October 11, 2005
IN REJECTING CALLS for a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, President Bush rightly insists that the United States cannot abandon the country to the insurgents — a murderous gathering of Arab Sunni supremacists, Saddam Hussein nostalgics and Salafist terrorists. These last fanatics would become even more dangerous if invigorated by victory in Iraq.
But in presenting the victory of the killers as the only alternative to a failing military occupation, Bush is entirely wrong. It is the least likely of all possible outcomes. As U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad keeps reminding us, about 80% of Iraqis are not Sunni Arabs or Baathists, let alone Salafists, out to kill as many non-Sunnis as they can.
That 80% majority consists mostly of Arab Shiites and Kurds of all creeds, who jointly dominate the ranks of the fledgling Iraqi army and police force. Because both those forces are still lacking in morale and cohesion, it may be more important and necessary in the meantime for both Kurds and Arab Shiites to have their own well-armed militias.
Therefore, if U.S. forces are withdrawn, the insurgents would not be left triumphantly victorious in the field. They would face much more numerous Arab Shiite and Kurdish militias, as well as the largest part of the new army and police force.
What we have now are U.S. troops interposed between the insurgents and our allies in Iraq, in effect protecting our enemies from our friends.
True, there is no unity within the Shiite camp, and there have even been some firefights between the Al Mahdi militia of Muqtada Sadr and the larger Badr militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution of Iraq. Nor do the different Kurdish peshmerga militias have a unified command, and still less operationally coordinated are the different Shiite and Kurdish militia forces. That is not surprising. But as long as U.S. troops stand between them and the insurgents, there is no necessity, no incentive and no opportunity for joint Kurd-Shiite action. Things are likely to change very quickly if U.S. forces disengage.
Given that the insurgents are not only outnumbered but themselves divided, with some groups very hostile to each other, as is certainly the case between secular Baathists and the fundamentalist Salafists, the government and militia forces would hardly need a perfect union to defeat them.
The insurgents are narrow sectarians but can claim that they are legitimately resisting foreign occupation as long as U.S. troops remain in Iraq, and they can also present themselves as Muslims fighting Christian invaders. The United States is therefore paying a heavy political price for its military operations in Iraq.
Yet nobody can claim that the U.S. checkpoints and patrols, the raids and occasional offensives are reducing the ranks of the elusive insurgents. By now it should be an accepted principle that when insurgents receive or extort the support of the local population, as in the Arab Sunni areas in Iraq, not even the finest tactics by the best troops can defeat them — and certainly not the current practice of repeatedly recapturing the same insurgent-dominated towns, only to abandon them again.
U.S. military operations in Iraq could therefore be reduced without adverse consequence. The most prudent option would be an orderly disengagement of U.S. troops carefully coordinated with all forces, both official and militia. Some U.S. forces might remain indefinitely, as long as both the United States and the Iraqi government desired, to stabilize the country and dissuade foreign intrusions.
Others might prefer a different way of disengaging, but to persist in a failing
military occupation is the least prudent course in the long run.