The U.S. will only win important concessions if it's really willing to pull out

The Globe and Mail
August 18, 2004
By Edward Luttwak, security analyst

Many Americans now believe that the United States is depleting its military strength, diplomatic leverage, and money in Iraq to pursue unrealistic aims.

Democracy seems to interest few Iraqis, given the widespread Shia proclivity to follow unelected clerics, the rejection of the very principle of majority rule by most Sunnis, and the preference of many Kurds for tribe and clan over elected governments. Reconstruction was supposed to advance rapidly with surging oil-export revenues, but is hardly gaining on the continuing destruction inflicted by sabotage and pervasive thievery. It's unlikely that the new Iraqi interim government will be able to oversee meaningful elections; its authority is more widely denied than recognized.

Yet few Americans are prepared to simply abandon Iraq, for that would leave the interim government, with its feeble forces of doubtful loyalty, to face the attacks of greatly emboldened Baath regime loyalists, Sunni revanchists, local and foreign Islamists, and Shia militias.

The defection of its army, police and National Guard personnel, and the government's swift collapse would then be the most likely outcome. Forms of civil war would almost certainly follow. An anarchical Iraq might offer neighbouring countries opportunities for interference, but is more likely to threaten their stability, if only by offering unpoliced bases of operation to their enemies. Worse might follow -- it usually does in the Middle East -- even to the point of outright invasions by Iran, Turkey and possibly others, which would initiate new cycles of repression and violence.

The likely consequences of an abandonment of Iraq are so bleak, few Americans are even willing to contemplate it.

That's a mistake.

It is precisely because unpredictable mayhem is so predictable for all concerned that the United States might be able to disengage from Iraq at little cost -- or even advantageously.

To see how the failures of the war and occupation might be turned into something of a success, it is useful to approach the diplomatic complications of disengagement by first considering the much simpler case of a plain military retreat. Notoriously the most difficult of military actions, retreat can degenerate into rout. Having originally chosen to withdraw to avoid the losses of remaining in place, the routed army suffers much greater losses, and perhaps total defeat.

Then there is the opposite of the rout, the deep retreat that lures the enemy beyond its culminating point of strength, until it is overstretched, unbalanced and ripe for defeat, as Napoleon was in Moscow.

Iraq has no Napoleon to unbalance. But there are different enemies, and remarkably unhelpful nominal allies whose intense mutual hostility now brings no advantage to the United States, but which could be unbalanced by a well-crafted disengagement, and forced to desist from hurting U.S. interests.

At present, because the United States is fully committed in Iraq, the Shia followers of Muqtada al-Sadr feel free to attack the same U.S. troops that elsewhere are fighting Sunnis bent on restoring their ancestral supremacy. Clerics and the population at large, whom victorious Sunnis would oppress, do nothing to stop Mr. al-Sadr. Yet the Shia would quickly revert to last year's collaboration if really convinced that the alternative was their abandonment to Saddam Hussein's loyalists.

Likewise, both Iran and Turkey have much to fear from an anarchical Iraq, from which their own dissident Kurds, among other enemies, would be able to operate. At present, because the United States is viewed as determined to stay anyway, Iran's hard-liners can pursue their anti-American vendetta by subversion, by supplying Mr. al-Sadr, and by encouraging the Syrians to infiltrate Islamist terrorists into Iraq.

For its part, our ever more nominal ally, Turkey, focuses on uniting the Turkmen minority under its leadership while dividing the Kurds. It does nothing to help the United States in its difficulties. Only if the alternative is an imminent U.S. withdrawal would Turkey prefer to help rather than to cope on its own, while the quarrelling factions in Iran might prefer passivity to active hostility -- stopping aid to Mr. al-Sadr's Mahdi militia, for example.

Even Kuwait, whose very existence depends on American power, does little to help. The Kuwait Red Crescent Society has been sending odd truckloads of food into Iraq (claiming 60-tonne loads for 20-tonne trucks), at a time when Kuwaiti subcontractors are collecting huge sums from Pentagon contracts, as well as rising oil revenues. The Saudi rulers' attitude is exemplified by their recent offer of an "Islamic" contingent to help garrison Iraq; sounding generous and courageous, the offer turned out to promise troops other than their own, and was hedged by conditions that made it worse than useless.

Yet Kuwait and Saudi Arabia would both be endangered by an anarchical Iraq. Moreover, Iran might invade Iraq's southern regions on the pretext of protecting its fellow Shiites. Once again, the alternative of a disastrous U.S. withdrawal is apt to concentrate minds wonderfully.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia should replace the U.S. taxpayer in aiding Iraq. The two could jointly sponsor peacekeeping troops, in earnest this time. While Islamic troops for all of Iraq are a bad idea -- they would be Sunnis, and most unwelcome to Iraqi Shiites -- recognizably Sunni troops would be fine for Iraq's recalcitrant Sunni towns.

So a strategy of disengagement would seek to extract real leverage from the threat of an American withdrawal that would expose neighbouring countries and local factions to the dangers of an anarchical Iraq. The threat would have to be made credible by physical preparations for an evacuation, just as real nuclear weapons were needed for deterrence.

More fundamentally, it would have to be a real threat, meant in earnest: The United States is only likely to obtain important concessions if it is truly willing to quit Iraq should those concessions be denied.

So long as the United States is tied down in Iraq by overambitious policies, it can only persist in wastefully futile aid projects and tragically futile combat against factions that should confront one another instead. A strategy of disengagement would require bold, risk-taking statecraft of a high order, and much competence in conducting many concurrent negotiations.

But it would be soundly based on the most fundamental of realities: For geographic reasons, if nothing else, others are more exposed to the consequences of a U.S. debacle in Iraq than the United States itself. It's time to collect on that difference.

Edward Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

© 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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