It is time to plan for an American withdrawal

The Bush administration is probably right in asserting that the ongoing violence in Iraq is not yet a civil war but rather a fragmentary civil strife that could escalate into a civil war. That, alas, is also testimony to the proposition that the occupation of Iraq has proven to be inconclusive, costly and destructive of Iraq’s social fabric.

From this viewpoint, how certain can one be that if America were to desist, the Shia and Kurd population of Iraq would not be capable of compelling on their own an arrangement with the Sunni-Arab community? Together, the Shia and the Kurds account for about 75 per cent of the population, and both are well-armed.

The Sunni would be faced with a difficult decision: whether to accommodate or resist. Some may choose the path of accommodation and some the path of resistance. But the outcome of any confrontation is also predictable: namely, that the Kurds and Shia would prevail. Is that an outcome necessarily worse than staying on course, which involves a bloody war of attrition waged by “an ineffective occupier” (to borrow a phrase from Paul Bremer, former US administrator in Iraq)?

Given that a more authentic Iraqi political leadership is finally beginning to push aside the earlier US-hand-picked choices, the time is ripe to adopt a strategy for terminating the US military presence in the country. The following four-point programme could serve as the basic framework for an acceptable termination of the US involvement in the ongoing conflict that the Bush administration seems unable either to win militarily or to end politically.

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Zbigniew Brzezinski
former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter