Next steps: The United States needs to decide on a Plan B before the Iraq conflict passes it by.
President George W. Bush recently announced a controversial plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. Even as Congress heatedly debates the merits of the “surge,” it is not too soon to plan what to do if it fails. Americans must begin a national debate now about Plan B. Failure to do so might result in de facto support for genocidal violence, with the added risk that Iraq’s neighbors could escalate their own role in the conflict.
There are no good options for addressing Iraq’s ongoing civil war, only three bad ones: Maintain a neutral stance and attempt to use a mix of coercion and security to facilitate national reconciliation; take sides; or let the conflict burn itself out. The president’s new plan—call it Plan A—embraces the first option. But if beefing up the U.S. troop presence in Baghdad and Anbar province fails to limit the violence by this summer, the United States could find itself forced to choose between two competing visions of Plan B: taking sides or getting out.
The first option calls on the United States to take sides in Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian conflict. It is sometimes referred to as the “80 percent solution,” because it sides with the majority Shiites and Kurds in their attempts to bring Sunni insurgents to heel. Neoconservatives and administration hawks who support this strategy say it will produce undeniable facts on the ground for the Sunni minority. For the Sunnis “must come to know that they will lose everything if they don’t abandon violence as their principal political tool,” wrote Reuel Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, in The Wall Street Journal. Even some realist critics of the administration have suggested this alternative. Since “no American gesture of inclusion and pacification can propitiate the recalcitrant Sunni minority,” it’s time to side with the elected Shiite government, argued Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, and Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a recent Financial Times editorial.
Implementing this strategy would probably entail abandoning strenuous efforts at national reconciliation, drawing down U.S. troops to a sustainable level, and leaving those remaining to advise, train, and support the Shiite- and Kurd-dominated Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). A smaller number of dedicated U.S. Special Forces would focus on raids against high-value Sunni targets, especially elements of al Qaeda in Iraq. The United States would seek to balance support for the Shiites in Iraq with a confrontational stance toward Shiite Iran in the hopes of maintaining regional cooperation from moderate Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt.
Taking sides was one of the alternatives considered by the Bush administration, according to media reports, and it may represent the administration’s current Plan B if the surge fails. It would also sit well with most Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish politicians, who believe the main security challenge in Iraq is not their own militias, but the Sunni insurgency.
Many Democrats will coalesce around a different Plan B: getting out. Fueled by rising public discontent over the war and a looming presidential election, they seem poised to embrace calls for an orderly withdrawal of most U.S. combat forces over the next 12 to 18 months, combined with other steps to manage the consequences of disengagement. Most Democrats believe that victory, at least in the president’s grandiose terms, is a pipe dream. Instead, Washington should shift its objectives to managing and mitigating the worst humanitarian and geopolitical fallout from continued violence in Iraq.
U.S. troops would redeploy out of the line of fire, leaving the civil war to largely burn itself out. At the same time, the United States would try to lessen civilian suffering through targeted economic aid, peacefully relocating civilian populations into defensible enclaves and protecting refugees (perhaps in support of a Bosnia-style de facto partition), and helping the thousands of Iraqis who “collaborated” with the U.S. occupation and seek to flee their country before the death squads come for them. By engaging all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, the United States would seek to prevent Iraq’s civil war from becoming a regional conflagration.
These two possible Plan B’s have different strategic and moral implications. From a national security perspective, taking sides might give the United States at least some influence over events and the policies pursued by the Iraqi government, help prevent the establishment of an al Qaeda safe haven, and deter outside states from intervening out of fear that they would come into conflict with U.S. troops. Staying in the fight might also help maintain U.S. credibility by avoiding the perception that the United States yet again abandoned its Iraqi allies—principally the Shiites and Kurds—or retreated in the face of jihadi attacks.
