Frederick Kagan’s take on withdrawal from Iraq

In the last two days I’ve linked to four opinion pieces on Iraq from George Will, Robert Kaplan, the New York Times editorial page, and Richard Holbrooke. Now Frederick Kagan of the AEI has weighed in from the pages of the Washington Post in an op-ed that I, at first, found puzzling and later found myself in partial agreement with.

I found Mr. Kagan’s opening sally puzzling:

It’s been coming for a long time: the idea that fixing Iraq is the Iraqis’ problem, not ours — that we’ve done all we can and now it’s up to them.

While I agree that resolving the problems in Iraq is not solely the Iraqis’ problem I think that the contrapositive is true as well: resolving the problems in Iraq is not solely America’s problem.

While I don’t agree with Mr. Bush, I certainly feel a little sorry for him. He’s getting lambasted by one side for staying the course and lambasted by the other for wavering.

But I agree with this part of his op-ed:

A rapid U.S. withdrawal would lead to catastrophe in Iraq. The presence of American troops is vital to restraining Iraqi soldiers — the Iraqis know not to participate in death squad activities when Americans are around. The fact that large numbers of U.S. troops are not embedded with the Iraqi police is a main reason for the participation of those forces in the killings. When the U.S. troops go, the Iraqi army will probably go the same way.

However, I think I agree with frequent commenter Lounsbury that the most that is likely to be achieved by continued U. S. military presence in Iraq is slowing the inevitable catastrophe. I continue to believe that this is in the U. S. vital interests because it maximizes our ability to prevent the catastrophe from spreading region-wide.

BTW “rapid U. S. withdrawal” is no strawman argument: both Russ Feingold and John Edwards, prospective Democratic presidential candidates, have argued for a U. S. withdrawal by the end of the year i.e. 2006.

So put me down at this point as a perhaps uncomfortable combination of Holbrooke and Kagan. I think we need to maintain a substantial U. S. military presence; I think we need to recognize the limitations of what can be achieved by that presence; I think we need to change our objectives; I think we need to engage more humbly and seriously with potential regional adversaries and partners.

All of this leaves the U. S. strategy on the War on Terror completely up in the air. At this
point I don’t think there is a strategy.

UPDATE

David Ignatius, writing in the Washington Post, says that that withdrawal of U. S. forces from Iraq over the next year is a done deal and, for it to be done properly, will take one of two approaches:

  1. greater devolution of powers to regions in Iraq i.e. partition accompanied by stabilization of the Sunni areas or
  2. substantial cooperation from the Syrians and Iranians.

He also notes that, for any plan to succeed, there will need to be a lot less partisan bickering. I don’t see the prospects for any of the things Mr. Ignatius suggests are necessities as being particularly bright.

ANOTHER UPDATE

I see that James Joyner reacted to the opening of Mr. Kagan’s op-ed much as I did.  He’s more optimistic about the prospects of the Iraqi Army, though.  I think, as Kagan seems to, that without the continued presence of the U. S. military that it would dissolve and its members align with the various militias.

9 comments… add one
  • The Bush administration, the neocon “pushers” of regime change and the GOP, by continually putting off facing criticism of their Iraq policy through the use of multiple Friedmans – “don’t judge us on what is happening now, wait six/twelve/eighteen months and it will be better” – have created a truly tangled problem.

    How do you unravel a Gordian Knot if the sword will not work?

    No-one, from any side, has any idea. All the plans for unknotting have the potential to create new and just as troublesome knots of their own. That’s the Bush legacy.

  • Actually–and I’m in the preliminary stages of putting together an feature length article on the topic–I’m of the mind that there’s a distinction between the military and the police/security forces. The latter are far, far more important in counterinsurgency.

  • I look forward to your post, James.

    Just for the record the anecdotal reports from Iraqi bloggers is that the police/security forces are much more compromised in the fashion that I suggested than the Iraqi Army is.

  • Some time ago, in 2004 I believe but perhaps early 2005, I suggested that the administration should change military strategy and begin by securing real control of Baghdad and other areas of Iraq like Kurdistan that were cooperative, then work outward slowly as best they could and not attempt to maintain the fiction of controlling Iraq. Now the U.S. is – belatedly -trying to regain control of Iraq’s capital and most observers expect failure.

    What can be done now ?

    Perhaps Kurdistan can be salvaged as a pro-Western, more liberal and secular enclave if we back the Kurds to the hilt and give strong guarantees to the Turks about the PKK. That’s the best case scenario coupled with only moderate ethnic cleansing/civil war in the rest of Iraq.

  • Dave:

    I thought as you are thinking re the utility of the American “control rods” slowing the inevitable until roughly this year.

    I have now come to the conclusion that the US is incapable of coming up with anything remotely resembling coherent AND effective policy, due to its own political constraints (which I believe RIGHT and LEFT share, their pointless partisan eye poking aside; each with its ideological self-pleasuring obessions taking needed things off the table, e.g. re the Right, their loony-toon reaction to the minor gaffe of the State Spokesman on Jazeerah -horrors he was speaking in Arabic….. The Left is more obvious with its wooly headed wishful thinking along the lines that everyone will be nicey nice if only the Imperialists would leave).

    As such, I do not believe US presence any longer is providing a net benefit over cost.

    Mark is right re the salvage supra, only it will be very hard to salvage even Kurdistan as the “liberal and secular” image of the Kurds is largely a nice little fiction sold by the two tribal/clan confederation leaders to the gullible Americans who like such stories (sorry Mark, but the image is largely fiction).

    However, at least Kurdistan if supported (and not as a seperate nation) provides a potential island of relative tolerance, relative stability and potential for regrowing a “stablish” not-too-authoritarian Iraq.

  • I’d characterize my own position less as hopeful than as desparate: I’m concerned about the chaos spreading outside Iraq’s borders or, more likely, being prevented from doing so by intervention by its neighbors.

    The “political constraints” you refer to are one of the two primary reasons that I opposed the invasion of Iraq in the first place. The present situation is exactly what I envisaged.

    The other reason was that I believed that it was more likely that we would be able to contain Saddam than that we would be able to construct a liberal democratic society favorable to the U. S. in Iraq (at least within the time constraints required by contemporary American politics).

    As Robert Kaplan noted every alternative for dealing with the situation is a bet and evaluating the odds is a very difficult judgment call.

  • Hi Col,

    Terms can be relative. We can call the Barzani-Talabani enclave “stable” or “friendly” or ” non-extremist” or whatever you might prefer to distinguish them from radical Sunnis and Shiites of various stripes.

    However I’m not certain we can even pull this off anyway.

  • In re: the Kurds in northern Iraq

    IMO while the area is more pacific than the rest of Iraq at this point I suspect that how liberal or democratic it is may be somewhat exaggerated. English language Kurdish bloggers, now all silent, were complaining about increasing repression (and corruption) there just as they turned out the lights. It’s unclear to me that American forces will find a haven there anyway and without them I suspect that Turkey and Iran will find intervention there irresistible.

  • My correction was not nitpicking I should note. Start using such descriptions and you start believing them, if only in the background. See FT today: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1bee4124-6620-11db-a4fc-0000779e2340,_i_rssPage=fc3334c0-2f7a-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8.html

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