Iraq June 30th
Peter Feaver, writing in the Shadow Cabinet at Foreign Policy (h/t Andrew Sullivan), opines:
Starting this week, the parade of critical junctures in Iraq will accelerate. If the Iraqis go ahead with plans to put the SoFA to a national referendum, the parade could become a stampede. When even skeptical war critics like Fareed Zakaria are penning articles about “Victory in Iraq” that read almost like a Bush valedictory speech on the topic, the opportunity for a decent outcome in Iraq seems tantalizingly close. I hope we are not jeopardizing that outcome with a premature withdrawal.
I hate to sound like a broken record on this one, but here goes. There is no “tantalizing close”-ness to victory (“decent outcome”) because what victory would be in this situation is not properly understood. In contemporary warfare, there are (at least) two phases: war and peace. They are not perfectly separable in any specific moment but over the long term they clearly are recognizable.
The War phase is what the US wins. It goes into Afghanistan in late 2001 and expels the Taliban/Al-Qaeda. It goes into Iraq in 2003 and very quickly defeats the Iraq Army and overthrows the Baath regime.
The Peace (or Reconstruction/Stabilization) phase is much harder. It is built primarily around the ability to create 1. economic opportunity and 2. legitimate political deals.
This second phase at minimum takes about 10 years. Thomas Ricks, Feaver’s ForeignPolicy.com colleague, has said repeatedly that he thinks Iraq will be a 15-20 year commitment. In Ricks’ analogy we are only entering Act IV of this V act tragedy. Act I: The Invasion Act II: The Rise of the Insurgency and the failure of the US to win the peace phase 3. The Counterinsurgency (“Surge”) 4. What is about to happen now that the US pulls down and 5. Presumably some new state going forward
The (second) Iraq War started in 2003. So 10 years (the minimum) is already 2013, four years away. So no we are not tantalizingly close to four years from now. And the decisions to pull out of the cities is part of a long term drawdown/exit from the country. To think that victory (cough cough, decent outcome) is tantalizingly close or whatever linguistic expression one prefers (“victory is within reach”, is “around the corner”, etc) is to still think in terms of War. [Read more →]
June 29, 2009 12 Comments
