Global Policy Forum

But Many Agree That a Nuanced Withdrawal Is Needed to Avoid More Sectarian Strife, Civil War

By Anna Badkhen

Experts analyzing how the United States can disentangle itself from the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq disagree over many aspects of strategy, but they are united in one view -- the complexity and scale of the problem defies simple solutions. How can the United States leave without allowing the current Sunni-Shiite bloodletting to escalate into a Bosnia-style civil war or creating an even more fertile breeding ground for militant jihadists? And what can it do to stop Iran -- Iraq's Shiite neighbor and the most potent regional military power -- from filling the vacuum when American troops leave? With the current debate on Iraq framed between the intention of the Bush administration to "stay the course" and the demand by many Democratic lawmakers to withdraw, which President Bush has decried as "cut and run," is there any middle ground?

Many Iraq experts outside the government agree that the nation needs a more nuanced exit strategy, but they cannot agree on how to go about it. "We're choosing between bad and worse," said Shibley Telhami, an expert on the Middle East at the University of Maryland.

The Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel charged by Congress with reviewing Iraq policies, is expected to articulate new choices and call for changes in strategy. James Baker, the former secretary of state who is co-chairing the panel, said Sunday that those recommendations would likely be issued after the fall elections. "Our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives ... of stay-the-course and cut-and-run," he said on ABC's "This Week."

Some say the solution is to start withdrawing American troops, now nearly 150,000 strong, from major Iraqi cities, where they are easy targets for sectarian militias and Sunni insurgents, and concentrating them instead along Iraq's borders and in the more U.S.-friendly Kurdish north. About a third of them are now stationed in Baghdad, where they come under daily attacks as they try to aid the Iraqi government's so-far-unsuccessful effort to stabilize the capital. "We've inserted ourselves in the main cities, and we've put most of our facilities into main areas where it's hard for us to stand on the sidelines, and it's also difficult for us not to get involved in the low-level civil war that already has begun," said National Interest magazine editor Nicholas Gvosdev, who advocates pulling U.S. forces to Iraq's borders. Gvosdev recommends sending National Guard units home immediately, and drawing down the number of regular forces in Iraq. Stationing the troops along Iraq's borders would prevent neighboring powers from sending arms and fighters into Iraq, he said.

Zachary Shore, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, said the troops should be moved to northern Iraq instead. This strategy would allow the United States to continue training Iraqi forces, while at the same time helping build up the infrastructure in the relatively successful, quasi-independent Kurdish region, he said. "You don't reinforce failure, you reinforce success," said Shore, whose latest book, "Breeding Bin Ladens," came out Friday.

Removing American troops from most of Iraq could open the way for Iran, warned George Friedman, founder and chief executive of Strategic Forecasting, a private security consulting group in Texas. Iran already wields enormous influence over Iraq's Shiite militias in Baghdad and in the Shiite south, he said, and without the buffer of U.S. troops, it could expand its reach to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, essentially taking control of Persian Gulf oil.

"Withdrawal essentially creates Iranian hegemony. The Iranians are far and away the most powerful regional power and will be in a position to dominate the region if the U.S. goes away" and dictate the price of oil, Friedman said. "The consequences of (the region) being dominated by Tehran really matters to you as you travel around the (United States) in the car."

Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia who helped negotiate an end to the Muslim-Croat conflict, dismissed Friedman's concerns. "Iran is already there. It already dominates the (Shiite) south, and has a huge influence with the central government in Baghdad," said Galbraith, now an expert on Iraq at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington. "A U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will not increase Iran's influence because we have already turned much of the country over to the Iranians." Galbraith advocates splitting Iraq along ethnic and religious lines, creating three independent states: a Kurdish north, a Shiite Arab south, and a largely Sunni Arab central Iraq.

This so-called three-state solution would be a natural continuation of a divide that "has already happened on the ground," said Galbraith, who visited northern Iraq last month. If the United States were to encourage Iraq to adopt it, "we should pull troops out of the southern part of Iraq tomorrow and then fairly rapidly from Baghdad," where "we're not actually doing anything to contain civil war," he said. The United States should then encourage Iraq's Sunnis to create their own security force to defend themselves from Shiite militias and radical Sunni jihadists, said Galbraith.

But John Pike, who heads the GlobalSecurity.org military think tank in Washington, said such a solution would not work in central Iraq, because it is not religiously or ethnically homogeneous. For example, Baghdad, home to about one-fourth of Iraq's population, has an almost even number of Shiite and Sunni Arabs. Christians, ethnic Kurds and Turkomans also live in the capital. "Any way you draw the border, you'll have an enormous number of people who will be on the wrong side," Pike said. He predicted that Sunnis also would oppose the three-state solution for economic reasons, because it would leave them without access to Iraq's oil riches, concentrated in the north and south. "All they will have is sand."

He said the U.S. military presence is the only thing that stands between the current, comparatively low-level bloodletting, which "is certainly horrific for the Iraqi people in some parts of that country," and a "genocidal civil war" that would erupt across most of the country if American troops pulled out.

Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution, said that leaving Iraq to disintegrate into "Bosnia-style ethnic cleansing" would further damage Washington's already-frayed image in the Middle East. "Leaving aside the moral issue, if Iraq explodes into a civil war, you make a mockery of the goal of trying to help Muslims, and that makes it hard to convince Muslims around the world that we're trying to be their friends," he said. "You're breeding more international anger."

Instead, O'Hanlon said the United States must put more effort into stabilizing Iraq before it pulls its troops out: improving the Iraqi security forces and trying to disarm the militias that have infiltrated them, especially the police; helping combat unemployment as high as 75 percent; and negotiating with Iraq's neighbors to secure their assistance in trying to improve security inside the country.

Telhami argued that the U.S. presence cannot improve Iraq's stability. "It's a leap of faith, there is no evidence of that," he said, pointing out that since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, terrorist attacks on U.S. troops have increased, and as has sectarian strife. He advocates a staged withdrawal of troops to U.S.-friendly countries in the region, such as Kuwait and Jordan. "As long as there are American forces on the Iraqi soil, they will be seen as a problem," he said. "It might take two years to completely disentangle, but the U.S. should completely disentangle. That doesn't mean that significant withdrawal could not be completed within a year."

If the United States chose to withdraw from Iraq immediately, removing troops could take "a month, a few weeks, if you do it 24 by 7," Pike estimated. That would not be enough time to dismantle all installed facilities and the like, "so we'd have to abandon billions of dollars of equipment," said Kalev Sepp, a defense analysis professor at the Naval Postgraduate School who travels to Iraq frequently.

What would happen afterward is much less clear. "We've gotten into a position where staying is untenable, withdrawing is untenable, and expanding (the U.S. presence) is untenable," said Friedman. "It's the one that the American public is gonna have to sort out."