I Cogitate

Getting out of Iraq: What’s the right idea when all ideas are bad?

James Fallows
November 30, 2006

For much of the last five years I have been writing about the buildup to the Iraq war, the management of the war, and the war’s likely consequences. Apart from this article in the Atlantic a year and a half ago, I have avoided writing or saying much about what the United States should do next in Iraq. About the general management of the “war on terror” ­ sure, no problem, as shown in one article from early in 2005 and another from a few months ago. But as for the “best” way to deal with the worst strategic error in modern American history, I’ve had nothing useful to say.

There was a natural but not so high-minded reason I felt this way. Having been against this venture from the start, I had no stomach for coming up with “solutions” to problems that I thought ahead of time were likely to prove insoluble. (Example one: maintaining U.S. presence long enough to ensure public order, and thereby let the economy recover and the institutions of civil society emerge ­ despite the certainty that a non-Islamic, non-Arabic speaking force of armed foreigners would be seen as “occupiers” rather than as “liberators” within weeks. Example two: finding a way for Iraq’s disparate groups to resolve their arguments and go on as one unified state, absent the oppressive strong-man figures who previously had held the country together.) Such tasks would have been difficult ­ in my view, essentially impossible ­ in the best of circumstances. We’ll never know whether that pessimistic view was correct, because the circumstances of the occupation, far from being the best, were just about the worst.

There was another reason, too. The question “what do we do now?” implies that the answer will in some way be “useful.” For the last six months at least I have not thought that any available answer was good. But when I was on a book tour this fall, I couldn’t get away just with saying that. So I made a point about which I am changing my mind.

My previous point had been: this war was a bad idea, carried out with near-criminal incompetence and irresponsibility. But ­ I said ­ even those who opposed the war could not pretend that the last three and a half years had not occurred. The entire United States, including critics of the war, had taken on a responsibility not to make things even worse for the people of Iraq. And as long as the evidence suggested that conditions would become even worse for civilians ­ that the car bombings would increase, the ethnic cleansing would grow more brutal, and everyone would have as much reason to curse the United States for the way it left as for the way it came in ­ we could not “just leave.”

The painfully obvious problem at the core of the “surge” strategy

James Fallows
January 15, 2007

I don’t know why the Democrats have not made the following a central part of their criticism of the “New Way Forward” in Iraq:

On the one hand, President Bush says that the stakes are too high even to consider the possibility of “failure” in Iraq. From his speech last week:

Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September the 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.

But on the other hand, it turns there are, in fact, circumstances in which the United States can accept the failure of this effort. That would be if Iraq’s own government fails to meet the new set of standards we have now laid down for it. Thus we had the long list of (virtually impossible to achieve) objectives for the Iraqi government — fair sharing of oil revenues, control of sectarian militias, etc — backed up with these warnings:

I’ve made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended…. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

Politically, you can understand the reason for each half of the President’s schizophrenic message. He has to say that the struggle in Iraq is of world-historic proportions, to justify sustaining an unpopular effort. And he has to say that the United States will hold the Maliki government to some standard, so America does not just appear to be the paymaster for whatever the regime of the moment decides to do –including, most recently, more revenge-style “executions.”

But logically and strategically, these statements simply cannot both be true...

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