I’m reading and absorbing it. I hope to have something more detailed to write when I’m done. Here’s my first basic impression. It’s absolutely not more of the same. It’s a a clear declaration that we’re leaving. Money quote from Lee Hamilton to ABC News:
"We did not find one single person, and we interviewed over 200 people, who thought we should stay the course … The Iraqis must be under no misapprehension here. We are going to pull out our combat troops out of Iraq in a responsible way over a period of time and they have to begin to accept the new mission and we have to begin to accept the primary mission of training and embedding troops."
But it’s also a very realist "Hail Mary" which involves so many simultaneous things to happen right that its chance of success, even using the Baker-Hamilton premises, can only be in the 20 percent range. Overhaul Iraqi army training to wean it from sectarian loyalties and give it a capacity to enforce peace on the whole country? Get Iran and Syria to back off? Do all this while we’ve declared we have no intention of sticking around for much longer than a year in any real force strength? And do it all while civil war spirals further? Yeah, right.
But the key claim of the ISG is that the only alternative to this – the current strategy with the current force levels, however massaged – has a zero percent chance of success. And the other claim is that any alternative to this – all of this, including the Israeli-Palestine issue – will fail to get actual bipartisan support at home. You can see why Bush looked yesterday like a dog being given a bath.
The only truly new aspect of the report, apart from its insistence that we are absolutely leaving soon, is the notion that Iran has an interest in stabilizing Iraq and that we have leverage in that respect. Many neoconservatives argue that Iran has precisely the opposite intention, and so we have no leverage; and even if we did, Ahmadinejad is not someone any rational actor can negotiate with. I don’t want to go all Baker-Hamilton on you, but both sides may have captured parts of the truth. Let’s assume the neocons are right (and I think they are) about the nature of the Tehran regime. Is there a point at which civil war in Iraq really does threaten the mullahs in Tehran? And if there is, are we there yet?
I don’t know. Perhaps it’s unknowable in the time and place such decisions have to be made. But I do think we can over-estimate the stability of the Tehran regime, and that revolutionary unrest and disintegration in its neighbor might rattle the forces in Iran’s leadership that are halfway sane. Think of hundreds of thousands of restive Shiite refugees pouring over the border. Think of growing ethnic unrest within Iran. Think violence spreading in from the Kurdish region. So Baker may be right: we may have more leverage than we think. But we may not yet have enough to get Iran to back off in any meaningful sense.
So we have two awful options, it seems to me. First: throw everything we’ve got at this thing, do all the Baker-Hamilton commission wants (including the Iran and Syria gambits) except withdraw troops. But merely maintaining current force levels is, as Baker argues, a non-starter. If Bush wants to pursue something called "victory" in his head, then the acid test will be his troop commitment. He needs to embrace much of Baker-Hamilton and add more than 50,000 and probably closer to 75,000 new troops into the theater – in the next three or four months. And why not talk to the regimes in Syria and Iran? If they are what the Bush administration says they are, the diplomacy will go nowhere, and we can then be seen to have at least tried. The new troops should then be used to prop up Maliki, train the Iraqi army, and finally police the borders. No timelines. Full Metal McCain.
If we don’t do that, we should leave – rapidly, and let the real war begin. It may already have. I don’t see a third way working, especially given the incompetence in the White House, the profound weakness of Maliki, and the complete lack of domestic confidence in this administration’s conduct of the war. Asking young Americans to die for a slower, longer civil war between Sunnis and Shia is, at this point, the real non-starter. In fact, a third way may make us even more complicit in the conflict we will eventually have to escape from. That’s my first take, open to revision and correction. Double down and deal; or get out in a matter of months.
(Photo: Haraz Ghanbari/AP.)
The Dish 