A too-weak ‘alternative’?

Carl Conetta, co-director of a small Washington-based
NGO called the “Project on Defense Alternatives” has come out with a six-point
plan
for arriving at what he– somewhat misleadingly– calls a
total US troop withdrawal from Iraq within 400 days. Misleading,
because if you read the fine print in his plan, he is advocating a process
that would involve:

1. the US continuing to try to control the internal-Iraqi politics of the
   entire “withdrawal” process, and
2. the US still, after those 14 months, leaving “2,000-3,000 US troops
   … in Iraq to participate in multinational military training and monitoring
   missions, commanded by NATO and under a three-year UN mandate.”

So I would say that, while Conetta’s proposing of this plan shows that yes,
there is indeed a rising groundswell of opinion in some parts of the US punditocracy
in favor of a withdrawal from Iraq– and Conetta’s sensing of this may well
be what led him to describe his plan as one for a “total” withdrawal–
still, this plan is far too timid and, if I may say, too uncognizant
of regional realities in that part of the Middle East, to be realistic and
achievable.

In fact, Conetta’s plan adds little or nothing to the one laid out in
this July 15 NYT op-ed
by former CIA Director (and MIT professorial brainiac) John Deutch. In
it, Deutch built on the
remarks he’d made
back on June 7 that urged a US withdrawal from Iraq, and told the NYT-reading
public:

[Deutch:] Our best strategy now is a prompt withdrawal plan consisting of clearly
defined political, military and economic elements. Politically, the United
States should declare its intention to remove its troops and urge the Iraqi
government and its neighbors to recognize the common regional interest in
allowing Iraq to evolve peacefully and without external intervention. The
first Iraqi election under the permanent constitution, planned for Dec. 15,
is an appropriate date for beginning the pullout.

I think Conetta’s main mistake was in hugely over-estimating the ability
of the US authorities to micro-manage the politics inside Iraq during the
period leading up to, and of, the troop withdrawal. The second of his six
points, titled
Political measures meant to draw in disaffected communities, is undoubtedly
well-meaning, and includes some generally good ideas like focusing the application
of punitive methods much more tightly than at present, etc etc. But
under this same “political measures” rubric he also lists sub-goals
that, quite frankly, are none of Washington’s darn’ business, like
a list of extremely micro-managing things about the Iraqis’ own national Constitution
and governance structures…

In addition to being none of Washington’s
business, these goals are, quite simply unattainable by the US, which
has shown that (1) it has almost zero understanding of Iraqi internal politics
and (2) every time it has sought to intervene in Iraqi politics in the past
three years it has made things worse for itself (and also, for most Iraqis.)

So why should we expect Washington suddenly to develop the political smarts
it might need to intervene “succesfully” at this point inside Iraqi politics? The
only possible grounds for believing this would be if one judged that the announcement
of a US decision to withdraw completely would on its own radically transform
politics and attitudes inside Iraq, and cause Iraqis “overnight” to start
cooperating with Washington’s political schemes…

No reason, I think, to believe that that would happen– and especially
not, if the “withdrawal” plan is from the get-go designed not actually to
be total.

Conetta’s dirigiste (US control-freak) tendencies also show when,
nanny-like, he opines that:

Until Iraq stabilizes and settles into a pattern of peaceful relations with
its neighbors, the United States and others will continue to be concerned
about its military potentials and will want some reassurance. However, as
an alternative to a long-term large-scale military presence in the country,
the United States should favor the development of a Military Monitoring Regime
under UN auspices. This would require the Iraqi government to forswear weapons
of mass destruction and support for terrorist activity, agree to limit the
size and capabilities of Iraq’s armed forces, and permit unfettered access
to its military sites by a multinational corps of UN monitors. A reasonable
term for the monitoring regime would be five years or less, as the Security
Council sees fit. A highly effective monitoring corps might comprise 1,500
personnel and could be accompanied by a multinational security detail comprising
6,500 troops.

Okay, let’s review the facts here. Which of these two parties has
reason to fear the military capabilities and possibly aggressive intent of the other?
Might it be:

a) Iraq, which does not have WMDs or indeed (at this point)
any offensive military capabilities at all; and whose present leadership has
no history at all of having undertaken aggressive warfare; or might it be–

b) the US, which has nuclear weapons as a routine part of every single carrier
battle group it has in the Gulf region, and has many extremely capable and well-armed force projection platforms in the Gulf, and whose present leadership, yes,
does indeed have a record of having launched a war of aggression in recent
years?

So maybe, as part of the withdrawal scenario it should be the US that is
subjected to a full-blown, UN-supervised, Military Monitoring Regime? (Does
Conetta have any idea about the way that most Iraqis view the history and
activities of the UN monitoring regimes to which they were subjected, 1991-2003?
Why on earth should they feel at all that they deserve to be placed
under such a regime at this point?)

So it goes on: attempts at unfeasible political micro-managing and international
dirigisme to the nth degree. And all for what?

Meanwhile, there’s another big problem: if registering “success” according
to political metrics like these is defined, to both the Iraqis and the US
public, as constituting a set of successive pre-conditions for the US
troop withdrawal, then– as in the Occupied Palestinian territories!–
all that does is give a huge incentive to the forces that want to keep things
stirred up inside Iraq to re-double their dastardly perpetrating of inhumane
violence and social mayhem.

As JWN readers will recall, my own preference– as first enunciated
here
on July 6– is for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is speedy,
total and generous. By the way, an organization called Global Policy
Forum just put a slightly lengthier and more thought-out
version of that
up on their website. In that longer version I argued that:

The parallels with Israel’s position in Lebanon
in the late 1990s are by no means perfect, but they continue to multiply.
Back then, many Israelis warned of chaos and bloodshed in Lebanon, and of
vastly increased Syrian influence in Lebanon and the region, should the IDF
undertake a unilateral withdrawal. The much-ballyhooed eruption of chaos
never eventuated there (though there would quite likely be some continuing
internal conflict inside a post-withdrawal Iraq). As for enlarged Syrian
influence in Lebanon… It didn’t last very long, did it? Meanwhile, after
the May 2000 withdrawal Israel was able to regroup and retrain IDF units
that had been tied down far too long in the (in-)security zone inside Lebanon.

I am not arguing that the US withdrawal from
Iraq should [necessarily] be, as Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon was, quite
unilateral. As with Israel’s currently planned withdrawal from Gaza, negotiating
the modalities of the withdrawal with a successor power would undoubtedly
make for smoother overall performance of this complex logistical challenge.
Ideally, the US withdrawal from Iraq would be negotiated. [However] those
negotiations need not be long-drawn-out