By NOAH FELDMAN JUNE 25, 2006
What will bring stability and peace to Iraq? For the first couple of years after the invasion, the standard answer was military might. American troops would begin the job. Only then, once there was relative calm, could the Iraqi Army and the police force preserve the peace while political institutions were established and a functioning democracy took shape. Even those who believed in the promise of Iraqi democracy echoed this view. Each time the political process reached a milestone — interim constitution, elections, proposed constitution, referendum, elections again — we embraced the progress but warned that without improved security, all this political development could come to naught.
But sometime in the last year, the conventional American view of how to end the violence changed. Today you hear from soldiers and civilians alike that only the Iraqi political process can create peace, by generating a settlement that strikes a balance among the interests of Iraq's various groups. The main purpose of President Bush's recent surprise visit to Baghdad was to meet with Iraqi politicians, not to buck up the troops' morale as he did on Thanksgiving 2003. Even the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been studiously played down as a sign of progress. Once, security was going to enable politics. Now it is supposed to be the other way around: politics will buy security.
This shift in approach may seem merely tactical. Our evident inability to prevent civil strife in Iraq by force may be dispiriting, but why, you might wonder, should it matter in the long run if the political solution works out and Iraq emerges with a capable if imperfect democratic government? In truth, however, the implications are profound, both for the United States and for the prospects of democracy in the region. It is the difference between the United States winning a war and simply not losing one.
In the old story, U.S. force would open a space for Iraqis to participate in politics. As Iraqis realized that the United States was actually going to transfer power to an elected government, they would form parties and vote. The results would benefit Iraqis and would also serve the broader U.S. interest in regional democratization. After all, the stated goal of the United States in Iraq was not merely to escape without disaster. It was to encourage reformers and discourage autocrats throughout the Middle East by giving the lie to the notion that Arab states cannot be successful democracies. We would improve our security in the long run if dictators were replaced with legitimate governments whose citizens would not hate us for backing their oppressors.
It was largely this logic that drove the United States to undertake the task of reconstructing Iraq. If the only goal had been to topple Saddam Hussein or eliminate weapons of mass destruction, it would have made sense to withdraw the moment he was caught or the moment it became clear that the W.M.D.'s were nowhere to be found. In order to have the wished-for demonstration effect in the region — in order, that is, to achieve true success — our intervention in Iraq required not just the establishment of a functioning Iraqi state but also an orderly process for that state to emerge. Aspiring democrats in places like Egypt needed to be able to point to Iraq to prove that democracy was not, as the autocrats have long claimed, merely a recipe for instability or a step toward a radical Islamist government.
In contrast, the new politics-first exit narrative has nothing to do with American victory — whether military or political — and everything to do with American retreat. It accepts the undeniable reality that our armed forces have not established order in Iraq. Calling for more troops or for a different deployment of the troops already there won't work. Rather, we must look to Iraqi politicians to set the terms for our withdrawal. Only they can allow us to escape the scene without leaving behind a civil war that could destabilize the region even more than we have already done.
Even if Iraqi politicians do manage to save their country from its emerging chaos, the demonstration effect will have failed. The whole world knows that Iraq is teetering on the brink of civil war. If we get lucky, everyone will know that it was just luck, and that the result could easily have been Balkan-style breakup and disarray. Iraq will still be a one-off — not a model for democratization and certainly not a lesson for others in the region who are trying to figure out how to improve their own countries.
To make matters worse, the odds are high and getting higher that a political solution on its own won't work. It sounds reasonable to say that the Iraqi political leadership must recognize that no one will benefit from a civil war. I have been saying it myself, to Iraqis and others, for three years now. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, says it every day like a mantra, and President Bush must have said it to the Iraqis in private. But a congruence of elite interests need not lead to an agreement, and an agreement need not lead to actual peace. In Basra, where Iraqi politicians have been active since the invasion, politics has not prevented gunfights in the streets between militias allied with Shiite political parties.
For politicians to end violence, they need to accomplish two things. First, they need to persuade the public that it would be better off with them than with the gunmen. Then they need to persuade the gunmen to take early retirement. Even if the first of these delicate tasks can be accomplished — no easy thing in Iraq, where the government has trouble organizing itself and delivering basic services — the second may prove impossible. As we know from Northern Ireland and the Israel-Palestine conflict, the bombers have a great advantage over the would-be governors. You can't run a country without public support, but a tiny handful of extremist bombers can make the government ineffectual — and unpopular.
And yet the pursuit of politics has nonetheless become the only alternative to all-out civil war. It is not pure fantasy to argue that the constitutional process, which will soon reopen, might give Sunnis the incentives to reduce violence by promising them their fair share of state resources. Nor is it absurd to argue that the Shiite militias now at one another's throats might stop the shooting if their leaders would negotiate a power-sharing deal. I write these sentences because I believe they are true, and because politics is the best option we have at this late stage. Yet it is now less likely than before that negotiations will succeed. The hope that politics can end war is not one we've reached by planned logic or cool calculation. It's one we've reached out of dire necessity.