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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
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August 21, 2006
With rising levels of sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, Democrats have intensified their criticism of the Bush administration's policy, saying it is impossible to stay the course indefinitely. Republicans respond that their policy in Iraq is one of "adapt to win," not merely to stay the course, and counter that a hasty withdrawal strategy would only perpetuate the civil war there and leave the country a terrorist haven akin to Afghanistan in the 1990s. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, an early advocate of the Iraq war, says "it's time to start thinking about Plan B—how we might disengage with the least damage possible." A number of exit strategies and suggestions have been floated to avert an all-out catastrophe, including calling for an immediate pullout of U.S. forces, establishing a Dayton-like peace conference involving Iraq's neighbors, and partitioning the state into three semi-autonomous zones.
The sharp upturn in sectarian violence over the past six months, experts say. Top U.S. military commanders now admit the situation, left unchanged, could slide into civil war. As of mid-August, more than one hundred Iraqis were dying per day, the majority of them in Baghdad. More than 3,400 Iraqi civilians were killed in July alone. And while U.S. casualties are slightly down from previous months, the number of Americans wounded, mostly by car bombs, has risen. "[T]he United States cannot afford to be seen standing by while Iraqis slaughter each other," writes Michael Eisenstadt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in the Weekly Standard. Eisenstadt said Washington's recent decision to send thousands of extra troops to Baghdad is a step in the right direction.
The U.S. strategy is focused on raising the professional standards of Iraqi security forces, building their capacity to independently patrol and secure their country, and reforming the security ministries to rid them of sectarian bias and abuses. Politically, U.S. officials are trying to bolster Iraqi efforts at developing a national unity government that can institute broad-based economic reforms.
President Bush has repeatedly said U.S. troops will step down as Iraqi forces step up and any plans for large withdrawals will be determined by military leaders on the ground. Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman defines the White House approach as an "adapt-to-win" strategy, referring to the U.S. decisions to ratchet up the level of troops before last December's election, rotate more soldiers into hotspots like Baghdad, and involve more international actors like the European Union and the United Nations. Judith S. Yaphe of the National Defense University supports the president's strategy, even though it may mean more U.S. casualties in the short term, because all the other options "focus on our needs, our politics, our standards of democracy, our casualties, our potential loss of regional influence and our dependence on oil," she writes in the Los Angeles Times.
Yes. The Bush administration rejects the popular refrain that Iraq is collapsing into civil war although Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, highlighted new concern about the sectarian fighting in a recent Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing. Most experts agree the White House, in effect, lowered its expectations of immediately establishing a secular and pluralist democracy in Iraq to reining in the violence and defeating the insurgency. The administration's drive for democratization in the Middle East "should be subordinated (at least for the next several years) to its efforts to avert civil war in Iraq," James Dobbins of the RAND Corporation's International Security and Defense Policy Center writes in this Foreign Affairs roundtable.
A number of experts, including former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, who has advised Iraq's Kurds, say President Bush lacks the political strength to unify Iraq. The war's growing unpopularity played a key role in Connecticut's race for Senate, in which incumbent Joseph Lieberman, a vocal supporter of the war, lost to anti-war challenger Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary. According to the most recent Zogby poll, 56 percent of the U.S. population says the war in Iraq is not worth the loss of Americans' lives. "Terrorism is an important issue to Americans," says pollster John Zogby, "but when it comes to judging Bush's presidency, their decision is based largely on Iraq." The election cycle has heated up the rhetoric surrounding the war. Democrats accuse Republicans of failing to grasp the grim realities in Iraq and adjust their strategy, while Republicans blast Democrats for being soft on terrorism.
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