Stephen Biddle probably isn’t a household name, but he’s a pretty serious player on foreign policy. Biddle is not only a senior defense policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, but he’s also served as an advisor to Gen. David Petraeus.
Today, in an important Washington Post op-ed, Biddle argues that lawmakers should stop looking for some kind of compromise, ISG-inspired, Plan-B policy in Iraq. He’s noticed several Republican senators who say they no longer back the president’s failed approach, but they don’t like the Dems’ policy either, and so they want something that resembles a middle ground. Biddle explains that it doesn’t exist.
Under the best conditions, it is unrealistic to expect a satisfactory Iraqi security force anytime soon, and the more severe the violence, the worse the prospects. The result is a vicious cycle. The more we shift out of combat missions and into training, the harder we make the trainers’ job and the more exposed they become. It is unrealistic to expect that we can pull back to some safe yet productive mission of training but not fighting — this would be neither safe nor productive.
If the surge is unacceptable, the better option is to cut our losses and withdraw altogether. In fact, the substantive case for either extreme — surge or outright withdrawal — is stronger than for any policy between. The surge is a long-shot gamble. But middle-ground options leave us with the worst of both worlds: continuing casualties but even less chance of stability in exchange. Moderation and centrism are normally the right instincts in American politics, and many lawmakers in both parties desperately want to find a workable middle ground on Iraq. But while the politics are right, the military logic is not.
Biddle is cautious about taking sides here, which is fine. The point right of his piece isn’t whether the surge is a failure, but rather whether some kind of half-surge, which would garner GOP backing, makes sense.
It doesn’t. In fact, it’s the worst of all possible options. The only thing that makes less sense than an occupation is half an occupation. As Yglesias put it, “Withdrawing tens of thousands of Americans is only going to leave the tens of thousands who remain in a more dangerous and fundamentally untenable position. If we want to withdraw troops — and we should — we need to get essentially all the way out.”
As it turns out, the NYT’s Tom Friedman writes along the same lines today.
Obviously, President Bush’s stay-the-course approach is bankrupt. It shows no signs of producing any self-sustaining — and that is the metric — unified, stable Iraq. But the various gradual, partial withdrawal proposals by many Democrats and dissident Republicans are not realistic either. The passions that have been unleashed in Iraq are not going to accommodate some partial withdrawal plan, where we just draw down troops, do less patrolling, more training and fight Al Qaeda types. It’s a fantasy.
The minute we start to withdraw, all hell will break loose in the areas we leave, and there will be a no-holds-barred contest for power among Iraqi factions. Our staying there with, say, half as many troops, will not be sustainable. […]
Staying in means simply containing the Iraqi civil war, but at the price of Americans and Iraqis continuing to die, and at the price of the U.S. having no real leverage on the parties inside or outside of Iraq to negotiate a settlement, because everyone knows we’re staying so they can dither. Today, U.S. soldiers are making the maximum sacrifice so Iraqi politicians can hold to their maximum positions.
I didn’t agree with every word in Friedman’s column, but on this, I think he’s right.