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• Related Materials

  • Prepared Testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
    By Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations
    Testimony
    January 23, 2007

  • Binge and Surge
    By Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy
    Article
    January 12, 2007

  • Stop Obsessing About Iran
    By Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy
    Article
    January 22, 2007

  • Send the State Department to War
    By Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies
    Op-Ed
    November 14, 2007

  • The Right Strategy Isn't Enough
    By Stephen Sestanovich, George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies
    Op-Ed
    January 24, 2007

  See Also

  Middle East, Iraq, Defense Strategy, Wars and Warfare, U.S. Strategy and Politics

  Sects Maniac

  Author:	Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy

  January 22, 2007
  The New Republic

  When will we finally take no for an answer? In December, Bush administration officials began talking about a surge of U.S.troops to Baghdad to create the military conditions for political reconciliation. Such an effort, they said, would only succeed if Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki reached courageously across sectarian lines, disarming the Shia militias that buttress his government and sharing political power with Iraq’s beleaguered Sunnis. “If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises,” President Bush declared when he unveiled the surge plan to the nation, “it will lose the support of the American people.”

  And, since December, here’s what Maliki has done: First, his aides told reporters that he didn’t want any more U.S. troops in Baghdad. To the contrary, he wanted all U.S. troops out of Iraq’s capital. Maliki, it turned out, had a plan of his own. Iraqi troops would attack Sunni insurgents only, while ignoring the Shia militias. In other words, in a city increasingly cleansed of Sunnis and run by Moqtada Al Sadr’s brutal Mahdi army, Maliki would hasten the job.

  American officials threatened and cajoled, and Maliki supposedly backed down. But, at a January 11 press conference where he was expected to endorse Bush’s surge, Maliki didn’t show up. Instead, a spokesman told the press that Iraq’s government “will not stand against it” before adding that “what is suitable for our conditions inIraq is what we decide, not what others decide for us.”

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• 

  New CFR Books

  

  In Termites in the Trading System, Jagdish Bhagwati reveals how the rapid spread of preferential trade agreements endangers the world trading system.

  

  America Between the Wars explores how the decisions and debates of the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers shaped the events, arguments, and politics of the world we live in today.

  

  In The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, Noah Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia—the law of the traditional Islamic state—in the modern Muslim world.

  Complete list of CFR Books.

  

  

  New Independent Task Force Reports

  Confronting Climate Change

  This report argues that the United States must lead with domestic action on climate change and proposes a U.S. negotiating strategy for a global UN climate agreement that includes commitments from all major economies, while also promoting a less formal Partnership for Climate Cooperation that would focus the world's largest emitters on implementing aggressive emissions reductions.

  U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality

  This Task Force report examines changes in Latin America and in U.S. influence there, while taking account of the region's enduring importance to the United States. The Task Force offers an agenda for U.S. policy toward Latin America and identifies four critical areas that should provide the basis of a new U.S. approach.

  About Independent Task Forces at the Council.

  

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