This week, the NYT reported on a classified plan, which “represents the coordinated strategy of the top American commander and the American ambassador,” that foresees a significant U.S. role in Iraq for the next two years, with a goal of “sustainable security” throughout the country by the summer of 2009. The approach is called the “Joint Campaign Plan,” though it’s apparently more of a collection of goals than an actual strategy.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan scrutinized the plan and came away discouraged.
If the U.S. military had, say, 100,000 more troops to send and another 10 years to keep them there; if the Iraqi security forces (especially the Iraqi police) were as skilled and, more important, as loyal to the Iraqi nation (as opposed to their ethnic sects) as many had hoped they would be by now; if the Iraqi government were a governing entity, as opposed to a ramshackle assemblage that can barely form a quorum—then maybe, maybe, this plan might have a chance.
But under the circumstances, it seems unlikely. One officer who’s familiar with Iraq planning put it this way to me: “No one who understands the situation is optimistic. I think the division among those who have thought deeply about the situation is mainly between those who are still fighting and trying to influence the outcome and those who have concluded that the principal objective must now become disengagement.”
Wait, it gets worse. Kaplan also describes what to expect, or not, in Anbar Province.
For a few months now, U.S. field commanders have formed alliances with Sunni tribesmen, especially in Anbar province, for the common goal of crushing jihadists. The new plan, as the Times puts it, is “to stitch together such local arrangements to establish a broader sense of security on a nationwide basis.”
But in these alliances, we’re dealing with tribesmen who are cooperating with us for a common goal. It is not at all clear on what basis these various local Sunni factions can be stitched together into some seamless security quilt — or why, because they’ve agreed to help us kill jihadists, they might suddenly agree to stop killing Shiites, compromise their larger ambitions, redirect their passions into peaceful politics, and settle into a minority party’s status within a unified government.
Alliances of convenience rarely outlive their immediate aims. Josef Stalin formed an alliance with the United States and Britain for the purpose of defeating Nazi Germany. But once the war was over, he had no interest in integrating the Soviet Union into the Western economic system.
Kaplan notes that the strategy is the brainchild of Stephen Biddle, a senior defense policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and an advisor to Gen. David Petraeus, who recently garnered attention for explaining the shortcomings of a partial withdrawal.
How confident is Biddle in his own strategy? Not very. He recently said the odds that the surge and the new strategy might work — that is, that they might produce “something like stability and security in Iraq” — are “maybe one in 10.”
As Matt Yglesias put it, “You’d have to be out of your mind, really, to adopt a military strategy whose author thinks the odds of failure are overwhelming unless the alternative was something like national extinction.”
And yet, the president has done just that — and congressional Republicans are unwilling to challenge him on it.