enough. He preferes warfare, and even when he initiates diplomatic initiatives, they are often half-hearted; the "Road Map", for instance, could have been a perfectly good starting point for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations several years ago, but Bush never gave it the kind of sustained push that Clinton gave his peace initiatives.

Posted by Dilan Esper | September 21, 2007 2:05 PM

There's a reason he didn't push the roadmap - if you recall, the end game of Clinton's push was the intifada. I'm not blaming that on Clinton - he made a good faith effort. The Palestinians have no real interest in compromise though - they are still looking to push Israel into the sea.

The Israeli/Arab conflict will go on until the Palestinians decide that total victory is not possible. Only then will they sit down to negotiate in good faith.

Posted by James Robertson | September 21, 2007 2:14 PM

Matt, why are you wasting your time talking about Iraq? What purpose does it serve? Can you not think of anything else to do? The war will continue, unchanged until Bush leaves office. What else is there to say?

Only a sufficient loss of blood and dollars will force America out of Iraq. Appeals to reason are fruitless. Why are you wasting your time?

Posted by HH | September 21, 2007 2:15 PM

Awesome article on Iraq

Posted by Anon | September 21, 2007 2:41 PM

There is ZERO evidence that Iran wants "chaos in Gaza and Lebanon". What they want is Israel out of the way of the Palestinians.

As for Iran's leadership wanting an "apocalyptic world", that is just religious bigotry and nonsense.

The reality is that Iran isn't full of "suiciders", not in the population and not in the leadership. They have have a cadre of suiciders in their military or the IRGC but those are expendable morons, just like US troops are basically "suiciders" for taking orders from nitwits like Betrayus and Bush. The only difference is in the level of fanaticism and conventional military training - and in the fact that suiciders choose to do so while US troops are just too stupid to see it as suicide.

In any event, the next question is clear: even if Iran would like a stable Iraq aligned with it, what motivation do they have to accommodate the Sunni? They and the Iraqi Shia have the upper hand at the moment. Unless the US sides with the Sunni against the Shia with sufficient transparency that it becomes obvious the Shia will never defeat the Sunni, then Iran has no motivation to change the operations it may be involved in.

Iraq is in flux at the moment. The Sunni either believe that they can regain power completely, or that they can retain enough power to force the Shia to accommodate them in the government. The Shia, OTOH, currently have the upper hand. Until this imbalance of power changes to more parity or exhaustion sets in, the conflict will continue.

Until one of those two events occurs, Iran - or any other Iraqi neighbor - has no motivation to change their approach.

The one thing which is guaranteed is that Iran will not allow a Sunni OR Shia OR combined government in Iraq which is allied with the US as Saddam was in the 1980's. Most of Iraqi's neighbors - with the possible exception of the Saudis - and the Iraqis themselves undoubtedly agree.

Therefore the US is in essence in conflict not only with the Iraqi insurgency, and with Iran, but with Syria and the Iraqi people as well (with the possible exception of the Kurds, who, quite frankly, aren't really part of the "Iraqi people" at this point.)

Therefore the only thing the US can do to stabilize Iraq is to withdraw, give up the oil, and engage Iran in other ways to achieve some sort of rapprochment in both Iraq and Iran.

None of which, of course, is going to happen.

HH is right. Further talk about Iraq is almost pointless now. Iran is the next war - people should be focusing on that.

I see a resurgence of propaganda from "the denier crowd" - people like Steve Clemons - popping up on the blogs about how Bush won't attack Iran for various specious reasons. These people will be the Beinarts and O'Hanlons of the future - claiming they never supported the Iran war, they just "didn't know" it would happen.

No, they actively DENIED it would happen and tried to convince everyone else it wouldn't. Which makes them as culpable as the war promoters and as culpable as the Iraq war promoters and deniers.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 21, 2007 4:58 PM