We've Lost. Here's How To Handle It.

We've Lost. Here's How To Handle It.

Authors: Steven Simon, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies
Ray Takeyh, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies

June 17, 2007
Washington Post

Last week’s bloodshed in Iraq and the bombing of what remained of the historic Shiite shrine in Samarra and of two Sunni mosques in Basra were more reminders of a terrible truth: The war in Iraq is lost. The only question that remains—for our gallant troops and our blinkered policymakers—is how to manage the inevitable. What the United States needs now is a guide to how to lose—how to start thinking about minimizing the damage done to American interests, saving lives and ultimately wresting some good from this fiasco.

No longer can we avoid this bitter conclusion. Iraq’s winner-take-all politics are increasingly vicious; there will be no open, pluralistic Iraqi state to take over from the United States. Iraq has no credible central government that U.S. forces can assist and no national army for them to fight alongside. U.S. troops can’t beat the insurgency on their own; our forces are too few and too isolated to compete with the insurgents for the public’s support. Meanwhile, the country’s militias have become a law unto themselves, and ethnic cleansing gallops forward.

But the most crucial reason why the war is lost is that the American people decisively rejected continuing U.S. military involvement last November. As far as the voters are concerned, the kitchen is closed. U.S. policymakers have not yet faced this hard fact. Some disasters are irretrievable, and this is one of them. Unless we admit that, we cannot begin the grueling work of salvage.

One reason why Washington’s head remains firmly buried in the sand about defeat is that the Bush administration and its die-hard allies are determined to try to win a war that is already over. As justification, they warn that a U.S. withdrawal would mean disaster. The same policymakers who assumed that Iraq would be a cakewalk now assume that the hard-to-predict consequences of leaving will be vastly worse than the demonstrated costs of hanging on. They paint the unknowable as the unthinkable. According to national security adviser Steven J. Hadley, for instance, a failure to secure Baghdad will lead to “regional chaos” and a civil war that will bleed into surrounding countries. Or Anbar province will become an al-Qaeda mini-state radiating violence throughout the world. Or there will be genocide. Or U.S. disengagement will destroy our credibility, weaken our deterrence and embolden our foes. Or all of the above.

In fact, history suggests that the consequences of a U.S. defeat will not be that dire. First, the risk of a regional Shiite-Sunni war is modest. The region has endured many civil wars: Algeria, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Yemen. While some have drawn in outsiders, none has led to war among those outsiders. Such meddlers tend to seek advantage in their neighbors’ civil wars, not to spread them, which is why they rely on proxies to do their fighting. You can already see that pattern at work in Iraq today: All of Iraq’s neighbors, especially Iran, are trying to protect their interests there, but all are also carefully calibrating their involvement.

The risk of a longer, bloodier Iraqi civil war is considerably higher. Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish killing and score-settling will probably intensify after U.S. forces leave. So fears of genocidal violence shouldn’t be dismissed, especially if the United States goes ahead with its current plans to arm Iraq’s largely Shiite army. But at this point, the three essential ingredients for genocide—heavy weapons, organization and broad communal consent—don’t exist. The present rough military balance between Sunnis and Shiites, both of whom have built formidable militias, reduces the likelihood of nationwide genocide; so does the fact that Sunnis have a haven available in western Iraq.

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It’s possible but unlikely that U.S. withdrawal would embolden some strategic adversary such as China to confront the United States years from now. But rivals are far more likely to act according to the raw-power conditions that prevail at the moment of confrontation than according to the ghosts of setbacks past.

A well-managed defeat would be more likely to boost U.S. credibility. Staying longer certainly won’t. As the historian Robert Dallek recently noted about Vietnam, “U.S. credibility was enhanced by ending a war that it could not win—a war that was costing the country vital resources that it could better use elsewhere.”

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