Bushites and Iraq: Plan B and more realism?

Saturday’s NYT had an important article by David Sanger and David Cloud, who wrote:

The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.
It is the first indication that growing political pressure is forcing the White House to turn its attention to what happens after the current troop increase runs its course.
The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province.
The mission would instead focus on the training of Iraqi troops and fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, while removing Americans from many of the counterinsurgency efforts inside Baghdad.

Until now, the President’s spokespeople have always steadfastly said that there is no “Plan B” in the event that the current (and still surging) troop “surge” should fail. To admit to having a Plan B, they have argued, would (1) be premature, at a time when the surge has not yet fully run its course, (2) be defeatist, and (3) give aid and comfort to “the enemy.”
However, after the Diyala attack of late April, the Mahmoudiya incident of May 12, and the even more recent pinch that the US supply lines in Iraq are experiencing, it has become painfully obvious that

(1) The kind of widely dispersed deployment inside Iraq that a textbook counter-insurgency campaign would dictate simply cannot be maintained at a casualty level that is acceptable to the US political system;
(2) The introduction of the further 20,000 or so troops still due to arrive in Iraq under the surge plan won’t make much significant difference at all;
(3) There is no strategic reserve from which the Centcom commanders can draw, in order to beef up the Iraq deployment any further; and
(4) Anyway, the kind of COIN prescribed in the latest, partially Petraeus-authored Army/Marines COIN manual really cannot be effectively waged in a country with the high level of technical expertise that Iraqis have– and a country, moreover, whose borders to states with very different agendas to that of the US are very permeable indeed. (See my earlier commentaries on the manual here and here.)

Bottom line: The COIN campaign that Petraeus now finds himself leading in Iraq is already a lost cause. The events of Diyala and Mahmoudiyah, and the thick stream of body bags now bringing dead US soldiers back to their home-towns here in the US prove that.
However, the White House is still for some reason bullheadedly insisting that we need to wait until September, when Petraeus himself can come back to Washington to give his ‘report card’ on the surge, before any alternative can be decided on… I guess Bush doesn’t want to be the one who said, “We tried but we failed.” (Anyway, why would anyone give any credence to a strategic judgment uttered by that brief part-time naval aviator/strutter… Evidently “David”– as Bush likes to refer to Gen. Petraeus– is being carefully groomed and prepped to come back and be the one to give the nation the “bad news” that in fact, we all know about already.)
But it certainly is interesting that even in the immediate aftermath of the (brief and evanescent) political “victory” that Bush won when he stared down the congressional Dems on the withdrawal-deadline issue last week, he and some of his key advisors were already not just continuing to plan out their ‘Plan B’, but also starting a strategic leaking campaign around it.
I imagine that Bob Gates, the eminently realistic man who is now the Secdef, has been having people from both the brass and the civvie sides in the Pentagon come to him and explain just how really disastrous some of these now-looming “Iraq catastrophe” scenarios could yet, any day, turn out to be.
Diyala was bad enough… and then, it almost immediately forced a radical shift away from the “live with the people” mode dictated by Petraeus’s (theoretical) COIN doctrine back behind truly massive– and politically quite self-defeating– fortifications.
Mahmoudiyah was bad enough– and indeed, it continues to be terrible for those most closely involved, since two of the US soldiers abducted there are still missing… And then, since Mahmoudiyah, the military has shown just how much it is prepared to get itself tied into enormous logistical knots to try to find the missing soldiers, thus providing a powerful incentive for others who might want to capture US troops alive, rather than simply kill them.
(Regarding which, I imagine a lot of people in the Pentagon are now wishing they hadn’t earlier been so cavalier in their bending of the rules that the Geneva Conventions lay down regarding the treatment of POWs. It would have been far better for everyone at this point if the US President could have voiced an eloquent– and convincing– appeal that the abducted soldiers should be treated in line with the Geneva Conventions.)
Anyway, my present conclusion– based on the Sanger/Cloud piece, as well as on various other pieces of recent information– is that the “majority party” inside the Bush administration now clearly seems to be preparing a policy of cut and blame, which is a version of “cut and run”.
Blame Maliki, that is. Last week, we got other “leaked” information that administration insiders had decided to “leave Maliki in place”, rather than continuing to mount various pressures against him. That fits in perfectly with a “cut and blame” policy. Because if the Bushites had maneuvered Maliki aside in some way– whether with Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, or Iyad Allawi, or anyone else, then in a sense they would have been under more pressure to “own” the political outcome of that. With a weakened, ineffective, and quite possibly corrupt Maliki still in place, they (might feel that they) don’t have to “own” anything.
(In this regard, I have to say that I find the whole question of “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government, as discussed earnestly and at great length within certain Washington policy circles, to be either irrelevant or actually immoral. First of all, it is the height of imperial arrogance for US politicians to argue that the government of Iraq should be in any way accountable to them and their expectations. Secondly, it is another height of arrogance for these US politicians even to imagine that they know what is best for the Iraqi people… Yes, of course it would be wonderful if the Iraqi government could clean up the death squads that may well be operating within its ranks, and to find a way to include the Sunnis effectively in the governance system, and to divide the country’s oil wealth in a transparent and fair manner… But why should any US politicians imagine that at this point it is appropriate to condition the reconstruction aid they give the Iraqis over the months ahead on the Iraqi government jumping through Washington-defined hoops on these issues, like a trained dog?)
Back to Sanger and Cloud. They write directly about the electoral-politics considerations that are behind the administration’s current interest in a workable Plan B:

Several administration officials said they hoped that if such a reduction were under way in the midst of the presidential campaign, it would shift the debate from whether American forces should be pulled out by a specific deadline — the current argument consuming Washington — to what kind of long-term presence the United States should have in Iraq.
“It stems from a recognition that the current level of forces aren’t sustainable in Iraq, they aren’t sustainable in the region, and they will be increasingly unsustainable here at home,” said one administration official who has taken part in the closed-door discussions.

The reporters also note this:

Missing from much of the current discussion is talk about the success of democracy in Iraq, officials say, or even of the passage of reconciliation measures that Mr. Bush said in January that the troop increase would allow to take place. In interviews, many senior administration and military officials said they now doubted that those political gains, even if achieved, would significantly reduce the violence.
The officials cautioned that no firm plans have emerged from the discussions. But they said the proposals being developed envision a far smaller but long-term American presence, centering on three or four large bases around Iraq. Mr. Bush has told recent visitors to the White House that he was seeking a model similar to the American presence in South Korea.
Both Mr. Bush and Secretary Gates appeared to allude to the new ideas at separate news conferences on Thursday, though they were careful not to be specific about how or when what they are terming the post-surge phase would begin.

I see all this as a significant and generally welcome shift in the administration’s thinking. Sanger and Cloud note, probably correctly, that Cheney probably is not on board this new realism. But Cheney seems in many ways to have been becoming considerably more circumscribed politically than he was until last fall. (I hesitate to say “marginalized”. He has clearly been heading in that direction, though he retains enormous power to make very serious mischief, particularly with regard to Iran.)
The crucial change occurred when the Prez was forced to throw Rumsfeld overboard after last November’s election, and to hire Gates instead. Gates is no Quaker, but he is a realist; and in matters concerning conflict and war realism is strongly to be preferred to the bullheaded pursuit of a self-righteous ideology. Gates’s entry into the cabinet seems to have given Condi Rice the ballast that she so sorely needed to counter Cheney’s blind militarism and unilateralism.
It is true that the idea, mentioned in the Sanger/Cloud piece, that the US retain “three or four large bases around Iraq” is not one that I think we should aim for. We should continue to aim directly for the total and speedy withdrawal of all the US forces from Iraq.
But the proposal for retaining just three or four large bases, with a mission of combating Al-Qaeda in Iraq and continuing to train Iraqi forces, is significantly less ambitious than what the Bushites previously wanted to achieve in Iraq.
I found the reference to the South Korean model hilarious. The political structure there is so very different from the one in Iraq!
And actually, just think about this “three or four large bases” idea for a moment. Under what authority would the US be in the bases? Under a Status of Forces Agreement with the duly constituted Iraqi government? I don’t see any conceivable Iraqi government, except perhaps a secessionist Kurdish-Iraqi government, that would be prepared to conclude such an agreement with Washington. (And for various reasons I’ve written about before, I don’t think that keeping US bases just in Kurdistan would be feasible or advisable over the long term.)
And if the US forces have “retreated” to within the well-fortified boundaries of these three or four massive fortresses– then who do they think is going to be running the rest of the country, anyway?
Meanwhile, Moqtada Sadr’s re-emergence within the country is extremely interesting– as is the fact that SCIRI head Abdel-Aziz Hakim is now briefly out of the picture, undergoing cancer treatments. In Iran, apparently. The content of what Sadr said at his mosque in Kufa was mostly constructive– especially when he called strongly for national unity, and when he explicitly said he was “extending his hand” to Iraq’s Sunnis and Christians:

“I want to say now that the blood of Sunnis is forbidden to everyone,” he said. “They are our brothers in religion and in nationality.”
… “And let our Christian brothers know that Islam is a friend to our minorities and to other faiths, and seeks dialogue with them.”

I have to say I think it;’s good that Hakim is out of the picture for a while. He has fielded an amazingly successful p.r. campaign with many western journalists– and even, via the journos, with scholars like Juan Cole and others– and had succeeded in persuading most of them that (1) He was the “leader” or the most politically powerful figure within the broader Shiite coalition, the UIA; and (2) that Moqtada Sadr was responsible for most of the Shiite death squads.
In fact, the Sadrists and their allies were significantly stronger within the UIA than SCIRI (oops, now renamed SIIC). And SCIRI’s own Badr Brigades were probably responsible for more of the sectarian death-squad activities than the Sadrists.
So I now also have a little naggy feeling in the back of my head that maybe some of the more realist Americans might now be encouraging the re-emergence of Moqtada Sadr within Iraq? My analogy there would be with the bosses of the White apartheid regime in South Africa, when they got to the point where they realized their attempt to suppress all the opposition had no chance of success, and they started negotiations with Mandela. Now I’m not saying that Moqtada is Mandela. But I do think that if the Bushites want to negotiate an orderly US troop withdrawal from Iraq with anyone, then Moqtada might seem to them– as he seems to me– to be a reasonable figure to choose for this role.
Of course, just as Mandela could not negotiate credibly without maintaining his strong anti-apartheid rhetoric– and nor would he ever have wanted to give it up, anyway– so, too, Moqtada Sadr cannot negotiate credibly with the US without maintaining his strong anti-occupation rhetoric…
Anyway, as I said, that’s a naggy little thought at the back of my head. Just Helena’s wishful thinking there? Perhaps.
But if I were either the commander of US forces in Iraq, or a US President whose fellow party members are implorng him not to drive their party into total destruction during next year’s elections, then I would realize that over the coming 17 months the first and highest priority must be to avoid all the many catastrophes that could at any moment strike the (currently very widely and unwisely dispersed) US troop deployment in Iraq… And to do that, you need to find an Iraqi political interlocutor (or combination of interloctutors) who can deliver.
Entering into such a negotiation, you might have the idea that you want to come out of it with “three or four bases” remaining in Iraq. But meaningful political negotiations, once entered into, have a way of developing their own dynamics.
… So let’s see what lies ahead. Mostly, what I’ll be looking at is whether the little sprouts of realism I’m seeing within the Bush administration these days can really take firm root.