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The war in Iraq is front and center this election season.
President Bush is again making the case that “the security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq” and “if we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.”
Most Democrats, and a growing number of Republicans, while opposed to immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq, believe the Iraq war has been a distraction from the war on terror, and that Washington should make clear to the Iraqi government that U.S. forces will be coming home.
We can expect the rhetoric surrounding these alternatives to get even blunter as both parties try to hammer home politically advantageous caricatures of the other’s position. Yet, no matter what the outcome on Election Day, one hopes that both the president and the new Congress will agree on a so-far elusive formula: how to withdraw from Iraq without further strengthening the appeal of radical Islam.
That effort should begin with a belated recognition of two essential points. First, the outcome of our struggle with radical Islam—whether the Sunni strain typified by al-Qaeda or Shia strain embodied by the mullahs of Iran—will in no small measure be determined by Washington’s ability to navigate renewed feuding between Sunnis and Shias that our intervention in Iraq has touched off. Second, we are more likely to make matters worse through an indefinite occupation of Iraq, which is likely to force our taking sides in an Iraqi civil war between Shias and Sunnis....
Steve Andreasen was director for defense policy and arms control on the National Security Council from 1993 to 2001. Steven N. Simon is the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
