On Friday, October 21, US President Barack Obama announced that “the long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year,” marking the conclusion of a nearly 9-year war that cost the U.S more than 4,400 lives, more than 30,000 injured servicemen and servicewomen, and upwards of one trillion dollars.
As American troops in Iraq continue their phased withdrawal, many questions remain, primary of which is whether Iraq is in fact “safe, stable, and self-reliant,” as the White House claims, or whether a war-torn society, governed by a fractured and frail government, can resist and overcome the challenges that lie ahead. And lurking in the shadows is Shiite Iran. As described this past July by then-Joint Chiefs Chairman US Adm. Mike Mullen, “Iran is playing an out-sized role [in Iraq].”
The precipitate departure of US forces from Iraq stands to further empower Tehran’s mullahs, as another roadblock to their nuclear-weapon-fueled pursuit of nuclear weapons and Middle East hegemony will soon be removed.
OBAMA’S TRAGIC CHOICE FOR IRAQ
Max Boot
National Post, November 7, 2011
Friday afternoon is a traditional time to bury bad news, so at 12:49 p.m. on Oct. 21, U.S. President Obama strode into the White House briefing room to “report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.…” He acted as though this represented a triumph, but it was really a defeat.… Why did we fail?
The popular explanation is that the Iraqis refused to provide legal immunity for U.S. troops if they are accused of breaking Iraq’s laws. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself said: “When the Americans asked for immunity, the Iraqi side answered that it was not possible.… Now that the issue of immunity was decided and that no immunity to be given, the withdrawal has started.”
But Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi political figures expressed exactly the same reservations about immunity in 2008 during the negotiation of the last Status of Forces Agreement. Indeed those concerns were more acute at the time because there were so many more U.S. personnel in Iraq—nearly 150,000, compared with fewer than 50,000 today. So why was it possible for the Bush administration to reach a deal with the Iraqis but not for the Obama administration?
Quite simply it was a matter of will: President Bush really wanted to get a deal done, whereas Mr. Obama did not. Mr. Bush spoke weekly with Mr. Maliki by video teleconference. Mr. Obama had not spoken with Mr. Maliki for months before calling him in late October to announce the end of negotiations. Mr. Obama and his senior aides did not even bother to meet with Iraqi officials at the United Nations General Assembly in September. The administration didn’t even open talks on renewing the Status of Forces Agreement until this summer, a few months before U.S. troops would have to start shuttering their remaining bases to pull out by Dec. 31. The previous agreement, in 2008, took a year to negotiate.
The recent negotiations were jinxed from the start by the insistence of U.S. State Department and Pentagon lawyers that any immunity provisions be ratified by the Iraqi parliament—something that the U.S. hadn’t insisted on in 2008 and that would be almost impossible to get today. In many other countries, including throughout the Arab world, U.S. personnel operate under a Memorandum of Understanding that doesn’t require parliamentary ratification. Why not in Iraq? Mr. Obama could have chosen to override the lawyers’ excessive demands, but he didn’t.
He also undercut his own negotiating team by regularly bragging—in political speeches delivered while talks were ongoing—of his plans to “end the war in Iraq.” Even more damaging was his August decision to commit only 3,000 to 5,000 troops to a possible mission in Iraq post-2011. This was far below the number judged necessary by our military commanders. They had asked for nearly 20,000.…
When the White House then said it would consent to no more than 5,000 troops—a number that may not even have been able to adequately defend itself, much less carry out other missions—the Iraqis understandably figured that the U.S. wasn’t serious about a continued commitment. Iraqi political leaders may have been willing to risk a domestic backlash to support a substantial commitment of 10,000 or more troops. They were not willing to stick their necks out for such a puny force. Hence the breakdown of talks.
There is still a possibility for close U.S.-Iraqi military cooperation under the existing Strategic Framework Agreement. This could authorize joint exercises between the two countries and even the presence of a small U.S. Special Operations contingent in Iraq. But it is no substitute for the kind of robust U.S. military presence that would be needed to bolster Iraq’s nascent democracy and counter interference from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other regional players.…
Iraq will increasingly find itself on its own, even though its air forces still lack the capability to defend its own airspace and its ground forces cannot carry out large-scale combined arms operations. Multiple terrorist groups also remain active, and almost as many civilians died in Iraq last year as in Afghanistan.
So the end of the U.S. military mission in Iraq is a tragedy, not a triumph—and a self-inflicted one at that.
(Max Boot is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.)
WHO LOST IRAQ?
Charles Krauthammer
National Review, November 3, 2011
Barack Obama was a principled opponent of the Iraq War from its beginning. But when he became president in January 2009, he was handed a war that was won. The surge had succeeded. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been routed, driven to humiliating defeat by an Anbar Awakening of Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the infidel Americans. Even more remarkably, the Shiite militias had been taken down, with American backing, by the forces of Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. They crushed the Sadr militias from Basra to Sadr City.
Al-Qaeda decimated. A Shiite prime minister taking a decisively nationalist line. Iraqi Sunnis ready to integrate into a new national government. U.S. casualties at their lowest ebb in the entire war. Elections approaching. Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.
He blew it. Negotiations, such as they were, finally collapsed last month. There is no agreement, no partnership. As of December 31, the American military presence in Iraq will be liquidated.
And it’s not as if that deadline snuck up on Obama. He had three years to prepare for it. Everyone involved, Iraqi and American, knew that the 2008 SOFA calling for full U.S. withdrawal was meant to be renegotiated. And all major parties but one (the Sadr faction) had an interest in some residual stabilizing U.S. force, like the postwar deployments in Japan, Germany, and Korea.
Three years, two abject failures. The first was the administration’s inability, at the height of American post-surge power, to broker a centrist nationalist coalition governed by the major blocs—one predominantly Shiite (Maliki’s), one predominantly Sunni (Ayad Allawi’s), one Kurdish—that among them won a large majority (69 percent) of seats in the 2010 election.
Vice President Joe Biden was given the job. He failed utterly. The government ended up effectively being run by a narrow sectarian coalition where the balance of power is held by the relatively small (12 percent) Iranian-client Sadr faction.
The second failure was the SOFA itself. The military recommended nearly 20,000 troops, considerably fewer than our 28,500 in Korea, 40,000 in Japan, and 54,000 in Germany. The president rejected those proposals, choosing instead a level of 3,000 to 5,000 troops.
A deployment so risibly small would have to expend all its energies simply protecting itself—the fate of our tragic, mission-less 1982 Lebanon deployment—with no real capability to train the Iraqis, build their U.S.-equipped air force, mediate ethnic disputes (as we have successfully done, for example, between local Arabs and Kurds), operate surveillance and special-ops bases, and establish the kind of close military-to-military relations that undergird our strongest alliances.
The Obama proposal was an unmistakable signal of unseriousness. It became clear that he simply wanted out, leaving any Iraqi foolish enough to maintain a pro-American orientation exposed to Iranian influence, now unopposed and potentially lethal. Message received. [Last month], Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurds—for two decades the staunchest of U.S. allies—visited Tehran to bend a knee to both Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It didn’t have to be this way. Our friends did not have to be left out in the cold to seek Iranian protection. Three years and a won war had given Obama the opportunity to establish a lasting strategic alliance with the Arab world’s second most important power.
He failed, though he hardly tried very hard. The excuse is Iraqi refusal to grant legal immunity to U.S. forces. But the Bush administration encountered the same problem, and overcame it. Obama had little desire to. Indeed, he portrays the evacuation as a success, the fulfillment of a campaign promise.
But surely the obligation to defend the security and the interests of the nation supersede personal vindication. Obama opposed the war, but when he became commander-in-chief the terrible price had already been paid in blood and treasure. His obligation was to make something of that sacrifice, to secure the strategic gains that sacrifice had already achieved.
He did not, failing at precisely what this administration so flatters itself for doing so well: diplomacy. After years of allegedly clumsy brutish force, Obama was to usher in an era of not hard power, not soft power, but smart power.
Which turns out in Iraq to be…no power. Years from now we will be asking not “Who lost Iraq?”—that already is clear—but “Why?”
THE STRONGEST TRIBE
Harold Rhode
Jerusalem Post, November 9, 2011
Most Iraqi political leaders of all factions have privately said that they want US troops to stay. In Baghdad, you could hear them time and time and again imploring us to do so. Cultural pride, however, a major component of Middle Eastern culture, does not allow them to say so publicly, lest they appear weak in a rough neighborhood. They can, however, respond to a request that appears to be from others. We might, for example, say that we would like to stay in Iraq in order to help ensure security, and the Iraqis would then be appearing to be to “acceding to our request,” and their cultural pride would remain intact.…
Absent such a statement from Obama, the Iraqis had no choice other than to ask the Americans to leave.
What alarms the Iraqis is precisely that bad neighborhood, where almost all of their neighbors—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and even Jordan—have been doing their utmost to make sure that the remarkable experiment of a democratic country…totally fails.
As long as some Americans remain in Iraq and are willing to do what is needed to do counter the negative involvement of Iraq’s neighbors, especially Iran, Iraq’s politicians believe they have the maneuverability to stand up and continue working towards a system of government that that includes every ethnic and religious group, and that at least quietly could stand up to its neighbors.
Anbar, for example—the Sunni-dominated area in western Iraq—was, until President George Bush’s surge in the mid-2000s, well on its way to becoming an al-Qaeda-dominated statelet. Before the surge, only three of the 21 major tribal groupings supported the US in some way. When President Bush sent in the Marines, who demonstrated that America was serious about eliminating the terrorists, however, within less than a year almost all of the Sunni tribes had switched from supporting the fundamentalists to supporting the Americans—all because America had demonstrated that it was the strongest power in the area. As the locals put it, the Marines were the strongest “tribe” in the area. Of course, as Osama bin Laden observed about people respecting the “Strong Horse,” everyone wanted to be allied with the winner.…
How come all the Iraqi leaders are now jumping on the bandwagon to demand that the Americans leave, even though the Iraqis are at the same time quaking in their boots at the prospect? Iraq’s leaders know that in reality, they are too weak stand up by themselves to the despotic rulers of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
They also know that President Obama repeatedly declared during his campaign and in the first year of his presidency that he wanted America out of Iraq. They must have correctly heard it as an announcement that America was not to be relied on. If the Americans say they are leaving, then the Iraqis have no choice other than to make deals with whoever they are stuck with.…
[This] is potentially a recipe for disaster in Iraq. If we do not wish the entire region to be overrun by Muslim extremists sitting on half the world’s oil and using it to fund the Islamic obligation of a worldwide Caliphate—as is being implanted now in Europe, Africa and North and South America—we will need to return to Iraq. At that time, though, it will be at even a greater cost of life and treasure—which probably means that we will not.
Instead, we shall probably continue accommodating the Islamists, as we have already been doing in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Turkey and South America.
Obama’s desire to bring American troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of making a commitment to leave a small force as his military emphatically recommended, may instead spell failure for our missions in both places. But evidently Obama’s political agenda matters more to him than the security of the West.
(Harold Rhode, a Ph.D. in Islamic History, worked on Iraq in the office of the Secretary of Defense. He is now a senior adviser to Hudson Institute, New York.)
LEAVING IRAQ, U.S. FEARS NEW SURGE OF QAEDA TERROR
Michael S. Schmidt & Eric Schmitt
NY Times, November 5, 2011
As the United States prepares to withdraw its troops from Iraq by year’s end, senior American and Iraqi officials are expressing growing concern that Al Qaeda’s offshoot here, which just a few years ago waged a debilitating insurgency that plunged the country into a civil war, is poised for a deadly resurgence.
Qaeda allies in North Africa, Somalia and Yemen are seeking to assert more influence after the death of Osama bin Laden and the diminished role of Al Qaeda’s remaining top leadership in Pakistan. For its part, Al Qaeda in Iraq is striving to rebound from major defeats inflicted by Iraqi tribal groups and American troops in 2007, as well as the deaths of its two leaders in 2010.
Although the organization is certainly weaker than it was at its peak five years ago and is unlikely to regain its prior strength, American and Iraqi analysts said the Qaeda franchise is shifting its tactics and strategies—like attacking Iraqi security forces in small squads—to exploit gaps left by the departing American troops and to try to reignite sectarian violence in the country.… “I cringe whenever anybody makes a pronouncement that Al Qaeda is on its last legs,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, the American military’s top spokesman in Iraq.…
The Qaeda affiliate’s nascent resurgence has helped fuel a debate between some Pentagon officials on one side, who are seeking a way to permit small numbers of American military trainers and Special Operations forces to operate in Iraq, and some White House officials on the other, who are eager to close the final chapter on a divisive eight-year war that cost the lives of more than 4,400 troops.…
According to General Buchanan, there are 800 to 1,000 people in Al Qaeda’s Iraq network, “from terrorists involved in operations to media to finance to fighters.” A document released by the military in July 2010 said Al Qaeda had about 200 “hard core” fighters in Iraq. The weak Iraqi economy is providing a large pool of young and vulnerable recruits, analysts say.… Foreigners make up only a small percentage of the organization’s membership base.…
Although the United States is withdrawing all but a handful of its remaining 33,000 troops, leaving a few to guard the American Embassy, both governments are discussing a continuing military partnership. Among the main American goals is for the Iraqi government to approve a contingent of American Special Forces that would train and assist Iraqi security forces.… The White House [has] announced that President Obama will meet with [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] Maliki on Dec. 12 to discuss the continuing “strategic partnership” between the United States and Iraq.…
WITH U.S. TROOPS LEAVING,
IS IRAQ A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY NOW?
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
Pajamas Media, November 2, 2011
As the U.S. troop presence in Iraq continues to diminish, it is worth examining what sort of political system has been left behind. Is Iraq really a democracy?… Sadly, the answer to this question cannot be in the affirmative.
It is of course true that in March 2010, Iraq conducted elections recognized as free and fair by the UN. However, as Osama al-Nujayfi, the Sunni speaker for the Iraqi parliament, astutely observed, democracy is more than just about holding elections. In many of the other essential aspects of a truly democratic society, Iraq’s status is far from satisfactory.
Absence of rule of law: Most Iraqi politicians still think they are above accountability to the law. Illustrating this tendency is the case of the arrest warrant that was issued against Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers form a key part of the ruling coalition, concerning his suspected role in the killing of moderate Shi’ite cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei in Najaf in April 2003.
The case has now been dropped entirely, with the Supreme Judicial Council claiming that it had no evidence against al-Sadr or any reason to interrogate him. Bizarrely, the council’s spokesman, Abdul Sattar Bayraktar, is denying that there was ever an arrest warrant issued by an Iraqi court, additionally affirming that “no lawsuits exist originally against the leader of the Sadrist movement in the Iraqi courts.” In fact, a senior Iraqi judge, Raed al-Juhi, issued an arrest warrant against al-Sadr in April 2004, and the al-Khoei family filed a lawsuit against al-Sadr at the Court of Najaf in 2003.…
Persecution of political opponents: Following Obama’s announcement that all U.S. troops would be home for the Christmas holidays, reports emerged of a large number of arrests of “Baathists,” with generic accusations of plotting to destabilize and overthrow the political system.… However, being a former member of the Baath party is not the same thing as a being a terrorist, and as Article 135 of the Iraqi constitution stipulates, simply having been a member of the Baath party is “not a sufficient basis for transfer to the court.…”
It follows that the current wave of arrests is likely to be yet another attempt by the Shi’ite parties to crack down on political opponents with vague allegations of Baathism, a key part of their electoral campaign in 2010.
Squabbling among the politicians: More than 19 months after the elections in March 2010, a government has still not been fully formed, owing to the preoccupation of the country’s politicians with their own rewards of power. This is not merely a problem of sectarianism, but also a case of personal power struggles, particularly evident in the manner in which the premier, Nouri al-Maliki, has tried to win as much control of the government as possible for his State of Law bloc.
Indeed, in violation of the compromise agreement forged by Massoud Barzani in December 2010 that allowed al-Maliki to have a second term as prime minister, the premier is still attempting to take control of the Defense and Security ministries that should have been awarded to Ayad Allawi’s al-Iraqiya bloc, which won the largest single number of seats in the elections (91 seats as opposed to 89 for State of Law).…
The only conclusion to be drawn from the above observations is to agree with Freedom House’s comment that Iraq is still “not an electoral democracy” and the think-tank’s classification of the country as “Not Free.”
