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It seems that with the Bush administration now agreeing to a "time horizon" for the withdrawal of US forces, the Iraqis are ready once again to talk about a Status of Forces Agreement. This, as I've been saying, is both as it should be and reflects the Iraqi-side case for a withdrawal timeline. American troops clearly aren't going to leave immediately so some kind of SOFA is needed. And the Pentagon will demand that the SOFA include provisions that are reasonable for a combat situation. But those conditions necessarily undermine the notion of a sovereign Iraq, so it's vitally important -- both politically and substantively -- for the Iraqi government to make clear that this is a temporary situation with an endpoint. That's why Maliki wants a timetable, it's one of the reasons Barack Obama's proposed a timetable, and it's why Bush and McCain seem to be getting dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of a timetable.

Meanwhile, it can't be said often enough that despite the reductions in violence over the course of the past 18 months an awful lot of the underlying conflicts that could lead to violence are still lurking. Brian Katulis and Peter Juul did a nice look at Kirkuk the other day in the wake of bombings in the north. One hopes that different Iraqi factions will have the good sense to avoid destructive conflict over this and other lingering issues, but they might not and I don't think it's smart to leave the Army sitting around in the middle of things waiting to find out.

DoD photo by Spc. Richard Del Vecchio

Comments

It's worth pointing out that having an occupying army in their country makes people fucking crazy, or crazier. It totally undermines the legitimacy of local security and police institutions, creates revolutionary zeal, gives a target to people for all of their frustrations and anger, and generally makes for an atmosphere where normal social standards and conducts of behavior lose any salience. When you're literally watching tanks roll down your streets, it can't help but take you out of feelings of regular life and create an "anything goes" mentality. When normalcy collapses in the wake of crazy events like earthquake, floods and foreign invasion, the first thing to go is the sense of right and wrong, and the value of peace.

Posted by Freddie | July 30, 2008 9:30 AM

We need to use our withdrawal - everything from talking about producing an agreement for a withdrawal, through negotiating that agreement, through announcing that agreement, through taking down barbed wire, to handing off civil authority, to the sight of Humvees driving away - as tools to advance political reconciliation.

It would be a mistake (obviously, at this point) to think that we can control everything about Iraqi politics, but it would also be a mistake to discuss our withdrawal as if it was distinct from, irrelevant to, and totally unable to influence, Iraqi politics.

Posted by joe from Lowell | July 30, 2008 9:38 AM

WTF? Obama didn't propose a timetable for withdrawal to make negotiating a SOFA easier. He proposed a withdrawal two years ago because he thought it would help him win the presidency if the US lost the war in Iraq.

One of the things that Matt has yet to notice is that both candidates--you know, the candidate of imperialism and the candidate of immediate withdawal--favor leaving a substantial force (50,000 troops?) in Iraq. So "the Army" will be sitting around in the middle of things regardless.

Posted by Thomas | July 30, 2008 9:42 AM

Yes, "an awful lot of the underlying conflicts that could lead to violence are still lurking" in Kirkuk and elsewhere. But if it makes sense to pull out and let these people settle their disputes among themselves - likely in a low-grade ethnic war over control of Kirkkuk - can we at least admit that the same holds true in other places with deep-seated ethnic conflicts?

I am thinking specifically of Bosnia (should have let the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks duke it out rather than impose an unwonted peace), Kosovo (same for the Serbs and Albanians), and Sudan (too bad, Lost Boys and Darfurians). I'm sure there are others.

Posted by Joe Magarac | July 30, 2008 10:04 AM

Thomas said... Obama didn't propose a timetable for withdrawal to make negotiating a SOFA easier. He proposed a withdrawal two years ago because he thought it would help him win the presidency if the US lost the war in Iraq.

Wrong. He proposed a timetable because he wanted to get us the hell outa' Dodge. Bush/McCain have not because they want 58 permanent bases for 100 years. That's a basic, fundamental difference between the candidates.

I'm no military expert, but it sounds like the Bush/McCain plan will require a f*** of a lot more troops than the more limited mission Obama proposed (i.e. embassy protection, some support, further training). Bush/McCain probably do want 50,000 or more troops for an unlimited amount of time, basically enough to threaten Iran until they become a democracy that we like.

So the choice between the two candidates is really whether or not permanent bases are a good idea. Just don't say that Obama has proposed the same troop footprint that McCain has. It's simply not true.

Posted by LFC | July 30, 2008 10:08 AM

I haven't seen Obama saying he thinks we should have 50,000 troops in Iraq. We certainly don't have that many in other countries conducing missions like the ones he's talking about.

We have comparable numbers of troops in places like South Korea and Germany, but that's because they are combat troops positioned to be deployed in case of a war.

Rather a big difference there.

Posted by joe from Lowell | July 30, 2008 10:13 AM

You can stick with the WSJ account if you want, but there's also this account in the NYT of the Arab world, and it tells quite a different story.

Posted by Badger | July 30, 2008 10:16 AM

But if it makes sense to pull out and let these people settle their disputes among themselves - likely in a low-grade ethnic war over control of Kirkkuk - can we at least admit that the same holds true in other places with deep-seated ethnic conflicts?
I am thinking specifically of Bosnia (should have let the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks duke it out rather than impose an unwonted peace), Kosovo (same for the Serbs and Albanians), and Sudan (too bad, Lost Boys and Darfurians). I'm sure there are others.

In Bosnia, we stopped a Serbian military force from committing acts of aggression against Bosnian populations. In Kosovo, we stopped a Serbian military force from committing acts of aggression against a Kosovar population. In Darfur, the proposal is to stop an Arab military force from committing acts of aggression against a Darfuri population.

Right now, in Kirkuk, we are occupying the city and surrounding country, trying to manage internal politics, and attempting to assert our own interests in bases and oil concessions. Not the same thing at all.

If, after we pull out, there is a large-scale Arab aggression against the Kurdish population, comparable to Operation Horseshoe in Kosovo, I'd support action to stop it, along the lines of those other missions.

But, hopefully, our withdrawal and renunciation of those interests can help smooth the way for a political deal to avoid such conflict.

Throwing up our hands and leaving, and just "letting them fight it our for themselves," is the Ron Paul and the Dennis Kucinich position, but it is not mine, or MY's, not Barack Obama's.

Posted by joe from Lowell | July 30, 2008 10:21 AM

Actually, in Bosnia, our goal was to prevent the country from being partitioned. Policy during the early 1990s was to convince the Bosnian Muslims to "hang in there" in the hopes that the military situation would tilt in their favor rather than negotiate terms which would have allowed the Bosnian Serbs to join Serbia. When it became clear that the Bosnian Muslims weren't going to roll things back military on their own, the US intervened, which forced the Bosnian Serbs to negotiate autonomy only as part of a unitary Bosnian state.

The borders had, by that point of our intervention, stabilized, so we weren't confronting any specific Bosnian Serb aggression, though one could say we were retaliating for past acts.

Posted by Tyro | July 30, 2008 10:37 AM

Yeah, we got in pretty late in the game, Tyro. At that point, we weren't so much "preventing" such an aggression as trying to deny the aggressors their spoil, and prevent a future one from arising.

Posted by joe from Lowell | July 30, 2008 11:06 AM

...it's one of the reasons Barack Obama's proposed a timetable, and it's why Bush and McCain seem to be getting dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of a timetable."

Whatever happened to being an empire that makes our own reality?

Posted by A Different Matt | July 30, 2008 11:26 AM

Unless you want to stay in Iraq literally forever, the United States will have to withdraw at some point. Does this mean the US doomed to lose, or that we should develop a more realistic view of winning and losing?

Posted by Dragonfly | July 30, 2008 11:44 AM

The army should not be "sitting around", period. Iraq was, is, and will be for some time yet a vital US interest, and our military is going to have a role to play there. Based on what Obama has said he wants to have residual forces there to do, a former Pentagon auditor estimated last year that he was talking about 40-60,000 troops. As usual with American foreign policy, the only substantive disagreements are on the fringes--Bush, McCain, and Obama all will do about the same thing.

As far as "permanent bases", in the Middle East "permanent" means, like, the pyramids. The army needs to be where it might need to fight. This is not Okinawa, or even South Korea. It sure as hell isn't Germany, and hasn't been for a long time.

Posted by robert powell | July 30, 2008 12:25 PM

Does the gentleman on the right in that photo have his scope capped?

Posted by dbt | July 30, 2008 4:15 PM

Iraq was, is, and will be for some time yet a vital US interest

A "vital US interest" is a quite narrow and specific category. That means something that can threaten our existence or cause a catastrophe to us.

Iraq is not a "vital" US interest. If we pull out of Iraq and it goes to hell, it could cause mild to moderate consequences. But we'd still go on, most of us would not die, our economic system would still function, etc.

Now, if you want to argue instead that Iraq is an "important" US interest, then you have to define how important it is and how many US lives and US dollars it is worth losing to protect that interest.

Posted by Dilan Esper | July 30, 2008 5:41 PM

Iraq on the Edge
by Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/339676

Despite the Optimism of the Neocons, which has pushed mainstream media coverage to be increasingly flowery about Iraq's political progress, in fact the country is poised to explode. Even before the November election. And for McCain and Obama, the problem is that Iran has many of the cards in its hands. Depending on its choosing, between now and November Iran can help stabilize the war in Iraq -- mostly by urging the Iraqi Shiites to behave themselves -- or it can make things a lot more violent.

There are at least three flashpoints for an explosion, any or all of which could blow up over the next couple of months. (Way to go, Surgin' Generals!) The first is the brewing crisis over Kirkuk, where the pushy Kurds are demanding control and Iraq's Arabs are resisting. The second is in the west, and Anbar, where the US-backed Sons of Iraq sahwa ("Awakening") movement is moving to take power against the Iraqi Islamic Party, a fundamentalist Sunni bloc. And third is the restive Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is chafing at gains made by its Iranian-backed rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

Because of all this, it now looks like there won't be provincial elections this year at all. The ruling bloc of Shiite religious parties and Kurdish warlords is split over the crisis, weakening Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and members of the ruling coalition are trying to patch things up. I don't think they'll succeed. Many Shiites in the ruling bloc, including ISCI, have criticized the law as divisive, but as Arabs it's hard for them to endorse a Kurdish takeover of Kirkuk. ISCI and the Badr Brigade, its armed wing, are holding parlays to decide what to do. Interestingly, all three members of the ruling presidential council, including Talabani, the IIP's Hashemi, and ISCI's Adel Abdel Mahdi, voted to veto the law, putting ISCI and the IIP on record as supporting the Kurds. Bad for them politically.

The IIP says that it wants to mediate the crisis. But the IIP is in a very, very weak position. Having just rejoined the Maliki government, it is under siege at home in its base in Anbar province, where the Awakening is flexing its muscle. This could be the second explosion. The Sunni Arabs are still seething over the divisive Iraqi Constitution and their continuing exclusion from political power, and the Awakening movement sees the IIP (correctly) as wildly unrepresentative. So the Awakening, representing Sunni tribal powers and former resistance fighters, wants in, at the expense of the IIP. That time bomb is ticking, too.

The final crisis-to-be is the Sadr vs. Badr one. The Times today suggests that Sadr is weakening:

The militia that was once the biggest defender of poor Shiites in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, has been profoundly weakened in a number of neighborhoods across Baghdad, in an important, if tentative, milestone for stability in Iraq.

Don't believe it. Sadr's rivals, ISCI, don't have anything like the popular base that Sadr has. And underneath Sadr is a volatile mix of neighborhood, local and regional militias, mosques, and economic fiefdoms that won't yield easily to ISCI and Maliki. Because Sadr's forces are dependent on Iran, however, for arms and cash, Iran may be in the driver's seat. Just the other day, the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps crowed that the United States has failed to install an anti-Iranian regime in Baghdad, and he's completely right.

So Iraq is still poised to explode, and Iran may be in control. McCain's solution: provoke a showdown with Iran. Obama's solution: try to make a deal with Iran to stabilize Iraq. I'm not sure either "plan" will work.

Bush Forced al-Maliki to Back Down on Pullout in 2006
http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?articleid=13219

Many official and unofficial proponents of a long-term US military presence in Iraq are dismissing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's demand for a US timeline for withdrawal as political posturing, assuming that he will abandon it under pressure.

But that demand was foreshadowed by an episode in June 2006 in which al-Maliki circulated a draft policy calling for negotiation of just such a withdrawal timetable and the George W. Bush administration had to intervene to force the prime minister to drop it.

Al-Rubaei declared "Iraq's ambition to have full control of the country by the end of 2008." Although few readers understood the import of that statement, it was an indication that the al-Maliki regime was prepared to negotiate complete withdrawal of US troops by the end of 2008.

Then the national security adviser indicated that the government already had its own targets for the first two phases of foreign troop withdrawal: withdrawal of more than 30,000 troops to under 100,000 foreign troops by the end of 2006 and withdrawal of "most of the remaining troops" – i.e., to less than 50,000 troops – by end of the 2007.

The author explained why the "removal" of foreign troops was so important to the Iraqi government: it would "remove psychological barriers and the reason that many Iraqis joined the resistance in the first place"; it would also "allow the Iraqi government to engage with some of our neighbors that have to date been at the very least sympathetic to the resistance..." Finally, al-Rubaie asserted, it would "legitimize the Iraqi government in the eyes of its own people."

He also took a carefully-worded shot at the Bush administration's actions in overruling the centerpiece of Iraq's reconciliation policy. "While Iraq is trying to gain independence from the United States," he wrote, "some influential foreign figures" were still "trying to spoon-feed our government and take a very proactive role in many key decisions."

The 2006 episode left a lasting imprint on both the Bush and al-Maliki regimes, which is still very much in evidence in the present conflict over a withdrawal timetable. The Bush White House continues to act as though it is confident that al-Maliki can be pressured to back down as he was forced to do before. And at least some of al-Maliki's determination to stand up to Bush in 2008 is related to the bitterness that he and al-Rubaie, among others, still feel over the way Bush humiliated them in 2006.

It appears that Bush is making the usual dominant power mistake in relations to al-Maliki. He may have been a pushover in mid-2006, but the circumstances have changed, in Iraq, in the US-Iraq-Iran relations and in the United States. The al-Maliki regime now has much greater purchase to defy Bush than it had two years ago.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 30, 2008 6:15 PM

Mr. Esper--
"Catastrophe" is a word often used to describe Iraq's recent relationship with the US, and things have been going wonderfully compared to either a couple of years ago, or when Saddam Hussein was launching serial wars of aggression and genocidal rampages resulting in the deaths of millions and major disruptions of the world economy.

Iraq is the key state in the region producing most of the oil and most of the terrorism. It has likely reserves that in a reasonably stable environment could provide the bridge to an alternative energy future that could help us avoid the wars, anarchy, and economic collapse that are increasingly plausible without it.

Add the less concrete but no less important factors of the long-term advantages of turning an oil-rich, implacable enemy state into an ally, moreover one that has decent relations with Teheran and a key role in future Arab politics, not to mention the effect on our terrorism problem of being seen to lose in what both Bush and OBL have identified as a crucial battle, and I think "vital US interest" is entirely appropriate.

Posted by robert powell | July 31, 2008 3:16 AM

Oh, shut up, Powell. Your fantasies aren't relevant.

Iraq isn't going to provide the US with a fucking "bridge" to alternative energy. That was the neocon fantasy and the oil companies shut that down. Of course, once the US is kicked out, Iraq will either go along with OPEC or not as it chooses. It will be heavily influenced by Iran in that decision.

Not to mention that Iraq wasn't an "implacable enemy state" until Bush Senior decided to attack it in 1991 over nothing.

Moron.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 31, 2008 4:50 AM