Informed Speculation

Fareed Zakaria has been quite good on Iraq lately (of course, I would think that, as his thoughts have been echoing my own).  For me, a turning point in Iraq was reached on the day that Maliki shut down our operation in Sadr City to find a missing soldier.  The turning point was in my own mind; on the ground, it had been building for some time.  What happened on that day, though, was my illusions as to the odds of progress in Iraq were shattered. 

I came to realize that victory had suddenly become a very remote prospect, because we had invested so much in a democratic Iraq, and the end result was a weak leader who pandered to the majority, failed to protect the rights of the minority, sat by placidly while the death squads plunged Baghdad into violent chaos, and completely and utterly failed to build any sort of national pride and consensus.  It would be hard to exaggerate the disaster the befell us when Maliki ascended to the Prime Ministership. We needed a Churchill or a Reagan, but the dice didn’t land in our favor.

Anyway, back to Zakaria:

This is not our chessboard. The Iraqi government has authority over all the political issues in the country. We may have excellent ideas about federalism, revenue-sharing and amnesty, but the ruling coalition has to agree and then actually implement them. So far, despite our many efforts, they have refused. There is a desperate neoconservative plea for more troops to try one more time in Iraq. But a new military strategy, even with adequate forces, cannot work without political moves that reinforce it. The opposite is happening today. American military efforts are actually being undermined by Iraq’s government. The stark truth is, we do not have an Iraqi partner willing to make the hard decisions. Wishing otherwise is, well, wishful thinking.

Time is not on America’s side. Month by month, U.S. influence in Iraq is waning. Deals that we could have imposed on Iraq’s rival factions in 2003 are now impossible. A year ago, America’s ambassador to Iraq had real influence. Today he is being marginalized. Thus any new policy that requires new approaches to the neighbors and lengthy negotiations carries the cost associated with waiting.

Is all hope lost, then? Zakaria seems to think a remote chance for progress exists – provided we threaten to pull out, and mean to do so if our conditions are not met:

America’s only real leverage is the threat of withdrawal. Many outsiders fail to grasp how much political power the United States has handed over in Iraq. The Americans could not partition Iraq or distribute its revenues even if Bush decided to. But Washington can warn the ruling coalition that unless certain conditions are met, U.S. troops will begin a substantial drawdown, quit providing basic security on the streets of Iraq and instead take on a narrower role, akin to the Special Forces mission in Afghanistan.

And one last thing: for such a threat to be meaningful, we must be prepared to carry it out.

From where I sit right now, that sounds about right…the only hope to is to budge Maliki by scaring the hell out of him, unless his government falls of its own accord…no number of troops, no regional partnerships, no plan, period, has a hope of success if the Iraqi government doesn’t sign on…