Rational Grounds

The problems I have are not so much with the analysis, which is first rate, but with the proposed solutions. The first is, of course, that nobody is going to listen to him. As Biddle states, "Iraqization [is] the main component of the current U.S. military strategy." This has been our top priority for two and a half years now. There is far too much blood, sweat and tears invested in the current strategy for them to give up on it just because it's not going to work.

The second problem is that the alternative proposal is not obviously going to get us the results we want. Biddle recommends using the threat of early withdrawal to force the various factions to come to the bargaining table.

"Most important, the underlying interests of all local parties would be far better served by a constitutional compromise than by an all-out war. The losers would have to pay the butcher's bill of combat and bear the oppressor's yoke in the aftermath; even the winners would pay a terrible price. Since no side today can be confident that it would come out on top in a war, the prospect of losing should be a powerful motivation to compromise."

Unfortunately, the obverse is also true - no side today necessarily thinks it would lose, either. All the parties (with the exception of the Kurds, perhaps) have a realistic chance of receiving aid from local powers in any ensuing conflict, and little reason to believe that the other sides would negotiate in good faith at this point given the chance. Situations where relative strength is uncertain, mutual trust is close to nonexistent and the stakes are high are exactly those in which parties usually elect to fight rather than talk. I would say that a threatened American withdrawal would be at least equally as likely to accelerate any armed conflict as to "scare the combatants straight."

Third and finally, the guerrila violence in Iraq did indeed start out as a popular (though narrowly based) anti-occupation insurgency. We decided to deflate the violent opposition through Iraqification, and to the extent that we've succeeded in stopping the insurgency it has been by turning it into a civil war. If we're now going to decide that that's not what we wanted, and slow down or roll back the Shiite/Kurd involvement in countering the Sunni combatants, we need to be prepared to accept that the most likely alternative is going to be a return to an interminable insurgency. Probably with no small amount of Shiite outrage at their perceived betrayal thrown into the mix. Not exactly a rosy outlook, but I've said before that the grim reality is that all roads out of Iraq slope down. Our strategy now has to be predicated on which road bottoms out at the highest elevation.