Kori Schake's blog

Sunday was another tragic day in Iraq, more than 150 people were killed and another 500 injured in attacks on the Ministries of Justice and Interior in Baghdad. The devastation was another sad reminder of how fragile are the gains bought so dearly by Iraqis and Americans -- military and civilian -- working every day in that country to consolidate progress toward a secure and representative Iraq.

Those who believe Iraq was "the wrong war," or that violence and authoritarianism are endemic in a country with such deep sectarian divisions, or those who practice the soft bigotry of low expectations (as President Bush so nicely phrased it in a different context), and believe Muslims incapable of democracy will likely see these attacks as justification for accelerating our disengagement from Iraq. Such a conclusion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the domestic politics of Iraq in the run up to their January provincial elections.

War is the extension of politics by other means, as Clausewitz teaches, and domestic politics is what these attacks were about. Iraqi security forces are struggling to prevent such attacks. Prime Minister Maliki's confidence in their ability has always run ahead of their actual performance (as early as 2005 he advocated a security hand over) and he has been party to politicizing their ranks. 

But Maliki is running on a platform of providing security and negotiating the U.S. withdrawal. Anything that calls security into question or precipitates a return by American military forces into Iraq's cities (from which we had withdrawn on June 30 in accordance with the Strategic Framework Agreement) hurts Maliki's claim. And it doesn't just hurt Maliki, it hurts other incumbent politicians, like the Mayor of Baghdad, who also argued for removing blast walls to facilitate movement and commerce and a return to normalcy in the capital.

After the last spectacular attack, against the Foreign Ministry on Aug. 19, Prime Minister Maliki responded in a stridently partisan fashion, blaming Sunni and al Qaeda as one, conducting arrests and crackdowns that have a suspicious political tilt against his political opponents. While the U.S. military spokesman tried to put a good face on the Iraqi government's reaction, comparing it to the crasser political manipulation of the Aug. 19 bombings, Maliki's statement in the aftermath speaks for itself:

The cowardly acts of terrorism which occurred today must not weaken the resolution of Iraqis to continue their journey and to fight the followers of the fallen regime, the Baathists and al-Qaeda."

This, before the government had any reasonable idea of who conducted the attacks. There are numerous political factions that could benefit from delegitimizing the Maliki government's record, not least rival Shi'ia who excluded him from being their standard bearer in the election.

But the good news is that political pluralism has taken root in Iraqi politics. Maliki couldn't win the support of a Shi'ia-only slate organizing for the January elections, so he opted to build a cross-sectarian slate. He's not trying very hard, mind you, as his statement blaming Sunni for Sunday's bombing shows. But his effort to appeal across sectarian lines was his Hail Mary (so to speak) and shows he believed voters would reward the choice. Vice President Tariq al Hashimi, a Sunni, is likewise tacking beyond sectarianism to broaden his prospective political base. 

This is a hugely important development, seldom seen in fragile societies. Usually, as with the Balkan elections of the early 1990s, politicians prey on voters' mistrust and trend toward extremes which is why elections in factional societies are so often polarizing and foster an upward spiral of violence.

In the last provincial elections, nearly all incumbents were voted out of office, a strong signal that average Iraqis believed they weren't doing their jobs. And voters weren't just "simplifying the map," moving to the sectarian extreme out of fear: Shi'ia voted out Shi'ia, Sunni voted out Sunni, Kurd voted out Kurd. What Iraqi political elites took from that election is the fundamental commandment of democracy everywhere: Thou Shalt Respect the Voters.

Talking to Iraqi politicians (as I did the past couple of weeks around their country), what is most striking is the extent to which they sound like small-city politicians in our own country. They worry about power outages and sewer systems and the quality of education for youngsters. They're mad at the central government for not funding activity they consider its responsibility. They rail against corruption -- even as many of them practice it -- and fear exposure by the free media that is burgeoning. Accountability has come to Iraqi politics, and the politicians know it.

A representative government is struggling to emerge in Iraq. It may not succeed in bridging the sectarian tensions, corruption, and long shadow of decades of authoritarianism that inhibits initiative. In Iraq, strong cultural undercurrents cut against the kinds of behavior that make successful democracies successful. But Iraqis want it, and political elites are responding. This is good news for Iraq and for the advancement of our values in the world.

AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images

By Kori Schake

It's nice that the Nobel Committee wants to shower the president with  approval -- it's a good thing for the United States -- but it's likely to remind Americans that the president is being rewarded for behaving in the world the way Europeans behave.

It's less clear to me that it will improve the president's standing at home. I keep thinking of the comedian Tom Lehrer's explanation for why he stopped writing songs of biting political commentary: "When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, political satire lost its meaning." That the president received the prize for just being rather than for any actual achievement is likely to devalue the prize.

By Kori Schake

The release of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's report on the war in Afghanistan has occasioned full-throated cries of insubordination from the president's liberal supporters. The most ignorant and offensive of these is Eugene Robinson's belief that the military "need to shut up and salute."

Let's leave aside that liberal commentators showed no such compunction when the Bush administration was being criticized by the military -- including both active-duty servicemen like Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and retired servicemen like Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold -- for its conduct of the Iraq war and for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's disrespect of their views.

Then, dissent was patriotic. Now, evidently, our military is not to be afforded views on the war they are fighting.

But shutting up the generals would be a terrible mistake, one much more hurtful to the Obama administration than to the military. Here are the main reasons the administration should not take the counsel of its supporters and silence the dissent being vented by our military.

They're more popular than he is. The American military is the most respected institution in these United States, with 82% of the public expressing high confidence, routinely outpacing all other institutions in American life -- to include the presidency (51%), the Supreme Court (39%) and Congress (17%). They're likely to win this one in the eyes of the American people, and that can't be good for the president.

They want to support him. After President Bill Clinton commenced his administration with the ill-fated executive order on homosexuals serving openly in the military, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin wrote him a terrific memo about how to repair relations with the military. The fundamental point was that the military is a winnable constituency for any president. They want him to succeed. Treating them like they're the enemy will offend their professionalism.

They understand the difference between policymaking and execution. It's their job to salute and carry out orders once the president gives them, but that does not proscribe them from influencing policy in the making. Go back and read the transcript of Gen. Colin Powell's lecture at the National Defense University during the "gays in the military" imbroglio for a poignant reminder of how well they get it. It will be a better policy if the president takes account of their concerns.

They know more about war than you do. Less than 1% of Americans serve in the military, and few of our political elites have any experience of the military. Those who are serving or have served do actually know more about the theory and practice of warfare than those of us who have not. They've risked their lives to acquire the knowledge, and deserve us giving deference to their judgment on what it takes to fight and win the nation's wars.

He was persuading allies to remain committed to the fight. President Obama is not General McChrystal's only boss. As the NATO commander, he works for all the governments with forces committed to the mission in Afghanistan. In his comments in London, McChrystal was defending the strategy President Obama asked allies to commit to, and for which their forces are risking their lives. He was helping make the case for the war to skeptical European publics; surely the White House does not want to do all that heavy lifting itself?

Ask yourself why it leaked. Internal government documents like the McChrystal report on Afghanistan tend to be leaked in one of three circumstances: (1) someone who cares desperately about the policy believes an administration is about to make a catastrophic mistake; (2) someone involved in policy formation believes their point of view isn't getting a fair hearing; or (3) someone wants to force the administration to publicly defend its choices. The latter usually occurs when, say, the national security advisor tries to intimidate military commanders into politicizing their advice. Or when the president curries favor with the military by telling the Veterans of Foreign Wars he's all in, then a month later getting cold feet when the bill for achieving his objectives comes due. Whichever of these factors drove this leak, the administration should take it as a canary in a coal mine they aren't building consensus within the government, either for their process or their preferred course of action.

You get the military leadership you deserve. If you penalize military leaders who give you unwelcome advice, they'll stop giving you their best judgment. They'll either fall silent, (as then Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers did in the run up to the Iraq war), or they'll retire (as Lt. Gen. Newbold did in the run up to the Iraq war and Gen. Ron Fogleman did after the commander of the Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia at the time of the bombing was later denied promotion), or they'll go through the motions of what you've asked and achieve little (as Gen. George W. Casey, now Army chief of staff, did when he was the top U.S. commander in Iraq). The president needs -- and should want -- military leaders who give their military judgment, which is all General McChrystal has done.

Secretary Gates judiciously suggested in his speech to the Association of the U.S. Army Monday that the president has a right to receive advice confidentially. He is serving the president well by trying to turn down the temperature on this civil-military imbroglio. People in the White House would also be wise to stop trying to silence the military -- or they won't like the military they end up with.

Photo: Pete Souza/White House

By Kori Schake

Skepticism grows in President Obama's party about his presumed endorsement of General Stanley McChrystal's assessment of the strategy and resources required to succeed in Afghanistan. Senate Armed Services Chair Carl Levin has expressed skepticism about sending more forces until the Afghans contribute more themselves. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doubts there will be public support. Lynn Woolsey, Chairman of the Progressive Caucus, is threatening to lead opposition to funding the President's wars.

I believe Obama will not continue on the trajectory he set out for redoubling our efforts to win the "good war" in Afghanistan. He and his advisors lacked -- and continue to lack -- understanding of the importance of succeeding in Iraq, or why the surge strategy and additional forces changed the political dynamic in that country. His priorities are domestic, and he even encouraged trade-offs between international security and domestic policy by suggesting that his health care plan was affordable because (by his accounting) it would cost less than the wars we are fighting.

So I suspect that over the course of the next 9 months, the administration will conclude that: (a) the sticker price for achieving its aims in Afghanistan is too high; (b) international partners are exhausted with this effort; and (c) Afghans aren't providing the indigenous partnership that our strategy relies on to be successful. I don't share these views, but reasonable people who mean our country well could conclude them.

The only wrong choice -- both morally and strategically -- would be for the President to continue sending our country's sons and daughters to war if he is unwilling to commit the resources and effort to win it. That would be the true and tragic Vietnam parallel.

American power is pervasive and diverse enough to protect our interests without winning all our wars, as Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia demonstrate. But if the President winds down our effort to construct an Afghanistan that will not be a breeding ground for terrorist attacks, what are the policy alternatives for keeping Americans safe from terrorism?

The first is better defense: pushing out the perimeter of our defense against attack and building in layers of defense (inspecting cargo at ports of embarkation, checking flight manifests before planes come into U.S. airspace, tracing money from suspect organizations and individuals, cross-referencing databases in local/state/federal law enforcement and other sources). Much of this is already routine.

The second is relinquishing the concept of holding states accountable for actions occurring in their territory, and either gaining their tacit cooperation or violating their sovereignty to kill or capture people we feel threatened by. This was the approach to terrorism before 9/11. It accepts the world is dangerous and manages consequences rather than causes. However, clandestine operations are the key component of this approach, and the Attorney General's belief that even outside legal opinion does not protect agents could prevent this from being executable.

The third is ceding Afghanistan to squalor but redoubling our partnership with Pakistan. Many in the so-called Muslim world are surprised at our effort in Afghanistan, a society they consider at the far margin of affecting Muslim attitudes. Pakistan is understandably skeptical of American enthusiasm now, given our support for the mujaheddin, use of their intelligence community's relationships, and sanctimonious intrusiveness in their country's affairs. The Obama administration is off to a good start in relations with Pakistan, and could channel assistance for public education programs and other tools to shape a positive future in Pakistan along with our encouragement and assistance in their fight against extremism. A failed Afghanistan could be a containment problem if we had a successful Pakistan.

The fourth is cordoning off places we consider suspect: restricting travel and immigration, considering people suspect by passport rather than action. Of course, this categorical denial diminishes our ability to foster moderation in those societies by closing them off to education, relatives, and experiences that show them a different America than terrorists paint. Moreover, it redoubles the punishment of people unfortunate enough to be born in a society riven by terrorists in their midst.

The fifth, and I believe least damaging, alternative would be for the administration to broaden its scope of cooperation with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, even Iran and other countries that might be willing to adopt common cause with us for the long and arduous work of building an Afghanistan that would not be a threat to its own people and ours. This would require acknowledging to the Russians our culpability in their failed occupation of Afghanistan, working with them and the Chinese on border control measures they use repressively with their own publics but would help separate the problems of Afghanistan from those of surrounding countries, addressing corruption when it inevitably occurs, and numerous other unpalatable compromises.

But that is the work of coalition warfare. The only difference between that and what we are doing now is that we'd be making the compromises with countries that share fewer of our values and more of our interests in Afghanistan.

By Kori Schake

Debate is heating up over strategy and requirements for the war in Afghanistan. General McChrystal has completed his assessment of what would be needed to prosecute the war successfully. It reportedly advocates a shift in thinking about the problem from destroying Al Qaeda to protecting the Afghan people, and conveys that along with the conclusion that the people who decide whether we win or lose in Afghanistan are the Afghans.

Purportedly at Secretary Gates's request, McChrystal's assessment does not include a recommended troop increase. The Secretary evidently encouraged the General to hold off on the number and let the strategic approach be reviewed first. McChrystal's report supposedly contains three options of force increase: a 10,000 troop, high risk approach; a 25,000 medium risk option; and a risk-minimizing option of 45,000 additional troops.

Senator Feingold has argued in the Wall Street Journal that our mission in Afghanistan is undermining American national security. That's a serious charge, and he makes a defensible case for redirecting toward a level of engagement more proportionate to the terrorist threat, with a "focused military mission," increased pressure on the Karzai government to govern well, and a flexible timeline for withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan. In short, Feingold argues for doing in Afghanistan what the Obama administration has done in Iraq.

Crucial to Feingold's argument is that the Afghan people resent our military involvement. Both McChrystal, and now Gates, are persuaded that is not true. They argue that how we operate in Afghanistan will determine Afghan support to a much greater degree than the size of the force. Gates for the first time yesterday signaled his support for further force increases on that basis, indicating he will not be a political firewall for the White House if McChrystal and Mullen advocate politically uncomfortable increases.

Afghanistan was always going to be a central national security issue, because President Obama had campaigned and carried over into governance his argument that it was the "right" war and negligently under-resourced during the Bush administration. Even with domestic anti-war sentiment on the rise and a potential rebellion by Congressional Democrats against funding the Afghan mission, Obama is seemingly trapped into supporting the military commander's troop requests. Hard to imagine the Houdini contortion that lets him sustain his claim that his predecessor neglected the most important war and then refuse troops to a commander who you put into position and who is supported by a well-respected Defense Secretary.

Yet the President may -- and perhaps should -- do exactly that, and for reasons that are laudable in our system of civil-military relations. The American way of organizing for warfare has distinct responsibilities for the leading military and civilian participants. To work up the ladder, it's the military commander's job to survey the requirements for success and make recommendations. It's the job of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to evaluate the military judgment of that strategy and resourcing, advising the Secretary and the President on its soundness and other possible courses of military action. It's the Secretary of Defense's job to figure out how to provide those resources from a limited pool of people and equipment, to identify and manage the risk it creates for other operations and objectives (e.g., Iraq, managing China's rise, deterring North Korea, etc). It is the Commander in Chief's job to establish the war's objectives and determine whether they merit the resources it would require to be successful. He may determine the objectives are too costly in themselves, or that achieving them would distract too much effort from other national priorities, or that we do not have the necessary partners in the Karzai government to achieve our objectives.

It should go without saying that it is not the National Security Advisor's job to intimidate military commanders into dialing down their requests to politically comfortable levels, although that is what Jim Jones is reported to have done when visiting Afghanistan during the McChrystal review. Such politicization of military advice ought to be especially noxious to someone who'd been both the Commandant of the Marine Corps and a Combatant Commander. When the Bob Woodward article recounting Jones' attempted manipulation as published, Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen commendably defended McChrystal's independence. It is also curious that the one person invisible in this debate, as in the debate about relieving General McKiernan, is the CENTCOM commander, General Petraeus.

But beneficially and importantly for our country, policy debates over the war in Afghanistan indicate that the system of civil-military relations is clearly working as designed. We owe much to Gates, Mullen, and McChrystal for shielding the process from politicization and providing military advice the President needs to make decisions only he can make.

By Kori Schake

Assistant to the President John Brennan gave a speech yesterday, ostensibly a landmark address. He assured listeners that "the fight against terrorists and violent extremists has been returned to its right and proper place: no longer defining -- indeed, distorting-our entire national security and foreign policy, but rather serving as a vital part of those larger policies."

It is tempting to lampoon Brennan's remarks for the risible and solipsistic rhetoric (e.g., "like the world itself, [Obama's] views are nuanced, not simplistic; practical, not ideological.") -- or to once again express my concern that the administration might actually believe the refrain that the president "rejects the false choice between ensuring our national security and upholding civil liberties." This seems to be mistaking slogans for solutions, as Edward R. Murrow cautioned against.

But the standard for measuring Brennan's remarks is what they contain that is new policy. With the exception of Guantanamo, which the president has declared he'll close but six months later has not yet provided a program to achieve, the program sounds remarkably like Bush administration practices. Defeat al Qaeda, check. Hold Afghanistan, check. Partnership with Pakistan, check. Sharing intelligence and training militaries in East Africa, check. Going after terrorist financing, check. Disrupting terrorist operations, check. Prevent terrorists from getting nuclear weapons, check. Ensure our military has the troops and the tools it needs, check. Strengthen the intelligence community, check. Defend the homeland, check.

Even in the areas Brennan was claiming radical departures from Bush policies there is striking continuity. Brennan showcased "ending the war in Iraq" as an administration achievement. He somehow forgot to mention the glide path was set by the Bush administration in signing the Statue of Forces Agreement before President Obama was even elected. All Team Obama did was not carry out the president's campaign promise of a faster drawdown.

And in the doubling down on troops in Afghanistan without a political or economic or justice or drug strategy to bring a "whole of government approach" to the problem actually out-Bushes the Bush administration. Former Vice President Cheney would have much more damagingly rebuked Obama's approach to national security by pointing out it is no different from Bush's.

The only actual variance with Bush administration practice I found is rejecting the name "war on terror." There is considerable merit in this approach. Referring to a "war on terror" gives our enemies a validation we should be smart enough to deny them. It offends many who want to support us. Our preoccupation is not shared by other countries that are not the target of al Qaeda.

But it is unfair to the Bush administration to suggest they were not engaged with the Muslim world on issues of importance to those countries and societies. The Bush administration rightly understood the crisis in the so-called "Muslim world" about tolerance and modernity. Brennan says this challenge is "ultimately not a military operation but a political, economic, and social campaign to meet the basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people." Absolutely right. Which is why the Bush administration put so much effort into issues like democracy promotion, poverty alleviation, free trade, security assistance, and disease eradication.

Brennan was not disavowing that we are fighting a war, nor that the enemy has a virulent religious ideology and uses the killing of civilians as a tactic. In fact, he reaffirmed it, quoting President Obama saying "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred." Brennan himself continues, "and to win this war against al Qaeda, the administration continues to be unrelenting, using every tool in our toolbox and every arrow in our quiver."

So the objective is no different, the full range of tools will continue to be used ... only the name will be different. The fun will start when administration begins looking for some shorthand way to describe what is not the "global war on terror." The best entry into the acronym contest so far comes (not surprisingly) from a witty soldier I know in the military's Special Operations Command: the Joint Interagency Homeland Active Defense, or JIHAD.

Let us hope the Obama administration really is changing so little in their approach to fighting the terrorist threats our country faces, and that they don't believe their own rhetoric about there being no trade-offs between our values and our security. A change in the "war on terror" language is beneficial. But they should not misunderstand that good people are daily making decisions in which they have to make trade-offs between our values and the risks to our society. The Obama administration's own language creates serious problems for these people as they protect the rest of us. As no less an expert on terror than Leon Trotsky tells us, "you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

By Kori Schake

This weekend we celebrate our country's independence and the courage of those brave men who met in congress in Philadelphia to chart a path to greater liberty. Despite the considerable effort Jefferson goes to in the Declaration to enumerate the crown's depredations, and the very real grievances Americans had against the British government, we stand now far enough from the colonial experience to acknowledge we rebelled against perhaps the most humane and legally responsible government of its time.

And yet we rebelled. We are a country founded on the belief that people have rights, and they loan them in limited ways for limited purposes to their government. We were made great by distrust of a largely beneficial British government, and we remain great by distrust of our own. 

Which is what makes our president's response to Iran's elections so discouraging. America's reflex -- our natural position as a country -- is to stand with a people against their government when that government is infringing upon their natural rights. But our president chose the course of deference to an authoritarian government as it repressed its own people.

We do not know whether the Iranian election was fair. It certainly strains credulity to believe Ahmadinejad won more votes than any Iranian office-seeker of all time. Or that he decisively carried every demographic in every region. But to be honest, the June vote was never going to be all that significant. What we call Iranian "moderates" are not; advocates of real change in Iran are stricken from the ballot by the hundreds. 

Nor do hundreds of thousands of Iranians filling the streets prove the election was invalid, as moving as their mute protests were. Ahmadinejad's support was likely to be rural, not urban. Muqtada al-Sadr turned similar numbers out into the streets of Iraq's cities, and we did not consider that invalidating of the elected government. Our founding fathers, John Adams in particular, worried about democracy emboldening the mob instead of the people.

But it is the behavior of the Iranian government in reaction to the protests that we should unequivocally object to. Iranian protestors were not hurling Molotov cocktails and kidnapping government officials. They were engaged in a disciplined civil disobedience of the kind that changed our country many times: independence, the civil rights movement, anti-war campaigns. We belong by their side.

Our president expressed "deep concern" and urged the Iranian government to respect its people. He had to be pulled by public reaction into condemning the Iranian government as it threatened executions of protestors. This from a president who repeatedly lectures us that there is no conflict between our values and our interests.

His "realism" and caution now are of a kind with his initial reaction to Russia's invasion of Georgia last summer, when he urged both the invader and the invaded to exercise restraint. President Obama is a "realist," unwilling to impinge on our national interests or the established international rules of state sovereignty, even when those interests and rules crush the hopes of others striving to gain by peaceful means what we have long enjoyed.

This all makes me a little homesick for what came to be called "the freedom agenda" in the Bush administration -- now that we are hearing what the alternative sounds like, now that we are taking the measure of ourselves as a nation, and now that we are willing to consign other people's freedom to our interests. It makes us a little less a force for good in the world, a little less deserving to say we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

By Kori Schake

Iraq is receding from our national consciousness (Stephen Colbert's efforts to remind us about the war notwithstanding). The combined effects of the success of the surge, President Bush signing a restrictive Status of Forces Agreement with the Maliki government last year that validated calls for an accelerated withdrawal, and President Obama’s glide path to removing U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011 have made Iraq less newsworthy than the financial crisis or the Obama administration's efforts to mimic in Afghanistan the strategy they said was not succeeding in Iraq. It no longer bleeds enough to lead. But this vanishing act may be reversed in the next few weeks.

The gains achieved by the counterinsurgency strategy, additional forces, and increasing capacity in Iraq’s own military and police forces are substantial, and they have been sustained for nearly a year. According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, enemy initiated attacks are around 150 per month now, down ten-fold from 1,600 at their height. Iraqi casualties are still staggeringly high at 500 per month, but that is 3,500 fewer Iraqis losing their lives each month from when violence was at its height. By a substantial margin, those victims are Iraqi, civilian, and Shi’ia.

Politically, Iraq has made progress on about half the “benchmarks” demanded by Congress of the Bush administration. Worryingly, those Brookings grades as unmet are: the amnesty law, de-Baathification, federal funding to the provinces, the hydrocarbons law, resolving the status of Kirkuk, and the government absorbing Sons of Iraq into the security forces. To give a measure of the Maliki government’s resistance, of the 100,000 Sons of Iraq who helped break the back of the insurgency, only 5,200 have been integrated into the Iraqi Security Forces. Each of these issues could be flashpoints for violence as the United States disengages. And add to these troubles an Iraqi budget crunch that is slowing the pace of Iraq’s security force expansion.

Bush’s Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) requires U.S. military forces to withdraw from Iraq’s cities by June 30th of this year. The withdrawal is a month before the date set for a referendum in Iraq on the SOFA. The cabinet has requested a 6 month delay in the referendum, but parliament is unlikely to be willing or able to draft legislation in advance of June 30th. If the majority of Iraqis do not vote in favor of continuing the occupation of their country in a few weeks, U.S. military forces are required to withdraw within a year. 

Most Iraq experts do not believe Maliki will support the SOFA, despite the fact that his own government negotiated and signed it. He has consistently misjudged his forces’ capacity to manage Iraq’s security threats without American help, calling for our withdrawal as early as 2005. Facing national elections at the end of the year, neither Sunni, Shi’ia, nor Sadrist parties are expected to campaign in favor of the SOFA. The only overt Iraqi support for continuing American military involvement in Iraq comes from Kurds and Iraq’s security forces. Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Khader, has said they want an American presence for at least the next five years. The odds are that Iraqis will not endorse his view.

These tricky political waters will be navigated by a U.S. ambassador with no experience in Iraq, or expertise in the language, culture or politics of the region. No more troops will go to Iraq, irrespective of what General Odierno may request; they have already been diverted to the flow of forces for Afghanistan. Iraq is now the economy-of-force war. Liberal democrats who have voted against the supplemental spending bill for Afghanistan will surely refuse the purse strings for more investment in Iraq, even if the troops could be found. 

A hasty U.S. disengagement will feed violence. This was the fundamental problem with the Iraq Survey Group’s recommendations and candidate Obama’s Iraq policy: frightened people threatened with abandonment by the only force that can push violence out of the political process are unlikely to make brave political compromises necessary to stabilize the country. This time, Iraqis may choose the satisfaction of rejecting occupation only to engender an electoral flight to the extremes six months later. It would be a sad conclusion to the Iraq war for President Bush to have set that process in motion.