The Future of Iraq

On the fifth anniversary of the initiation of conflict, Peter Grier looks at the Iraq War, and wonders where we go from here. His best and worst case scenarios are as follows:

The Iraq war might end like this:

•Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds uneasily share power and wealth in a single state. Sectarian violence, as well as terrorism linked to Al Qaeda, are diminished but not eliminated. Overseeing all this are perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 US troops, deployed in Iraq for years, maybe decades.

•Iraq is partitioned, accompanied by a return to the widespread sectarian violence of 2006 – times two.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, those scenarios might be the best and worse cases that the United States now can aim for. One key to the outcome may be how long the US stays engaged in the expensive, drawn-out conflict.

In the middle, there is still a great deal of uncertainty. And not just uncertainty of outcome, but uncertainty of aims and goals.

Much depends on the attitudes of the various groups toward basic questions of national identity. But even after all this time, the US may not really know whether the Kurds want their own state, whether Shiites will allow true Sunni participation in central government, and whether the Sunnis – Iraq's old ruling class – truly have given up dreams of reconquering the country.

"We don't really have a good fix on what the calculations of all these actors are," said Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution in Washington during a January seminar on the future of Iraq.

The most crucial unknown: Is the current decline in sectarian violence a real trend – or are Sunnis and Shiites simply rearming and biding their time?

The most realistic best-case endgame?

Taking all these factors into account, success in Iraq at this point might be defined as a unified country that does not offer sanctuary to Islamic militants and is governed by a stable regime that is not under the influence of a hostile foreign power, such as Iran.

That, for example, is the bottom line of Andrew Krepinevich, a veteran Army planner and now president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Reaching this relatively stable state could take another three to five years – if it can be reached at all. Even then, the US might need to keep a substantial number of troops in the country – to keep Iraq's internal factions from going after one another and to protect the nation from its external enemies.

"A reasonable outcome would find something like 30,000 to 40,000 troops in Iraq for 25 to 50 years," says Dr. Krepinevich in an e-mail.

After all, the US has deployed troops in Germany and Japan for 63 years, and Korea for 57. Might Iraq, in the end, require a commensurate commitment?

In some ways, this is in line with James Fallows' excellent piece in The Atlantic a few years ago, "Declaring Victory". He maintains that the "war" part of Iraq is over, and we would do well to ditch such language and focus on our real task: police-work, infrastructure-building, and establishing lasting institutions for governance. This process will inevitably take decades, and not because Iraq is some unique quagmire. In fact, it will take this long because it almost always takes that long. Thomas Barnett calls this process "Bosnia-done-backwards," and we see the continued trauma and fractionalization of the Balkans to this day. Belgium is going through some of the same issues. But I doubt that anyone would say that the Balkans are in worse shape in 2008 than they were in 1995.

So should we pull the troops out? It depends on the weight of your values. If you believe that American "blood and treasure" is intrinsically more valuable than Iraqi "blood and treasure" simply by virtue of being American, then the answer is inevitably "yes". But if you believe, as I do, that Iraq is better off than it would be otherwise for whatever amount of stability that the U.S. presence provides, then a slow draw-down, with the possibility that 30-40 thousand American troops will still be in Iraq in 20 years, will give Iraq a good chance to emerge as a viable state. Pulling all the troops out now ensures that it will not.

The U.S. has a history of intervening and then dropping out, and the target country then descending into chaos and misery. It happened in Vietnam and Cambodia on a grand scale. But in Korea and the Balkans, a continued U.S./NATO presence has allowed stable institutions to be built over time, and the security of those countries has improved immensely due to the continued U.S. presence. I'm not suggesting that Iraq must only end up on either the S. Korean or Cambodian poles, but the lesson may be clear: a continued security presence can be beneficial for the growth of the country. A quick pull-out almost certainly will not be.