It was a politically brave speech John McCain gave the other day about
Iraq, in which he called for increasing troops levels and planning to keep
them there quite awhile, while acknowledging that the inevitable result
would be more U.S. casualties.
If McCain does run for president in 2008, this speech is an almost
guaranteed political loser. The Bush administration is highly unlikely to
follow the advice and would enflame the country if it did.
That means that in 2008, things in Iraq will either be better than they are
today, in which case McCain's call for more arms will seem imprudent,
unwise and unnecessary. Or things will be about the same or worse, in which
case the country is hardly likely to be receptive to a candidate proposing
an even deeper involvement and longer commitment.
But the political bravery and disinterestedness of McCain's prescriptions
for Iraq don't make them right.
McCain's most powerful argument is a moral one. "When America toppled
Saddam," he said, "we incurred a moral duty not to abandon the people there
to terrorists and killers."
Actually, the more significant moral obligation was incurred not in the
toppling of Saddam, but in the aftermath. Iraqis have given and are risking
their lives to create a democratic country, in part on reliance that the
United States would help them.
But McCain's analysis is less sound about whether an orderly and flexible
withdrawal is compatible with that obligation and about the practical
consequences of such a course.
According to McCain, and many other supporters of a sustained if not
enhanced military engagement in Iraq, the alternative is likely to be "full
scale civil war" that will lead to a "failed state" hospitable to
Consider the import of that for a moment. The Baathist regime has been
eliminated and its military force decimated. The military upper hand is now
clearly held by the Shia and Kurds, with their control of governmental
security forces and their militias.
Yet, according to the McCain premise, there is not now a critical mass of
Iraqis willing to fight and capable of prevailing to create a unified
democratic state. If that is true, then Iraq remains a Western artifice and
the United States will have no more success in making a country out of it
than did the British or the Baathists.
There is, however, reason for more optimism than the deeply pessimistic
premise behind McCain's analysis. The Shia and Kurds appear committed to a
unified, federated country stitched together with oil revenue.
The minority Sunnis cannot realistically hope for a restoration of their
dominant status. Given that the oil is mostly in Shiite and Kurdish
territory, the practical choice for the Sunnis is sovereignty without oil
revenues or local control within a federation and some shared oil revenues.
There are signs that the Sunnis are beginning to adjust to this reality,
and therefore the need to participate as a minority in a broader
The tactical alternative McCain recommends for an even deeper military
engagement needs to be more fully understood. He endorsed the "oil-spot"
strategy that has been proposed by, among others, Andrew Krepinevich in a
recent Foreign Affairs essay.
Rather than trying to secure the entire country through periodic sweeps of
insurgent strongholds, Krepinevich proposes instead that the United States
and Iraqi forces up to the task try to permanently secure smaller areas at
a time through the imposition of what amounts to martial law, although
Krepinevich doesn't call it that. This occupation would need to last,
according to Krepinevich, a half year or longer.
Spreading the oil spots of security would require U.S. involvement in an
extensive domestic intelligence operation that sought to gather information
about insurgents and manipulate tribal relationships in favor of a
democratic, unified government.
According to Krepinevich, all this will take a military commitment of at
least a decade, hundreds of billions of dollars and higher casualties.
Now there is a risk that McCain and Krepinevich are right, that without
such an engagement Iraq will be consumed by civil war and become a failed
state hospitable to terrorists. But if it requires that massive a U.S. role
to create a stable democracy in Iraq, there is also a substantial risk of
failure even with such an extensive U.S. engagement.
McCain is too dismissive about the opposite risk, that a large U.S.
military presence at some point hinders rather than helps the creation of a
stable, democratic Iraq. Part of the Sunni calculation is that they can get
the U.S. to impose a better deal for them than they can realistically
expect to negotiate directly with the Shia and Kurds. The terrorists have
flatly said that they require a large U.S. military presence to rally the
populace in favor of a militant Islamic state.
After the Dec. 15 national election and the formation of a new Iraqi
government, chances are a prudent evaluation of all the risks will weigh in
favor of an orderly and flexible reduction in the U.S. military presence
and role, not an escalation.
In his speech, McCain said: "Iraq is for us to do, for us to win or lose."
That's fundamentally mistaken. In the final analysis, Iraq is for the
Iraqis to do, and to win or lose.