Regime change as quagmire

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan is calling for regime change in Iraq. Maybe he wants a do-over?

This is from today's Washington Post:

"I hope the parliament will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and more unifying prime minister and government,"

As justification, Levin isn't pointing to Iraqi proliferation, governmental sponsorship of terrorism, or Iraqi ties to Iran. No, the chair of the Senate Armed Services committee has simply had it with Iraqi government's failure to make policy.

More specifically, Levin favors regime change if a scheduled summit among Iraq's various sectarian political factions fails to reach a compromise on issues like the distribution of oil resources and the ability of former Baath party members to serve in the government. This is what Levin said in a statement cosigned by Senator John Warner (R-VA):

"the Iraqi Council of Representatives and the Iraqi people need to judge the Government of Iraq's record and determine what actions should be taken -- consistent with the Iraqi Constitution -- to form a true unity government to meet those responsibilities."

This language is not exactly as forceful and menacing as the political rhetoric that Dick Cheney can muster on demand.

While Levin looks like a stereotypically friendly grandpa, Cheney himself proclaims that he's not a "touchy feely kinda guy."

Then again, on the issue of Iraq regime change, Cheney himself used to be less threatening. In retrospect, I guess this makes him a proven flip-flopper.

"Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?

That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it - eastern Iraq - the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq."

If only the 1994 Cheney had been Veep in 2002.


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"Any time they want"

As the AP reported Saturday, the leader of the Iraqi government thinks that his country can provide for its own security:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that the Iraqi army and police are capable of keeping security in the country when American troops leave “any time they want,”

And they want.

Polls from this past month show that nearly two-thirds of Americans think that the U.S. should "set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2008."


Note: Photo courtesy U.S. State Department.

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"War is a continuation of politics by other means"

It appears the the Joint Chiefs of Staff haven't forgotten this admonition by Clausewitz. This is from today's Washington Post:

Pentagon chiefs think that there is no purely military solution for Iraq and that, without major progress on the political and economic fronts, the U.S. intervention is simply buying time, the sources said. They particularly want to see U.S. pressure on the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to offer amnesty to Sunni insurgents, approve constitutional amendments promised to the Sunni minority, pass laws to ensure equitable distribution of oil revenue, and modify the ban on members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party taking government positions.

Hopefully, this kind of talk will put to rest all the "double down" whispering that has been emanating from the media's talking heads these past few days.

The military has long known that Iraq could not be won as a purely military campaign. Analysts in the US have to stop talking about victory versus defeat and focus instead on the choice between stalemated war versus sustainable peace.

Under the Joint Chiefs plan, what will the military be doing in Iraq? While many thousands of troops would become newly embedded in Iraqi units to serve training purposes, the remaining US forces would stop fighting Iraq's civil war.

Meanwhile, the remaining seven to eight brigades of U.S. combat forces would focus on three core missions: striking al-Qaeda, strengthening security along Iraq's borders, and protecting major highways and other routes to ensure U.S. forces freedom of movement in Iraq.

I'm not confident that this is the pathway out of Iraq, but it does sound better than the status quo. Hopefully, by changing course, fewer American soldiers would be exposed to violent injury and death.

If sectarian violence escalates dramatically after the switch to this strategy, it will become even more politically difficult for hawks to argue that the US should increase its involvement. Though the Pentagon might not identify civil war now, their perspective might be better from a more remote perspective.

Likewise, it will be harder to frame American withdrawal from Iraq as "cut and run." After all, the civil war won't be widely viewed as America's fight.



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