Strategic patience in Iraq
As Congress considers its next steps on Iraq War funding, it ought to heed the warning of the U.S. ambassador there: Giving Iraqis the idea that Americans are leaving the scene hurts — not helps — the slow process of Iraqi reconciliation.
“The longer and louder the debate gets” in Washington, D.C., Ambassador Ryan Crocker said in a telephone interview from Baghdad, “the more danger there is that Iraqis will conclude that we are going,” leading to “a hardening of attitudes” among sectarian factions.
He said slow progress is being made on the political front in Iraq as well as on the military side, but he said he fears that America lacks “strategic patience” and, as a veteran of service during Lebanon’s horrific civil war in the 1980s, “the potential consequences do scare me.”
Crocker’s message on the effects of deadline and withdrawal proposals in Washington differs from the one dispensed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said last month that “the debate in Congress … has been helpful in demonstrating to the Iraqis that American patience is limited.”
Democratic leaders have cited Gates to argue that they are advancing U.S. interests by challenging Bush administration policy in Iraq and pushing deadlines for troop withdrawals.
But Crocker said it makes his job of achieving reconciliation harder. “It is one thing when the administration says our patience is not unlimited. When you have Congress talking about timetables, withdrawal, cutting off funds, ‘the war is lost,’ etc., I think you move from useful pressure to where it convinces them we are leaving.”
Instead of working on reconciliation, he said, the parties “start calculating where they want to be when we’re gone. It takes everyone back to their worst nature.”
Shiites, he said, resist reconciling with Sunnis “because it might strengthen the Baathists, who want to put the boot back on their neck. Sunnis say, ‘build the trenches, man the barricades. (Shiites) have the numbers, so get ready to fight.’ And the Kurds up in the North figure they should run for independence because there isn’t going to be a unified Iraq.”
He said that “things are happening” on the reconciliation agenda, but on a timetable that can’t possibly work as fast as the political timetable in Washington. “I worry that our timetable is running so fast, it will derail theirs.”
It’s progress, he said, that Sunni tribal leaders and secular Sunni insurgents are killing Al Qaeda operatives, possibly including its leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, and that Shiite militant Muqtada al-Sadr is in Iran and that his followers are splintering.
When Sadr ordered his affiliated ministers out of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s cabinet, Crocker said, two of them refused to leave, and one asked for U.S. assistance in remaining.
When I asked Crocker about his confidence level in al-Maliki, he said, “He’s an intelligent, fundamentally decent individual who has one of the most hellish jobs on Earth. I think the Arabs — the Saudis and others — have been completely wrong to accuse him of being a tool of the Iranians.
Crocker said the consequences of U.S. failure could include “really horrific” street-by-street sectarian warfare in still-mixed Baghdad, plus triumph for U.S. enemies such as Al Qaeda and Iran, and a regional conflict.
It’s a warning to Congress. This may be Bush’s war. And failure would be primarily Bush’s doing. But Democrats now share responsibility for how it ends. Pulling American troops out is not the end of the story. And a Democratic president might well have to pick up the bloody pieces. The situation calls for strategic patience.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.