The Voice of Experience
Meghan O’Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser in the Bush Administration who helped to oversee the Iraq surge, has written the so-far best analysis of Iraq’s successful election. Though composed and published on Sunday before the vote itself, her been-there-done-that-got-the-tee-shirt wisdom is a sober assessment of what the surge has done and what the prospect before us is now. This passage is particularly forceful:
On Jan. 4, 2006, days after Iraq’s second election, President Bush announced that two U.S. combat brigades would be leaving Iraq, in addition to 20,000 troops whose tours had been extended for the vote. Some administration officials clearly hoped that a successful election promised greater stability. Instead, the subsequent negotiations over the government became a harbinger of the most violent Iraq since the days of Saddam Hussein. As I watch this new election, recalling the euphoria of those early Iraqi votes and marveling at the resilience of the Iraqi people in the years since, I am also sobered by the knowledge that the hardest work is yet to come.
But the column is also rare in that O’Sullivan’s past experience — and she worked on Iraq issues for a long and often-bleak time — hasn’t been so scarring as to blur her ability to see what the future might be. Iraq is not necessarily headed for bright, sunny uplands, but it’s not really “unraveling,” as my friend Tom Ricks often writes, in the sense of going backward to the conditions of 2006. Even if there is future sectarian conflict, it won’t be the same war as it was. That was an al Qaeda-inspired war and the least-likely future for Iraq is the return of a Zarqawi-style extremism, as the relatively high Sunni participation in the election makes plain.
It’s a good bet that it will take the Iraqis some time to form a new government and that there will be repeated attempts to shape the outcome through violent means, not least by Iranian-sponsored groups. This is also a time when the future of the U.S.-Iraq strategic partnership will be shaped profoundly; Gen. Raymond Odierno, the tactical architect of the surge and now overall U.S. commander in Iraq, has been eloquent in explaining this once-in-a-century point of deflection. Yet for his part, President Obama concluded his remarks congratulating the Iraqis on the election by reiterating his campaign pledge that “by the end of next year, all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq.”
A campaign pledge should not be a suicide pact. Even the most severe critics of past strategy in Iraq argue the need for a continuing American military presence in the country; Tom Ricks calls the decision to invade Iraq the worst strategic judgment in our history but also calls for retaining 30,000 troops in Iraq. He understands that to leave would be worse.
Even more than the Afghanistan surge decision, how Obama resolves his Iraq conundrum will bear on his stewardship of American strategy. Every president inherits not just the policy “legacy” of the previous administration but the larger tradition of American strategic culture, a broad, deep and powerful river that cannot be easily diverted; in the Persian Gulf region, the flag that became U.S. Central Command was planted by Jimmy Carter and advanced by every president since 1979. Striking that standard in Baghdad — even if one believes it was a mistake to carry it there and that doing so cost too much — would have many consequences.
Tom Donnelly is director of the Center for Defense Studies.
