146276 Stratfor Extra Iraq 11 06

U . S . O p t i o n s i n I r a q

November 2006

S T R A T F O R E X T R A

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iiStrategic Forecasting, Inc. • 700 Lavaca Street, Suite 900 Austin, TX 78701 • Tel: +1 512.744.4300 • Email: [email protected] • www.stratfor.com

U . S . O p t i o n s i n I r a qS T R A T F O R E X T R A

T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s

I . I n t r o d u c t i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

I I . T h e C u r r e n t E n v i r o n m e n t. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 C u r r e n t U . S . S t r a t e g y. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 T h e G l o b a l E n v i r o n m e n t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 T h e R e g i o n a l E n v i r o n m e n t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 T h e I r a q i E n v i r o n m e n t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 S h i a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 0 S u n n i s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 J i h a d i s t s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 K u r d s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 C o n c l u s i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6

I I I . U . S . S t r at e g i c Op t i on s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 8 O p t i o n 1 : M a i n t a i n C u r r e n t S t r a t e g y. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 8 O p t i o n 2 : W i t h d r a w a l o f U . S . F o r c e s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 0 Option 3: Massive Increase i n U . S . P r e s e n c e a n d O p e r a t i o n s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1 O p t i o n 4 : R e d e p l o y m e n t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4 O p t i o n 5 : D i p l o m a c y. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 7 C o n c l u s i o n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1

I V. A p p e n d i c e s T h e I r a n i a n G a m e ( A p r i l 2 4 , 2 0 0 3 ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 U.S . S t ra tegy : Percept ion vs . Decept ion ( July 21 , 2003) . . . . . . . . 37 I r a q : N e w S t r a t e g i e s ( M a y 1 7 , 2 0 0 4 ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2 T h e I R R : E m p t y i n g t h e C u p b o a r d ( J u l y 6 , 2 0 0 4 ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 7 Iraq, the Constitution and the Fate of a President (Oct. 13, 2005)... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 Iraq: If Not Now, When? (May 2, 2006).................................................55

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1Strategic Forecasting, Inc. • 700 Lavaca Street, Suite 900 Austin, TX 78701 • Tel: +1 512.744.4300 • Email: [email protected] • www.stratfor.com


I n t r o d u c t i o n

In March 2003, Stratfor produced a fi ve-part study titled Iraq War Plans. It was designed to examine the strategic options available to the United States in its invasion of Iraq. The War Plans series was less a forecast of how the war would be executed than a study of various options, noting the pros and cons of each. Since its publication, and the invasion of Iraq, Stratfor has been studying Iraq and the jihadists’ situation intently, but incrementally. With the onset of the insurgency, basic U.S. strategy has been set, though tactics have sometimes shifted.

Now it appears to us — between the reality on the ground, the congressional elections in the United States, the replacement of Donald Rumsfeld by Robert Gates as defense secretary, the growing importance of James Baker and the Iraq Study Group and the now unmistakable civil war in Iraq — that a major shift in U.S. strategy is inevitable. At the very least, a fundamental rethinking of U.S. strategy is taking place. In this context, all other parties to the war — and they are numerous — will be thinking through their options. The war is changing, and it is time to consider the options in some detail.

The history of the war is now wellknown. We are attaching articles written in the course of the war in order for you to chart our analysis, and see our strengths and weaknesses in the past. For those who want a detailed analysis of the war from its inception to 2004, we invite you to read Ameri-ca’s Secret War, by Stratfor’s founder, George Friedman. In this study, we will spend relatively little time on the past and focus on the current situation and possible options.

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T h e C u r r e n t E n v i r o n m e n t

Most wars have two sides. A few have three. The sides in this war are nearly uncountable and shifting. The main combatant parties are the United States, the Sunni community, the Shia and the Kurds. The complexity is compounded by the fact that each of these groups is itself torn by rival factions. Thus, even the simple statement that Sunnis and Shia are at war with each other must be carefully qualifi ed, because there is no single Sunni or Shiite position. It was not always this way: At various points there was much greater cohesion and coherence than at others. But that time is past. Now, this is less of a war than an extremely violent free-for-all.

Iraq was once seen as a way for the United States to send a clear message to the Islamic world and as a base from which U.S. forces could operate in the region. The United States, however, has failed to make an example of Iraq and, instead of projecting self-confi dence and power, it is now projecting doubt and weakness in the region. The United States chose to be feared more than loved, to use Machiavelli’s phrase. It is no longer feared and could never have been loved. It is in the worst of all possible worlds. It must shift its strategy.

Current U.S. Strategy

The American strategy in Iraq has been, since the emergence of the insurgency:

1. To create an Iraqi government that would be representative of all ethnic and religious groups and political tendencies within the state.

2. To establish a security environment in which this government could be formed, mature, create institutions necessary for governing and, fi nally, govern.

3. To transfer responsibility for security in Iraq to this government, with U.S. forces remaining in Iraq but withdrawing from direct involvement in maintaining that security.

To implement that strategy, the United States had to defeat or at least contain the insurgency. That insurgency initially involved the Sunnis primarily, but it has evolved into a much more complex situation in recent months. Therefore, the task of providing security has evolved from simply an attempt to defeat the Sunni insurgents to an attempt to control Shiite groups as well, along with the need for containing Sunni-Shiite violence and serious tensions within these groups.

Iraq is a country of about 27 million people, and Baghdad is a city of about 6 million. The United States currently has about 140,000 troops in Iraq, a fraction of which are capable of direct combat operations. The United States was unable to suppress the Sunni insurgency on its own. The likelihood of it being able to contain and suppress the current kaleidoscope of insurgencies and militias is, based on past experience, unlikely in the extreme.

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With that in mind, the possibility of the Iraqi government assuming responsibility for security is even less likely. It is important to understand, from the outset, that the Iraqi government — as conceived of by the United States — cannot possibly function as a government. The American plan was a coalition government, but the factions represented in that government are engaged in a civil war with each other. The very best that can be said of some is that they are deeply suspicious of each other.

Each faction of the government sees its institutions as a means for pursuing its own interests against other factions. They see the political battle as an adjunct to the military battles being fought in the streets. The government of Iraq exists only in the most formal sense, as having ministers and ministries. But in fact, there is no functioning government — nor can there be one while the civil war is raging. The idea that the weakness of the Iraqi government lies in insuffi cient training or corruption or not enough advisers misses the crucial point: A state cannot function so long as its constituent parts do not agree on the nature of the state and are waging open warfare against each other.

The United States’ current position is, therefore, unsustainable. In effect, the United States is fi ghting the putative members of the Iraqi government in order to induce them to make the government function. And none of this takes into account the fact that the Shia in particular do not want the government to function, except on their terms; that the Sunnis cannot accept those terms; that the Kurds are making their plans without reference to the government and that U.S. forces can’t provide security anyway.

The Global Environment

If the American invasion of Iraq had gone as planned and Iraq had turned into a pacifi ed, pro-American country, the United States would have assumed an enormously powerful position geopolitically, quite independent from the U.S.-jihadist war. Between U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the position of Israel and India, U.S. power and allies would have straddled the area from the Levant to the Hindu Kush. Syria and Iran would have faced threats from multiple directions. The Arabian Peninsula would have faced U.S. ground forces to the north and U.S. naval power on three sides. Pakistan would have been bracketed from Afghanistan and India. An implicit U.S.-Israeli-Indian coalition would have created a strategic reality that would have placed Muslim regimes on the long-term defensive.

It would have made the United States the dominant power in the region, and — given Washington’s relationships with Egypt and Morocco — would have created momentum that would have extended that power through North Africa as well. The United States would have had substantial resources at its disposal for operations in Central Asia, and that region would have been subsumed into the U.S. security system. In no sense would the United States have dominated all of the Islamic world, nor would Muslim public opinion have reviled U.S. actions any the less or hostile regimes like Iran have been eliminated. Nevertheless, the reality would have forced the region to the strategic defensive.

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Quite apart from the Muslim world, this is not an outcome that would have been welcomed by other great powers. As the Franco-Russian-German bloc showed prior to 2003, the prospect of American domination in Iraq would have undermined, for a long time, any strategic interests they might have in the Middle East. Not all, but many, major powers did not want to see the United States succeed in Iraq — not because they had a deep interest in Iraq itself or because they supported Islamic radicalism, but because U.S. domination of the Middle East would have tilted the global balance of power in favor of the United States for a very long time. U.S. infl uence in the region would, among other things, have given the United States substantial infl uence over the region’s oil supplies, particularly the sizeable reserves in Iraq. With petroleum and geography added to already overwhelming American military and economic power, a victory in Iraq would have redefi ned the world.

This means that many countries outside the region were not unhappy to see the failure of U.S. strategy in Iraq. It also means the United States is unlikely to gain more international support to pursue its original mission. Success for the United States in Iraq would pose serious challenges to these countries.

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Many European countries — including Spain, Italy and most of Eastern Europe — did side with the United States. In each case, their position was not based on any particular interest in Iraq, but on achieving a relationship with Washington for other purposes or, in the case of Eastern Europe, out of fear of the Franco-Russian-German bloc. However, as conditions in Iraq deteriorated, their inclination to increase or even maintain their fairly insignifi cant troop commitments declined.

The point here is that from the standpoint of Europe and much of the non-Islamic world, there are those who welcome an American defeat in Iraq and those who regret it, but not to the point of taking risks alongside the Americans. It was not true to say the United States had no international support at the time it invaded Iraq, but it is certainly the case that it lacks it now. Even among the strongest U.S. allies, the United Kingdom and Australia, for example, the appetite for the war has substantially dissipated. It is not true to say that if the United States continues the war, it does so alone. It is fair to say, however, that it cannot expect a signifi cant infusion of forces from the outside and might well experience a decrease.

While countries allied with the United States in Iraq peel away under the pressure of failure, the United States cannot simultaneously pursue its original plan and expect increased international support. The global environment is hostile to U.S. plans in Iraq.

The Regional Environment

The non-Arab power with an overriding interest in Iraq, other than the United States, is Iran. There is a historical tension between Iraq and Iran that can be traced back to the states’ Biblical antecedents and is deeply ingrained in the regional geopolitics. Part of this tension derives from Arab/Persian rivalries, which can be clearly seen in other parts of the region as well; part of it also derives from the Sunni/Shiite confl icts that now are roiling Iraq itself.

Before the fall of Saddam Hussein, the most recent manifestation of this tension was the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, which took hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives. Iranian policy since that point has been fi xed: to prevent the re-emergence of any centralized power in Iraq that could pose a threat to Iranian national security. Iran must protect its fl ank.

For Iran, the American goal of an Iraq united under a powerful central government that is aligned with the United States is its worst-case outcome. The United States would be able to use Iraq to re-establish the balance of power between Baghdad and Tehran, recreating the Iraqi threat toward Iran in a more dangerous form than it existed under Hussein. This is something Tehran must prevent, using all means possible.

Iran’s primary goal, therefore, is to turn Iraq into a reliable ally. In order to achieve this, Iraq must have a Shiite-dominated government and defense structure, with Kurds and Sunnis marginalized. Any hint of the re-emergence of Sunni power in Iraq strikes at the heart of Iranian security interests.

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Anything that gives the Kurds power, either regionally or in Baghdad, raises the specter of Kurdish nationalism gaining traction in Iran. Of the two threats, the most pressing are the Sunnis, who outmaneuvered the Shia in post-revolutionary Iraq and who, Iran fears, can do the same again if given freedom to maneuver. The Kurdish question is secondary: Iran and Turkey will deal with Kurdish regional autonomy in due course.

In order to achieve its primary goal, Iran not only must see the Shia overwhelmingly dominate any Iraqi government, but the Iraqi Shia must be dominated by their Iranian co-religionists. This is not as simple as it appears, since — as we shall see — the Iraqi Shia are split and since there is a degree of distrust between elements of the Iraqi Shia and Iranian Shia. There are doctrinal differences between the two sides, and ethnic tensions, but there is also the fear that Iranian domination will turn Iraq into a pawn in Tehran’s grand strategy and siphon oil profi ts away from Iraq toward Iran. Therefore, Iranian domination — as opposed to penetration — of Iraqi Shia is not a given.

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If the Iranians cannot achieve their primary goal, there is a secondary goal that they can achieve: the partition of Iraq. If they feel they cannot guarantee their domination of a government in Baghdad, then partition achieves two purposes for Iran. First, Iraq would not be able to regain its position as peer competitor with Iran. Second, there would be a Shiite entity in southern Iraq that would be inherently dependent on Iran. A Shiite state in that location would be seen as a threat to the Saudis and would face the natural hostility of the Sunni states. Therefore, any Shiite state in the south would need Iran to guarantee its security.

This situation would prevent the United States from marshalling and supplementing Iraqi power against Iran. It would put Iran in a pre-eminent position south of Baghdad. Therefore, Iran would be in a position to project power into the Arabian Peninsula. But for U.S. forces, if they were to remain in Iraq, the Iranians would be the pre-eminent military power in the region. They would be able to threaten the Kuwaiti and Saudi military forces — as was the case immediately after the fall of the Shah — and force the Saudis to reconsider permitting an American presence in the kingdom, which is what sparked the emergence of al Qaeda in the fi rst place.

As important, the Iranians might be able to mobilize substantial Shiite populations in the Arab Persian Gulf region. The Shia constitute a signifi cant portion of the population in many of the oil-rich Arab states: Saudi Arabia (20 percent), Kuwait (35 percent), Bahrain (70 percent), Qatar (10 percent), and the United Arab Emirates (15 percent). The Iranians maintain close links to these Arab Shia through local religious and political groups. On the whole, these groups have not threatened existing regimes. Neither economic nor political interests forced a confrontation. But as we have seen in Iraq, the Iranians have suffi cient infl uence among Shia in the region to potentially change this equation. If they were able to back unrest in these countries with a direct military threat, the Iranians would be in a powerful position.

It was this thinking that motivated the Iranians to use their infl uence in Iraq to destabilize the situation in June and July 2006.

The Iranians wanted the United States to overthrow Hussein and replace his regime with a Shiite government. The Americans thought they had the option of crafting a regime to their own liking. However, they underestimated not only Sunni resistance but also Iran’s ability to destabilize the situation. The Iranians were prepared to provide support to the Americans while fi ghting the Sunnis. But when the Sunnis shifted toward political accommodation that could lead to an unacceptable outcome for Tehran — signaled by the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in early June and the nearly simultaneous appointment of a Sunni as Iraq’s minister of defense — the Iranians shifted their position to encourage direct civil war between Shia and Sunnis.

Had the Shia maintained what appeared to be their course politically when al-Zarqawi was killed, accommodation would seem to have been possible. But, under Iranian infl uence, the Shia drew back from the political process in Iraq and increased their attacks against the Sunnis.

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Along with this shift, Tehran encouraged its ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to become more aggressive toward Israel, and provided military equipment and training for this effort. The confl ict in July-August 2006 was the outcome, and it stunned both Israel and the world. For whatever reason, Israel was unable, for the fi rst time since the founding of the modern state, to crush an enemy in war. This increased the confi dence of Syria, another Iranian ally dominated by an Alawite government, to raise its pressure on Lebanon.

In short, Iran had three goals. First, it wanted to be the dominant power in Iraq. Second, it wanted to be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. Finally, it wanted to reclaim for the Shia the distinction of leading the Islamist renaissance — a position that had been assumed by Sunni al Qaeda. By the fall, it was on the verge of achieving this. The key was Iraq: Iran either had to create a situation that would force the Americans’ withdrawal, thus leaving Iraq to the Iranians, or failing that, a civil war that would divide the nation, allowing Iran to dominate the new, southern Shiite entity. That would give Iran the ability to begin to dominate the Persian Gulf, and would give it revolutionary primacy in the Islamic world.

The Saudis were obviously to be the loser in this game. But the Saudis had very limited options. The states of the Arabian Peninsula as a whole could not hope to block Iran militarily. For Riyadh, maintaining a robust buffer — provided either by Sunnis or external powers — between the Saudi oil fi elds and Iran is vital. But if the Saudis’ open dependency on the United States increased, it could destabilize the kingdom. If they pressed too hard against Iran, the region’s Shia might rise. The Saudis could provide support to the Sunnis in Iraq, but that would be a double-edged sword. For one thing, doing so could drive a wedge between Riyadh and the United States, or force the United States to withdraw from Iraq. For another, it could draw the Saudi kingdom into a confl ict with the Iranians that it could not win.

The sum total of all these equations is that the United States was maneuvered into a position in which its options were limited, in which it had few allies, in which it had insuffi cient military power — and all of this during an election year. The Iranians understand American elections: They helped bring Jimmy Carter down by holding U.S. hostages until after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. They knew that the worse the situation was in Iraq, the worse the position of George W. Bush in the polls. All of these factors were converging to place Iran in a superb negotiating position. Add to this the American fear that Iran might develop nuclear weapons — and the dearth of U.S. military options to deal with that scenario — and the Iranians felt they had the United States on the ropes.

Most important, the United States had lost control of the internal security and political situation in Iraq. The system had fragmented, and the U.S. goal of a united state under a pro-American government in Baghdad had disappeared. How badly the situation had fragmented is something that must be understood in detail before turning to the current U.S. options.

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The Iraqi Environment

To fully comprehend the reality in which U.S. forces are now operating, we need to consider the internal situation and interests of each of the Iraqi factions: the Shia, the Sunnis (whose situation has been complicated by the emergence of the jihadists in Iraq) and the Kurds.

ShiaUnited Iraqi Alliance (128 seats):Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) Islamic Dawah PartyIslamic Dawah Party-Iraqi Organization Al-Sadrite BlocAl-Fadhila (Islamic Virtue) Party Badr OrganizationIraqi Democratic Movement Movement of Hezbollah in IraqCentrist Coalition Party Turkman Islamic Union of IraqJustice and Equality Assembly Turkmen Loyalty MovementSayyid al-Shuhadah Movement Al-Shabak Democratic GatheringReform and Building Meeting Justice CommunityIraq Ahrar

SunnisIraqi Accord Front, or Tawafoq Iraqi Front (44 seats):Iraqi Islamic Party General Council for Iraqi PeopleAl-Hewar National Iraqi Council

Hewar National Iraqi Front (11 seats):Iraqi Christian Democratic Party Democratic Arab FrontNational Front for the United Free Iraq Iraqi Sons Unified MovementNational Iraqi Front

KurdsKurdistani Gathering, or Kurdistani Alliance (53 seats):Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Kurdistan Democratic PartyLabor Party of Kurdistan Islamic Group of Kurdistan-IraqAl-Kaldani Democratic United Party Communist Party of KurdistanSocialist Democratic Party of Kurdistan Democratic Party of KurdistanIraqi Turkoman Brotherhood Party

Islamic Union of Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Islamic Union (5 seats)

Secular Non-CommunalNational Iraqi List (25 seats):Iraqi National Accord Iraqi Communist PartyAssembly of Independent Democrats People's UnionAl-Qasimy Democratic Assembly Iraqi Republican GroupArab Socialist Movement Independent Democratic GatheringSociety of Turkmen Tribes and Elders Al-Furat al-Awsat AssemblageThe Iraqis Loyalty For Iraq CoalitionIndependent Iraqi Alliance Independent Iraqi Sheikhs CouncilThe National List Ahrar

OthersLiberation and Reconciliation Gathering (3 seats)

Progressives (2 seats)

Iraqi Turkoman Front (1 seat):Iraqi National Turkmen Party Turkmeneli PartyProvincial Turkmen Party Movement of Independent Turkmen Iraqi Turkmen Rights Party Turkmen Islamic Movement of Iraq

Mithal al-Aloosi List For Iraqi Nation (1 seat):Iraqi Federalist Gathering The Iraqi Ummah Party

Al-Ezediah Movement for Progressing and Reform (1 seat)

Al-Rafedain List (1 seat)

Iraqi National Assembly (275 seats)

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The ShiaUnder the Sunni-dominated Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, the Shiite majority was subjugated and oppressed. The United States was seen as ineffectual in dealing with Hussein, particularly after a Shiite uprising in 1991 was suppressed by Hussein without U.S. intervention. The Iraqi Shia saw Shiite Iran as their natural partner against Hussein, and Iran saw Hussein’s Iraq as its main threat after the Iran-Iraq war.

Both Iran and the Iraqi Shia did what they could to precipitate U.S. action in Iraq against Hussein. But despite welcoming Hussein’s fall, the Shiite community did not necessarily welcome the Americans. Rather, they saw the Americans as being the catalyst for the reversal of Shiite fortunes. Since the United States was primarily focused on the Baathists (and, therefore on the Sunnis), the Shia sought U.S. help in forging a regime that would consolidate Shiite political power. When the United States tried to block a Shiite monopoly on power, the Iraqi Shia moved to a more independent posture, heavily infl uenced by Iran.

Iraqi Shia are far from being puppets of Iran, but Tehran has enormous infl uence and can act as a blocker to limit their actions, even if it cannot compel a particular direction. The Iraqi Shia cannot be understood simply as pawns of Iran, but they also cannot be understood except in the context of Iran.

The political landscape is dominated by pro-Iranian Islamist groups that, despite their signifi cant rivalries, are coalesced under the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), an electoral coalition of 17 different groups and independent politicians that controls 128 seats in the national legislature.

Four main groups make up the bulk of the UIA: the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Hizb al-Dawah (HD), the al-Sadrite bloc of radical Muqtada al-Sadr, and Hizb al-Fadhila. There are other, smaller groups as well, such as the Hezbollah Movement of Iraq, militias allied to individual clerics, and the oil mafi a and crime syndicate in Basra.

SCIRI chief Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim is head of the UIA. SCIRI is both the most well-organized and the most pro-Iranian of all Iraqi Shiite groups. Its armed wing, the Badr Organization, has been able to infi ltrate the army, police and Interior Ministry as part of efforts to counter the pressure on Shiite militias to disband. SCIRI’s deputy leader, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, holds one of the two vice president positions, and another key fi gure, Bayan Jabr, is minister of fi nance.

HD and its splinter group, Hizb al-Dawah-Tandheem al-Iraqi, together hold 25 of the UIA’s 128 seats. HD’s No. 2 offi cial, Nouri al-Maliki, is prime minister; the group also controls the Trade Ministry, and a senior member of its more pro-Iranian splinter group, Shirwan Kamil al-Waili, is minister of national security.

The al-Sadrite Bloc, though not the most organized, holds 32 seats in parliament — more than any other single party — and has a massive following among the rural and poor Shia of Iraq. Its large armed wing, the Mehdi Army, has engaged in two uprisings in the past (April and August

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2004), making the al-Sadrite Bloc the chief target for Washington and Baghdad in their drive to disband sectarian militias. The bloc also claims a number of Cabinet positions — health, electricity, labor and transport. It is the least pro-Iranian among the Iraqi Shiite movements, and it recently has confronted internal problems: Several militia commanders went rogue and engaged in sectarian violence without orders from al-Sadr.

Another important group is Hizb al-Fadhila, with 15 seats in parliament. It controls the governor’s post in the province of Basra, holds a dominant position in the Southern Oil Co. and has the backing of the Oil Protection Force (OPF), which is effectively al-Fadhila’s militia. Al-Fadhila also is involved in the organized crime and oil smuggling mafi a in Basra.

In addition to these four primary groups, there are several independents who are infl uential within the UIA. These include Hussein Shahristani, a former nuclear chemist who is currently oil minister. Shahristani is believed to be al-Sistani’s most trusted political ally. Another key player is Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, who serves as national security adviser under the current government — a position he has held since the days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by L. Paul Bremer. Khaled al-Attiyah, a cleric who serves as fi rst deputy speaker, is another key player.

The Shiite clerical establishment also wields political power — and, as with the parties themselves, there are divisions. The Hawza is the clerical establishment based in An Najaf, and is led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Al-Sistani has been a prominent fi gure since the fall of Hussein’s regime, but during the past year, his infl uence has waned considerably as internal Shiite squabbles and sectarian violence committed by Shiite militants have increased.

It is important to note that neither al-Sistani’s interests, nor those of the Iraqi Shia as a whole, are synonymous with those of their religious brethren in Tehran.

The clerical establishments in Iraq and Iran certainly have common ties, but there are differences of opinion within the Shiite world. The Najaf school of thought — so called after the holy city in Iraq — adheres to a “quietist” approach in politics, meaning that the ulema do not hold offi ce directly but exercise a great deal of infl uence and oversight in governance. The Qom school, named after the Iranian religious center, has favored a direct role for the ulema in politics. Thus, the Iranian regime, heir to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Qom school, has differences with al-Sistani, who follows the quietist approach of the Najaf factions. Those differences also can be seen, in varying degrees, with Iraqi groups strongly infl uenced by Iran.

For the time being, al-Sistani still is able to exert infl uence as a spiritual leader to help bind the various Shiite factions together. But at 76 years of age, and given previous threats to his life, one must consider what it would mean if he were to die or become incapacitated. There certainly could be opportunities for some Shiite groups in Iraq, not to mention for the Iranians, if al-Sistani were to depart the scene.

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Politically speaking, SCIRI and HD — both with 25 parliamentary seats — constitute the Shiite mainstream. While HD has balanced between various Shiite factions, SCIRI has been locked in a struggle with the al-Sadrites at the national and local levels, while competing with al-Fadhila in the nine southern Shiite-dominated provinces. SCIRI is also the main advocate for the creation of a Shiite federal autonomous zone in southern Iraq. Because the plan could allow SCIRI to consolidate its leading position in Iraqi Shiite politics, until recently other factions have been reluctant to back the proposal — but have signed on in light of growing tensions with the Sunnis. This plan also allows Iran to consolidate its hold over the Iraqi Shia and the oil resources in the south.

Within the Shiite majority, then, there are numerous competitions — with factions seeking to control the southern oil reserves and yet, at the same time, not to be subsumed by either Iran (on which they depend fi nancially) or each other. It is a delicate competition, in that they also recognize the need to bind together against the Sunnis, jihadists and Kurds at times if need be — not to men-tion the fact that to varying degrees, Iran has ties to every Shiite political actor in Iraq. Tehran has tried to play the various factions against each other and even has been instrumental in splinteringoffshoots from some groups — such as HD, which has two factions. Currently, the Iranians are working to weaken SCIRI’s main rival, the al-Sadrites, by encouraging Mehdi Army commanders to go rogue.

The SunnisThe Sunnis saw the American invasion, the dismantling of the Iraqi army, the purging of Baathists from the government and the U.S.-Shiite understanding as disastrous for them. At the worst, they would face a bloodbath at the hands of the Shia, while the Americans cooperated. At the very best, they were to be excluded from power in any Iraqi government and would be reduced to a powerless and impoverished position, as oil revenue was taken by Shia and Kurds. In effect, they were backed against a wall, with limited options.

Clearly, Baathists planned an insurgency to follow the fall of Baghdad. And just as clearly, U.S. decisions fueled that campaign. Traditional Sunni leaders felt that without an insurgency to harass the Americans, they would have no leverage at all. The jihadists saw this as an opportunity to plant Sunni religious radicalism in Iraq. The Sunni leaders welcomed whatever help they could get from the jihadists even if they didn’t really trust them. The insurgency was forged from this.

Sunni political power in Iraq is now divided among security/intelligence elements from the ousted regime, tribal leaders, religious scholars, political parties and coalitions, nationalist insurgent groups and transnational jihadist groups.

The political groups are divided into two alliances, which have a presence in the National Assembly. The larger is an Islamist coalition called the Iraqi Accord Front — a three-party alliance that has 44 seats. The smaller is the secular Hewar National Iraqi Front, a fi ve-party, secular-leaning bloc that has 11 seats.

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In addition to these alliances, prominent Sunnis — such as the former speaker of the interim parliament, Hachim al-Hassani; former interim vice president and leader of the powerful Shamar tribe, Ghazi al-Yawar; and former Foreign Minister Adnan al-Pachachi — are part of a 15-party secular coalition, the Iraqi National List, led by former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

J i h a d i s t sMujahideen Shura Council: Six-group alliance of transnational jihadists comprising al Qaeda, Jeish al-Taiifa al-Mansoura (Army of the Victorious Sect), Monotheism Supporters Brigades, Saray al-Jihad Group, al-Ghuraba Brigades and al-Ahwal Brigades.

Hilf al-Mutayyibeen: Alliance of transnational and Iraqi jihadist groups Mujahideen Shura Council, Jaish al-Fatihin (Army of the Conquerors), Jund al-Sahabah (Army of the Companions), Kataib Ansar al-Tawhid wa al-Sunnah (The Supporters of Monotheism and the Prophetic Tradition Brigades) and several Sunni tribal elders.

Jaish Ansar al-Sunnah: An independent Kurdish Islamist militant group that cooperates with other jihadist groups.

S u n n i N at i o n a l i s t I n s u r g e n t sIslamic Army of Iraq

1920 Revolution Brigades aka Iraqi National Islamic Resistance

Mohammed’s Army

The National Front for the Liberation of Iraq

Iraqi Resistance Islamic Front (JAMI)

Mujahideen Army

General Command of the Armed Forces, Resistance and Liberation in Iraq

Popular Resistance for the Liberation of Iraq

S h i i t e M i l i t i a sBadr Organization: Armed wing of Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq

Mehdi Army: Militia of the al-Sadrite bloc

Renegade Mehdi Army elements: Commanders and cells operating independently of Muqtada al-Sadr

Hezbollah led by Abdel-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi

Smaller militias allied to groups such as Al-Fadhila Party and individual clerics

Oil mafia/crime syndicate in and around Basra

I n s u r g e n t s

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Sunnis also hold key positions in the government, if the government were to function. Many of these are from the Iraqi Accord Front: Tariq al-Hashemi, the party’s No. 2 leader, is one of the two vice presidents; Mahmoud al-Mashhadani is speaker of parliament; and Salam al-Zubaie holds the second deputy prime minister post, allocated to Sunnis. The Iraqi Accord Front also holds the ministries of culture, higher education and planning, and claims the ministers of state for foreign affairs and women’s affairs as members. Sunnis also lead the government’s defense and intelligence agencies.

As a community, the Sunnis have adopted a two-pronged approach to politics. Clearly, some actors have decided to accommodate the Shia and Kurds, at least on the surface, by working with them in government – and indeed, as a minority group (and the only one of the three that does not command oil reserves of some sort), the Sunnis have little choice in this. At the same time, the country’s top Sunni religious body — the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) — has maintained a hard-line position, demanding an end to the U.S. occupation before negotiations over ending the insurgent violence and a political power-sharing mechanism are held. The AMS is also very critical of growing Iranian infl uence in Iraq, and thus has gained considerable backing from the Arab states. The AMS, established four days after Hussein’s regime was toppled, also has strong Baathist connections: All the founding members were formerly state-appointed mosque preachers. As a result of this, the group has considerable infl uence among both Islamist-leaning nationalist guerrilla groups and former Baathist military commanders.

The bulk of the Sunni nationalist insurgency is made up of former Baathists — both those who have retained a secular nationalist ideology and those who have adopted an Islamist orientation, all operating under various names.

There are, therefore, elements among the Sunnis who would align with the United States for protection against the Shia. There are those who support a coalition government. The problem is that there is no single, coherent Sunni position and no one to simply speak for them. Moreover, any collaborationist position within the Sunni community is likely to be met with Sunni violence.

The JihadistsThe Sunni jihadists are separate from, but closely related to, the nationalist insurgency. The two movements have been interwoven in ways that frequently made it diffi cult to distinguish between them, but their goals are not the same.

The crucial distinction here is that the Sunni nationalists have used violence as leverage in their pursuit of political power within Iraq. The jihadists, however, have no inherent interest in an Iraqi state as such; rather, their interest is in ensuring that it becomes a failed state. By their logic, the Sunni areas of the region would become the nucleus of a future, transnational caliphate.

Under Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Jamaat al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad organization, the jihadists had begun quietly establishing themselves in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. They burst into the public eye in August 2003, after the nationalist insurgency had

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taken hold, with two suicide bombings: one targeting the U.N. building in Baghdad and the other against a Shiite shrine in An Najaf (an attack that killed then-SCIRI leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim).

The chaos that the nationalist insurgency provided gave al-Zarqawi’s group room to maneuver, and within a year Iraq had become the world’s most active theater for jihadist attacks — with almost daily strikes against Shiite, Kurdish and coalition targets. In the Muslim world, Western troops were viewed as an occupying force — a perception that helped to attract new forces for the transnational Islamist militants from other parts of the globe. By the end of 2004, al-Zarqawi raised his personal profi le even further by joining forces with al Qaeda, though the partnership was plagued by differences of opinion with al Qaeda leaders over the appropriateness of killing Shia and other Muslims, who al-Zarqawi’s group deemed to be collaborators with the West.

Despite Al-Zarqawi’s death in June, the jihadists have been instrumental in fomenting civil war through continued attacks against the Shia (and the Shia’s active reciprocation).

Several jihadist groups, in addition to al Qaeda, are currently active in Iraq. Some of these — like the Mujahideen Shura Council — have a transnational outlook, while others are focused strictly on operations in Iraq. The transnational jihadists have by now established ties to like-minded local groups. This explains the more recent alliance called Hilf al-Mutayyibeen, which bands together the Mujahideen Shura Council, Jaish al-Fatihin, Jund al-Sahabah, Kataib Ansar al-Tawhid wa al-Sunnah, and several Sunni tribal elders. There are still other Iraqi jihadist groups thatoperate independently — such as Jaish Ansar al-Sunna, a Kurdish militant group that operates independently but cooperates with other jihadist organizations.

The KurdsThe Kurds have two interests. In the long run, they want to create a Kurdish state out of a homeland that now is intersected by the territorial boundaries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. The last three mentioned here are violently opposed to that idea. In the near term, the Kurds want to keep the Kurdish region in Iraq relatively independent and prosperous. The Kurdish region has been, to a great extent, autonomous from Baghdad since Desert Storm, when a U.S. presence helped to protect it. The Kurdish position is the most pro-American but, paradoxically, least aligned with U.S. policy. The Kurds have minimal interest in increasing the power of Baghdad and a great deal of interest in dividing Iraq into three regions — a strategy that is anathema to the Americans. Still, if there is a stable base to be found in Iraq, it is the Kurds.

However, the Iraqi Kurds are also not without signifi cant divisions. The main fault line runs between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Masoud Barzani’s KDP holds sway in northwestern Iraq, while Jalal Talabani’s PUK is infl uential in the northeast. The parties have a power-sharing arrangement, both within the context of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq and at the federal level.

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Within the KRG, Barzani is president and his nephew, Nechervan Idris Barzani, is prime minister. And at the federal level, the KDP holds the Foreign Ministry, as well as the ministries of housing and construction and industry and minerals. Of course, the PUK’s leader, Talabani, is president of Iraq. The PUK also claims the fi rst deputy prime ministership and the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources.

The Iraqi Kurds are willing to use their ethnic brethren in Turkey and Iran (and even in Syria) as leverage within Iraq, seeking to improve their own standing versus the Shia and the Sunnis — but they are not willing to antagonize Ankara, Tehran or Damascus by joining forces with the other Kurds of the region in a push for an independent Kurdistan.

There are several explanations for this position. First, and fairly obvious, is the fact that even if the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran pooled their resources, they would be no match for the military forces of even one of those states, let alone all three combined. Second, the Iraqi Kurds are suffi ciently factionalized in and of themselves that only chaos could be expected if the other Kurds of the region were thrown into the fray. A third consideration is that the Kurds of Iraq wield more political power internally than do the other Kurdish communities in the region. On the surface, it would appear that they would have the strongest chance of success in a bid for independence. But paradoxically, it is their very political strength and economic power, in the form of the northern oil fi elds, that prevents them from doing so.

Stated differently, it is more in the Iraqi Kurds’ interests to pursue political power within the existing framework than to attempt to create a new state of their own. Therefore, when the Kurds talk of federalism in Iraq, it is not a move toward an end, but an end in itself: Proactively maneuvering for anything beyond a federalist structure would jeopardize the gains they have made since the fall of Hussein. Within Iraq, the Kurds have power and leverage; outside of Iraq, there is real danger of losing political power and perhaps even of physical destruction by the states that view them as a threat.

It is no surprise that allies of the United States, like Turkey, would be opposed to increased Kurdish autonomy, while potential negotiating partners, such as Iran and Syria, would make limiting Kurdish autonomy a major bargaining point. Therefore, though the Kurds are indeed pro-American, they potentially limit U.S. room for maneuver if it should choose a negotiating route. Moreover, if that negotiation were to start to threaten Kurdish interests, the assumptions of U.S.-Kurdishrelations would be thrown into the air.

Conclusion

The current reality makes attainment of the original U.S. goals for Iraq, at the very least, diffi cult and unlikely. First, the fragmentation of Iraq and the infl uence of Iran make the creation of a strong central government unlikely. This is not a training problem; it is a loyalty problem. The forces that call themselves the Iraqi army and police do not owe their primary loyalty to the Iraqi

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government but to the myriad factions discussed above. No matter how well trained these forces are, they will not support an Iraqi state unless the faction they are loyal to commits itself to such a state.

The American strategy was to defeat these forces militarily in order to clear the way for an Iraqi government. The United States, however, does not appear to have the military power needed to defeat these forces. If there is to be a centralized Iraqi government, it can only be achieved, if at all, through political arrangements. These political arrangements are possible, but not compatible with the goal of making the Iraqi government pro-American. Though the Kurds are prepared to work with the United States and the Sunnis, for complex reasons, might see the United States as a temporary ally against Shia, the Shia make up the majority in Iraq and thus are the linchpin of the situation. And the Shia, along with their Iranian patrons, are not interested in a pro-American Iraqi government. The very best outcome that the United States can achieve with the Shia is a government that is neutral between the United States and Iran and that possibly would give the United States some basing privileges in Iraq for a period of time. But the idea that Iran and its Iraqi allies will allow the United States to dominate a government in Baghdad is no longer a realistic expectation.

The retention of U.S. forces in Iraq as a means of regional power projection is a greater possibility. Obviously, Iran would be the target of such a force and would do everything to prevent its emergence. But here the United States does have options that bypass Iranian wishes. The Kurds would welcome a U.S. presence, and the Sunnis — fearing Shiite and Iranian power, plus being infl uenced by Saudi Arabia — could well be induced to accept it. In this scenario, the United States would have to consider the partitioning of Iraq as in the American interest — balanced, of course, by the expansion of Iranian power in southern Iraq.

The United States can expect no meaningful military support from the rest of the world. Nor indeed can leaders in Washington be certain that outside forces, like Russia, will not act politically to further bog the United States down in Iraq and thereby weaken American power globally. In the current situation, the United States is on its own, dealing with its enemies.

Clearly, the United States has limited military options and will now be engaging in breathtakingly obvious negotiations. In these negotiations, the United States has essentially two strategic options:

1. To accept the fragmentation of Iraq into multiple entities, accept Iranian domination of the south but use bases in the rest of Iraq to threaten Iran’s national security and interests.

2. To negotiate directly with Iran for the creation of a single, integrated Iraq that protects both American and Iranian interests.

There are other options, which we will examine now, but if there is no military solution — or if the military solutions are politically unacceptable — then any political settlement must follow one of these courses. However, before we accept this as obvious, the full spectrum of options must be considered.

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U . S . S t r a t e g i c O p t i o n s

The United States has essentially fi ve options.

1. Continue its present strategy in Iraq, with minor adjustments.

2. Withdraw forces from Iraq on a short and/or fi xed time line.

3. Increase its forces in Iraq and the region, and implement a more aggressive military strategy. 4. Keep forces in Iraq, suspend security operations and redeploy its forces within Iraq and the region.5. Redefi ne the political process in the region by seeking accommodation with some or all of the various forces inside Iraq, as well as with other nations — particularly Iran. This option can be combined with any of the other options.

Let’s consider each option in some detail.

Option 1: Maintain Current StrategyThere are two arguments for continuing the current strategy:

1. The possibility that a show of commitment will cause forces in Iraq and elsewhere to re-evaluate American commitment and change their course.

2. Using the current strategy as a platform to engage in Option 5 above — aka negotiations.

Excluded from this argument is the possibility that the current strategy could result in a military victory. There are two ways to reach this conclusion. First, the United States has pursued its existing strategy with roughly the same force level since the summer of 2003. It has failed to defeat the Sunni insurgency. Moreover, during this period, we have seen an intensifi cation of the insurgency, and the Shiite militias have been added to the mix. Unless we assume that the Iraqi forces are actually weakening by burning through resources, we see no reason to believe that the United States can achieve in 2007 or 2008 what it failed to achieve in the previous years. Further, we see no evidence of a deteriorating resource base for the insurgency. Quite the contrary, there has been a continual infl ux of resources to the Sunnis and an intensifi cation of resources fl owing from Iran to the Shia.

Second, when we look at the current ratio of forces in Iraq, we see that U.S. forces — at roughly 140,000 (including a large number of forces not engaged in ground combat operations) — are attempting to suppress an insurgency spread through a population of more than 20 million (excluding Kurds). This ratio of forces is more refl ective of the ratio of police to civilians in an American city than it is to a military force dealing with a multi-faceted, well-armed and motivated insurgency.

Also excluded is the notion that by training Iraqi forces and holding the line on the ground, the United States can turn security operations over to the Iraqis. To argue this point, one would have to assume that the Iraqis lack expertise alone — when what they really lack is loyalty.

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The primary loyalty of most Iraqis is to their families, communities, religions and indigenous leaders. Their failure to fi ght effectively does not refl ect the need for additional training, but rather the fact that their membership in Iraqi military and police formations is a means for serving the factions in Iraq that claim their primary loyalty. The Iraqi government has far less meaning to the Iraqis than the Republic of Vietnam had to Vietnamese.

However, this can be said for Option 1. One of the reasons the United States invaded Iraq was to demonstrate to the Muslim world that, contrary to perceptions, the Americans were prepared to take risks, endure pain and fi ght in the face of adversity. This psychological mission was not trivial in a region that perceived the United States as not having the will to fi ght. So far, the United States has lost about 3,000 troops in Iraq — about 6 percent of the KIAs it endured in Vietnam. Continuing with the current strategy, even in the face of extended combat and unlikely victory, would secure the perception that the United States is prepared to shoulder burdens and, therefore, should not be underestimated. On the other hand, withdrawing would enhance the impression that the Americans have no appetite for a fi ght.

Psychology is not a trivial argument. It could be claimed that only a continuation of the current operation would lay the groundwork for a negotiated settlement, since the perception of withdrawal would obviate the need for negotiations. But on the other side of the equation is the reality that U.S. forces are absorbing casualties without materially effecting the military or political situation in Iraq. As in any counterinsurgency, U.S. troops can win any fi ght in which they engage. And as in any counterinsurgency, the most important battles are those that never happened, because of enemy agility, intelligence and strategy.

There is also a military reality to consider. The current posture exhausts U.S. forces. Between the forces currently deployed in Iraq, those that have returned and are recovering from deployment and those scheduled to leave and replace forces in Iraq, the U.S. Army has been drained of resources. That leaves the United States vulnerable to crises in other areas. Even if the decision to expand the U.S. Army were made today, it would be several years before that larger force would be available. In the meantime, the United States would be severely limited in its global options.

In the end, that is the primary reason the United States cannot continue its current strategy. Whatever its interests in Iraq, the country does not constitute the sum total of the U.S.-jihadist confl ict or all of the potential confl icts the United States might face. Gambling everything on Iraq, when viewed in the global context, incurs enormous risks, with limited opportunity for payoff. If the United States did win in Iraq, it would still be a skewed bet — but given the odds of such an outcome, and the certainty of soaking up U.S. forces, this is an unlikely strategy.

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Option 2: Withdrawal of U.S. ForcesSince the United States is incurring losses without being in a position to impose a military solution, and since the political process is clearly in disarray, a reasonable solution would be the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. There would be three ways to stage such a withdrawal:

1. A rapid retreat of all forces to Kuwait, coupled with a sealift and airlift for most troops, with a reserve force remaining in Iraq or in other countries of the region.

2. A staged withdrawal of forces over a predetermined and publicly announced time line.

3. A staged withdrawal of forces without a publicly committed time line.

If we begin by accepting that withdrawal is a good idea, then the fi rst approach recommends itself. The goal of the withdrawal is to eliminate U.S. casualties while freeing up forces for operations elsewhere. It proceeds from the idea that the political process is beyond infl uence by U.S. combat operations. In that case, any extended withdrawal would be illogical. Nothing would be gained by an extended withdrawal process, and further risks and loss of life would be incurred.

Any staged withdrawal carries with it a number of costs. First, casualties would continue to be incurred. Second, no U.S. guarantees or threats would be politically meaningful. A guarantee would last no longer than U.S. forces remained in Iraq, and a threat would have no meaning as U.S. forces were drawn down. Obviously, a staged withdrawal without a public time line would be preferable to one with a timetable, but it would rapidly become apparent that the Americans were withdrawing, and — given the logistical complexities of such a withdrawal — it would be obvious that a time line existed. Moreover, fl exibility would be an illusion. The U.S. Army is not an agile force: A sudden reversal of the withdrawal process would not be easy. Once the process was under way, both the time line and its irreversibility would become obvious. Between logistics and politics, the pullout would be locked in.

Thus, though the staged withdrawal would appear on the surface to be the most balanced and rational of these options, it would make little sense once the U.S. decision to leave Iraq was made. The entire reason for leaving is that the politics are out of control. A staged withdrawal would only guarantee extended chaos, without providing any clear advantage to the United States. If U.S. forces leave, they should leave quickly — a withdrawal mode that bears few additional costs and offers several benefi ts.

However, there is an inherent problem in the very concept of withdrawal. If the United States were to withdraw from Iraq, even if it left some forces in the region, Iranian power would surge. First, the Iranians would be in a position not only to support the Iraqi Shia but to project their own forces directly into Iraq — thus forcing Shiite subservience to Tehran, ending Kurdish autonomy and potentially devastating the Sunnis. An American withdrawal from Iraq would leave Iran free to extend its power — and even its armed forces — along the northern border of Saudi Arabia

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and Kuwait, as well as the eastern border of Jordan, linking up with and vastly strengthening Alawite Syria. Iraq’s strategic value to the United States, one of the reasons for the American invasion, would be reversed, with Iran enjoying the benefi ts of Iraq’s strategic position instead. Whether this was done by Iran’s Iraqi surrogates or by Iranian troops directly, the outcome would be the same: The balance of power in the Middle East would shift dramatically, and Iran would become a regional power.

With Iranian/Shiite forces arrayed along the Saudi border, the United States would have two choices: It either could remain in its Kuwaiti enclave, watching the evolution of events, or move into Saudi Arabia, at Riyadh’s invitation, to protect Saudi oil. Either choice would have devastating implications. Re-establishing U.S. forces on Saudi soil could destabilize the Saudi regime and re-ignite jihadist forces in the kingdom. Not moving in could place Saudi oil at risk and force the Saudis to reach an accommodation with Iran.

Thus, whether this withdrawal was staged or precipitous, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq — at this phase of events and without specifi c and durable political arrangements — would be catastrophic. Among other outcomes, it would trigger a massive Israeli response. A link-up between Iran and Syria would, over time, change the balance of power between Israel and Syria, which Israel would have to attempt to block. And since an Iranian presence on the Jordanian border — again, whether surrogate or direct is immaterial — would threaten the survival of the Jordanian government, Israel’s eastern frontier would be at risk as well. Add to this Turkish concerns about Syria and Iran along its southern frontier, and the result would be to trigger massive instability.

Therefore, we do not expect the United States to choose to withdraw on any of the three bases stated above. An American withdrawal from Iraq would create a vacuum that only Iran could fi ll — and having fi lled it, Iran would be in an extraordinarily powerful position to extend its authority and infl uence. Whether the last U.S. troops in Iraq were to leave in 30 days or two years, once it became obvious they were leaving, the game would play out as if they were no longer there. All sides would position themselves for the world that inevitably would come into being after U.S. withdrawal. And that would mean the region seeking and reaching accommodation, on whatever terms possible, with Iran.

Option 3: Massive Increase in Military Presence and Operations

A third, seemingly obvious option would be an increase in U.S. forces in the region. This could take two forms. In one, the United States would massively step up its military capability in Iraq. In the second, the United States would increase its forces to eliminate Iran as a military threat in the region, setting the stage for withdrawal without the catastrophic vacuum discussed in Option 2.

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Any increase of forces in Iraq would have to be massive, and not the 20,000-40,000 troop surge now being discussed by Washington. The problem is that it is simply not clear how many troops would be needed to defeat the Sunni insurgency and contain the Shiite militias. Counterinsurgency does not yield to the various war-gaming models that can make some reasonable predictions as to the effect of increased troops on the correlation of forces. Obviously, a massive surge of U.S. forces would have a substantial psychological effect, causing all parties to recalculate their assumptions and positions. But it is unclear what level of forces the United States would need in order to achieve its military and political goals.

In a real sense, of course, this entire discussion is academic, inasmuch as the United States does not have enough forces available to massively increase its presence in Iraq. The U.S. Army has about 677,000 active duty and drilling reserve strength. Of these, 119,000 are now in Iraq, with an additional 57,000 deploying there. Some 23,000 are in Afghanistan. That is a total of about 200,000 troops already committed. But the number of troops that are now in Iraq is roughly equal to the number that have rotated out in the past year. These units are short personnel and especially equipment — some of which is being repaired, some replaced and some left behind in Iraq. Of the 439,000 left, 5 percent to 7 percent are unfi t for deployment for a number of reasons (medical, administrative and others). So, if we reduce the 439,000 by about 40,000 and eliminate another 150,000 as in training and recovery cycles, the Army has about 250,000 available for deployment. This would strip all forces from South Korea to Germany. But apart from the fact that this would eliminate all reserves, many of these remaining troops are unsuited for combat or direct support operations. Some come from under-trained and under-equipped units, and others have specialties that are not relevant to the confl ict. In our best guess, the Army could fi nd another 100,000 troops to send to Iraq. However, that not only would tap out available effective troops, it would mean that all forces would be there for the duration. There would be no rotations.

The Marines have more than 186,000 active and drilling reserves. Of these, 22,000 are in Iraq, and 44,000 are getting ready to replace those who are already there or have recently left. That leaves about 120,000 Marines. Assuming similar availability as the Army, that would leave 114,000 available. Of these, a much higher percentage would be useful in Iraq than the Army would show. Stripping everything bare, the Marines could probably push another 75,000 into Iraq. Doing so, however, would mean ending the rotation commitments to the Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments, the vanguard of U.S. fl exibility overseas.

Summing all of this up, the United States — by throwing in everything but the kitchen sink — could increase the force in Iraq to something between 350,000 and 375,000. But such a move would strip the Navy of its power projection capability, leave Asia completely uncovered and make it impossible to rescue U.S. citizens who get trapped in Liberia or whatnot. It would be rolling the entire force into Iraq. And it is simply unclear that an increase of this size would make much difference in a country of 27 million. What it would do is leave the entire U.S. global position wide open on a gamble in which the odds could not be calculated. This is not going to happen.

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There is the second strategy to consider: using a troop increase to eliminate the threat from Iran.

If, as we have argued, the major impediment to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq is that it would mean a massive expansion of Iranian power, then it follows that the path to withdrawal runs through Tehran — in this case, by using American forces to destroy Iranian power. The logic runs deeper than simply the need for a withdrawal from Iraq. The U.S. invasion disrupted the historical balance of power between Iraq and Iran. That cannot be reconstituted at this time. So long as the Iranian military remains intact, Iran threatens American interests in the entire region. Therefore, destroying Iran’s military power is logical for the United States.

The problem with this strategy involves numbers, geography, deployment and logistics. Any invasion of Iran most likely would have to involve forces deploying from Kuwait and Iraq, assuming that Turkey declines again to participate (as it did in 2003). Assuming that the United States threw all 350,000 ground forces into the pot, a substantial number would have to be held back in Iraq to assure that lines of supply and communication supporting U.S. forces invading Iran would be secure. Let’s assume that this number would be the 150,000 currently tasked in. The United States would be invading Iran with 200,000 ground troops. Iran is a big country, almost four times as large as Iraq. Assuming that the United States could deploy its forces in Iraq along the Iranian border and protect its lines of supply, a force of 200,000 might engage the Iranian army in the border regions, but driving deep into Iran and then occupying the area would not be an option.

There is, of course, the air option. If we base U.S. planning on the premise that the United States does not require regime change in Iran, but needs only to eliminate Iranian ground combat capability, then it is possible that a sustained air campaign could undermine Iranian warfi ghting suffi ciently to eliminate Tehran as a threat to the region. The precedent for this is Desert Storm, in which the air campaign crippled the Iraqi army. But there are suffi cient examples of the failure of the air campaign to achieve desired ends, including the bombing of North Vietnam and Israel’s recent air campaign strategy against Hezbollah, to indicate that relying on an air campaign by itself is risky.

This is particularly the case because the Iranian response would not be conventional, but covert. It would come in two parts. First, in Iraq, the Iranians could force Shiite militias to attack U.S. forces directly — something that has not happened as extensively as it might. Second, Iran could use its assets in the Gulf states to rise up and destabilize those countries.

One scenario in particular is worrisome here: The U.S. line of supply to central Iraq, where U.S. forces are fi ghting and would still be deployed, runs through Shiite territory. Convoys moving from Kuwait toward Baghdad are regularly harassed, but there has been no concerted effort to date to cut that line of supply. If the Iranians committed their own forces, masked as Iraqi Sunnis, into a battle along this line of supply, they could massively disrupt U.S. supply lines. Undoubtedly, U.S. forces could force open the line of supply again over time, but if the security of that line became uncertain and intermittent, the U.S. position would deteriorate — not only within Iraq, but among the forces attacking Iran.

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The problem with Option 3 is that the United States simply does not have the ground forces necessary for any expansion that would have a decisive and certain effect on the situation in Iraq, nor allow for operations against Iran. Air campaigns against Iran are conceivable, but the Iranians have counters, all of which would require major ground forces to defeat. And that is the United States’ crucial point of vulnerability. These ground forces could be developed over a two- to three-year period on a crash basis, but that has nothing to do with the moment at hand. At this moment, the forces are not there, and neither is this option.

Option 4: Redeployment

So, U.S. troops cannot leave Iraq, and they cannot win decisively. The Americans can neither continue with the current strategy, nor simply walk away. This leads to the option of redefi ning the mission and the redeployment of forces. Given the situation, the mission now must be to prevent Iranian power from dominating the region. U.S. forces must turn away from the mission of creating a democratic government in Iraq — turning to face Iran.

The redefi ned mission can be simply stated: to prevent Iran from dominating Iraq to such an extent that it creates a regional sphere of infl uence. Iran cannot be simply excluded from Iraq; that is no longer an option. Two things, however, can be achieved. The fi rst is to limit Iran’s infl uence in Iraq. The second is, in doing this, to dampen the geopolitical consequences of the failure of the original U.S. mission and curtail Iran’s power in the rest of the region.

Such a redeployment could achieve for the United States another goal: reducing the casualties U.S. troops are taking in ineffective counterinsurgency operations. At this moment, the bulk of these casualties continue to come in the Sunni regions. However hopeful political discussions may have been last spring, and however badly the jihadists have been damaged in the Sunni regions, there is still an intense insurgency under way, and American forces continue to take casualties without being able to bring this under control.

Thus, if U.S. forces are to remain in Iraq, they cannot remain in the Sunni regions. More precisely, they cannot retain the mission of suppressing the insurgency unless there is a massive increase in forces, which we view as unlikely for the reasons discussed previously. The United States either must withdraw its forces entirely from the region or leave some forces in highly secure bases within the region.

In considering a redeployment, three realities must be faced. First, Shiite control of the south cannot be challenged and, therefore, Iranian infl uence and even domination of that part of Iraq is inevitable. Second, U.S. troops will be conceding the Sunni triangle to Sunni forces — and the future of the foreign jihadists and insurgents will be in Sunni hands. Finally, having conceded the fi rst two points, the possibility of Washington being able to control events in Baghdad diminishes even further. Baghdad is an area that will be the focus of any Sunni-Shiite civil war, and the

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United States will not be able to contain these tensions any more than it has in the past.

While acknowledging these realities, the United States has four remaining goals in Iraq:

1. To prevent Iraq from becoming an Iranian satellite state.

2. To protect the Arabian Peninsula from Iranian power.

3. To preserve the autonomy of Iraqi Kurds, within the context of the U.S.-Turkish relationship.

4. To preserve U.S. options over the long run and maintain a level of uncertainty in the region as to U.S. intentions and capabilities.

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In other words, the Americans must protect the Saudi-Iraqi border, protect the Kurds, keep their own options open, use the Sunni-Shiite confl ict to create an internal balance of power for Iraq and abandon more ambitious plans (pending diplomatic agreements and/or decisions on U.S. force structure going forward).

To achieve these goals, two prime areas must be occupied by U.S. forces. The fi rst is the region of Iraq west of Kuwait, running from the northern Kuwaiti border on a roughly straight line to the Saudi-Iraqi border, a distance of about 200 miles. A force of about two divisions in this region would be suffi cient to protect the Saudi and Kuwaiti borders from Iranian attack, while threatening the fl ank of any Iranian force that would try to attack Saudi Arabia farther west. The force could be easily supplied out of Kuwait; it would not have to occupy Saudi territory but it would prevent the expansion of Iranian power southward, regardless of the evolution of events in Iraq.

The second area that would need to have some U.S. troops would be in the northeast, in the Kurdish district. Given that the Kurdish militias are themselves capable forces, and that U.S. Special Forces have worked with them and supported them since the early 1990s, far fewer troops would be required to block Iran here than would be needed in the south. The primary mission would be to block Iranian incursions into the region. Since Iran’s primary interests in Iraq are in the south, there is a lower probability that the Iranians would deploy major forces in an incursion in the north — where the terrain also is inhospitable to offensive operations.

Even this arrangement would bring severe tensions with the Turkish government, which is extremely wary of Kurdish independence and the fact that the presence of U.S. troops would guarantee that.

These are, however, the options for U.S. forces to be based in non-Sunni areas. The argument for such basing is that it would show continued American commitment to Iraqi stability, while leaving U.S. forces in a position to exert force if needed. The counterargument is that the symbolic deployment of forces still leaves Americans in harm’s way without suffi cient compensation for the risk incurred. As these U.S. enclaves would continue to be targets for rocket and artillery attacks, the Americans would face the choice of either patrolling the areas around their bases — with the attendant risks and mission creep — or of staying within the base and absorbing the attacks.

The U.S. political tendency will be to compromise and maintain basing in the region. But the logic of the situation argues for withdrawal. If the forces currently in theater provide security in Iraq, any residual force certainly won’t be able to do more than protect itself, and probably not that either. Maintaining forces in the Baghdad region or at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) may appear an attractive option for Washington, but that actually amounts to continuing the current mission without even the resources currently available. We suspect that the United States will retain responsibility for security at BIAP, but beyond that, the enclave strategy — establishing a string of bases — contradicts the basic decisions.

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By withdrawing from central Iraq, the United States would leave a vacuum. The following outcomes are possible:

1. Extended civil war between Sunnis and Shia.

2. A political settlement between Sunnis and Shia, with a degree of parity.

3. A Shiite defeat of the Sunnis, with the assistance of Iranian forces.

The third outcome is the one that would concern the United States the most. However, it also could play out to U.S. advantage. If the Sunnis came under heavy pressure from Iraqi and Iranian Shia, they would turn fi rst to the Saudis and Jordanians for assistance — a road that inevitably would lead back to the United States, under those circumstances. In other words, the Shia could drive the Sunnis into the arms of the United States. This would draw the Americans back into the war, but on terms much more favorable than before. It is, incidentally, the best argument for the enclave strategy, but still an insuffi cient rationale, since this evolution is not certain.

Pursuing Option 4 would mean locking a smaller U.S. force into place in Iraq for years. The advantages of this strategy are that this force would be smaller than the one currently in place, and that it would be occupying areas where the casualties, if any, would be far lower. The disadvantage would be that U.S. troops would still be at risk from Iranian adventurism and exposed to jihadist attacks as well. It is a workable strategy, but ideally, it is one that also would involve a diplomatic solution.

Option 5: Diplomacy

In war, the goal is to impose a politico-military reality on the enemy. In diplomacy, the goal is to reach an accommodation based on existing and potential politico-military realities. The United States has been unable to impose the reality it sought to in Iraq. It is now facing the question of whether it can impose a politico-military reality that will circumscribe the consequences of that failure — the dramatic expansion of the Iranian sphere of infl uence — by redeploying its forces. In other words, Option 4 represents a solution to the Iranian problem that does not require Iranian agreement.

For the United States, Option 4 has obvious defects built in:

1. It accepts the expansion of Iranian power in southern Iraq.

2. It places substantial U.S. forces in an exposed position.

3. It increases the tension between Sunnis and Shia in the region, and could result in instability on the Arabian Peninsula, to the rear of U.S. forces.

4. It assumes that the Sunni position in Iraq will be held, and that Iranian infl uence will not spread west toward Jordan and Syria.

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Option 4 is a choice that could work for Washington, but given these shortcomings, it obviously is not guaranteed to solve the long-term problem of Iran.

The only other choice is to reach some sort of diplomatic understanding with Iran that would achieve the goals of both countries, or at least a compromise. A diplomatic resolution between the United States and Iran, however, is diffi cult to imagine, for domestic political reasons on both sides. Iran regards the United States as “the Great Satan.” The United States regards Iran as part of the “axis of evil.” To reach a settlement, the Iranians would be making a deal with the devil and the Americans would be making a deal with evil.

But there is a precedent for this: the Sino-U.S. understanding in the early 1970s. The Americans had regarded Red China as the greatest menace to humanity, and had sharp memories of fi ghting the Chinese in the Korean War. Maoist China regarded American imperialism as the greatest evil in the world, and the Chinese had similar memories of the war. Nevertheless, and in spite of domestic political indoctrination, Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-Tung sat down together to forge an understanding that would have been unthinkable a few months before it happened.

What made that understanding possible — indeed, inevitable — was the existence of a common enemy, the Soviet Union. The reality of the Soviet threat overwhelmed ideology and domestic political considerations, giving rise to strategic reassessments and diplomatic solutions. In short, the military problem posed by the Soviets redefi ned the diplomatic possibilities.

The fundamental problem in the Iranian-U.S. equation is that there is no common enemy to unite these two actors. Therefore, any diplomatic solution must be built on a much more precarious framework: mutual fear of each other. But typically, trust is needed for diplomacy to work. Fear and trust normally are incompatible.

Begin by examining the basis of the mutual distrust, which is ideological but goes beyond ideology. Iran’s territorial integrity has been under attack continually: The Soviets occupied the northern part of the country during and after World War II, and the Iraqis conducted an aggressive campaign in the 1980s. In addition, more distant hegemons, like the United Kingdom, have tried to control Iran, and the United States exerted control through the governments it helped to create and support. The United States also supported historical rivals to Iran in the region, such as the Saudis.

The Iranians view the United States as an ideological challenger and as a nation committed to containing Iranian power. For Tehran, then, one of the urgent issues is to prevent the United States from re-establishing the traditional balance of power that existed with Iraq, and from which a fundamental threat to Iranian national security derived.

From the American point of view, Iran’s desire to break free of a threat on its western frontier also appears to be a desire to establish hegemony in the Persian Gulf. If Iran is not limited by a powerful

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Iraq, it will be the dominant power in the region. Whatever Iran’s subjective intentions — and the United States has no reason to trust those — satisfying Iran’s needs for security inevitably will evolve into the creation of Iranian power in the Persian Gulf region. The United States sees Iran as an ideological rival, and sees Iran’s maneuvers to preserve its territorial integrity as an attempt to dominate the region — something with which the United States cannot live.

Both powers are correct. Iran needs to neutralize Iraq in order to be secure. And without a powerful Iraq, Iran would be the dominant regional power. The diplomatic challenge is to fi nd a formula that would guarantee Iranian security without giving birth to a new power that could threaten the Persian Gulf and U.S. interests in the region. Achieving this without the underpinnings of a military balance would be diffi cult. Neither side has any reason to trust the long-term guarantees of the other. Iran sees Iraq as the key to its national security. The United States sees a pro-Iranian Iraq as the preface to regional hegemony. Both are right.

At the same time, both powers fear each other. The Iranians are fully aware of U.S. power and recognize that, in the long term, power cannot be dismissed lightly. This is one of the reasons Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. The Americans are aware that, given the realities of Iraq, they could forestall Iranian hegemony only by positioning troops in Iraq for an extended period of time, and by being willing to intervene against Iran or its proxies if they were overwhelming Iraq’s Sunnis. The United States does not want to be in the position of redeploying and then having to surge forward into the Sunni triangle, in defense of the Sunnis. That would be an explosive situation, to say the least.

The issue is whether a political resolution with Iran that would achieve two goals is possible. The goals are:

1. To genuinely neutralize Iraq so that Iran’s western frontier is secure.

2. To render Iraq suffi ciently powerful that it would deter Iranian expansion, yet without threatening Iran.

This would be a daunting balancing act, even without the complexities of Iraqi politics. But one must add to this another set of issues:

1. Iran will demand certain economic concessions in Iraq, particularly including the development of oil reserves in the Basra region.

2. Iran must have guarantees that Kurdish autonomy in Iraq will not lead to an independent Kurdish state.

3. The United States will demand that Iran not develop nuclear weapons.

4. The United States must insist that Iran not agitate the Shiite population in the Persian Gulf.

In addition, the negotiations must take place in such a way that the ideological sensibilities of both parties are not excessively strained.

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To us, there would appear to be simply too much on the table between the United States and Iran for a successful and stable diplomatic resolution to be reached. Each side will be tempted by the prospect of such a resolution, but each side will be unwilling to make the kind of concession needed, except if there were a prior military reality in place. In other words, for a diplomatic solution to be reached with Iran, the necessary precondition is the U.S. military redeployment conceived of in Option 4. If that were in place, then a reality would be imposed and a diplomatic solution could be built on that reality. At that point, the level of trust would really hinge on the creation of a Sunni buffer region in western Iraq. For Iran, if it were sincere, such a buffer would not pose a real problem. For the United States, if it were sincere, the buffer would have to be respected, in spite of al Qaeda operations.

If Iraq’s Sunni region becomes the key to a solution, then obviously, one must turn to the Sunni powers affecting this: Jordan and Saudi Arabia. They must become the guarantors of the region against both the United States and Iran. They must guarantee Iran that the Sunni region would not develop into an anti-Iranian power. They also must guarantee limitations on foreign jihadists in that region. Their guarantees could not be absolute, of course, but their collaboration on containing the jihadists would be critical.

It is at this point that the Syrian question would have to be addressed. In general, the Syrian threat in Iraq is subordinate to, and part of, the Iranian threat. However, Syria might well see a secure Sunni power in Iraq as a threat to its own interests. Obviously, if Iran bought into a diplomatic resolution with the United States, Syria would be isolated as weak. However, from the American point of view, having to trust that Iran would not encourage Syria to undermine the agreement would be asking too much. Therefore, Syria would have to be dealt with.

Syria, of course, wants to dominate Lebanon. When it did so in the past, there was relative stability. The Israelis and Syrians had parallel interests in Lebanon. Neither wanted instability. Once Syria’s armed forces were forced out of Lebanon, however, the behavior of Hezbollah no longer could be ascribed to Damascus: Hezbollah became aggressive, and Lebanon destabilized. Israel has far less trouble with the idea of a Syrian-dominated Lebanon and a controlled Hezbollah than it does with a disintegrating Lebanon and a Hezbollah that is free to maneuver. If the status quo ante in Lebanon could be restored, Damascus’ interests would be more than satisfi ed, and it would have more important things to do than meddle in Iraq.

All of this is logical, but it assumes an enormous number of leaps. The probability of all of them being made is small. In our view, therefore, a grand diplomatic resolution to Iraq would not be possible unless an extraordinarily complex diplomatic tour de force were to occur. Some smaller diplomatic understandings, however, are possible:

1. An informal understanding with Iran on the treatment of the Sunni region if Iraq collapses.

2. An understanding with Iran on the creation of a formally united but fundamentally weak Iraq.

3. An understanding with Saudi Arabia, such that it would use its infl uence with the Sunnis to curtail their insurgency in Iraq. 4. An understanding with leading Iraqi Sunni leaders on suspending some operations against the United States.

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These understandings would all be inherently precarious. Nothing would enforce them but good will, and that is sorely lacking in the region. These small steps would not open the door to a U.S. exit from Iraq, since the fundamental question of Iranian power, absent the United States, would remain. Each of these understandings, and others of this class, would be reversible. Thus, it follows that diplomacy works only as an adjunct to the implementation of Option 4, and not an option by itself, unless (a) the broad agreement can be managed or (b) one side decides to abandon core interests.

Conclusion

The fi ve options we have presented here outline what we see as the main alternatives open to the United States. They obviously overlap, contain subtle gradations internally and exclude some outrider scenarios, such as massive nuclear strikes against Iran or covert action intended to destabilize the regime. This outline is designed to be a useful analytical tool.

From this, however, some key fi ndings emerge:

1. The United States cannot maintain its current strategy. The strategy is not achieving its goals and is sucking up U.S. ground forces, so as to have dramatically reduced U.S. global options. The current strategy leaves the United States with drastically reduced ability to respond to military crises and challenges elsewhere in the world, without achieving its goals in Iraq.

2. The United States cannot withdraw from Iraq. A withdrawal would leave Iran in a dramatically improved position and likely would shift the strategic balance of power in the region in ways that the United States could not tolerate.

3. Any diplomatic solution for the United States in Iraq must involve Iran as the central player. All other regional powers, such as Syria, are secondary to Iran.

4. A comprehensive diplomatic resolution with Iran is extremely unlikely. There is no strategic foundation for such a resolution, as the interests of the two countries are in many ways incompatible, and there are too many failure points lurking in the diplomatic process.

5. There are lesser, informal agreements of a relatively near-term nature that can be reached concerning arrangements in Iraq, and these will be pursued.

6. The reduction and redeployment of U.S. troops in Iraq is the key solution. The redeployment should focus on containing growing Iranian power by positioning forces along the Saudi- Iraqi border and, secondarily, in the northern Kurdish region.

7. Deploying forces to secure bases in central Iraq will be a temptation for the United States, as this creates a compromise solution. But like many compromises, this path would lead to the worst outcome: continued vulnerability for U.S. troops without signifi cant politico- military advantage. Nevertheless, we expect the United States to maintain some forces in the region, particularly at BIAP.

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8. We would expect reduction and redeployment to begin in a matter of months, since little is being gained by the current posture and the political environment in the United States is conducive to this move.

Given U.S. interests in the region, the relative power of Iran and the unlikelihood that the traditional Iraq-Iran balance of power will be resurrected, it is diffi cult to foresee circumstances under which the United States will be able to withdraw the remnant force from Iraq in the coming years. The failure of the U.S. adventure in Iraq to achieve its strategic and political goals has created a long-term imbalance in the region that only the United States can stabilize.

The United States must now reconfi gure its presence to cope with this strategic reality — its unintended creation.

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A p p e n d i c e s

The Iranian GameApr 24, 2003

SummaryThe Shiite rising in Iraq has posed a major problem for the United States — not only with the Iraqis, but with Iran. Tehran clearly has a degree of infl uence and even control over Iraqi Shiites, and it appears to us that the Iranians are using this confrontation to put themselves in a position to negotiate more effectively with the United States over the long-term geopolitical dynamic of the Persian Gulf.

AnalysisFollowing an overwhelmingly successful war, the United States has encountered a fi nal but signifi cant intelligence failure. Embedded in U.S. strategic thinking has been the valid assumption that the oppressed Shiite majority of Iraq would welcome the fall of Saddam Hussein. The extended concept — that the Shiites would rise in support of the U.S. invasion — proved overly optimistic. The fi nal concept — that the Shiites would passively accept U.S. governance — has proven false. The fundamental error was this: Washington was concerned that the Shiites were insuffi ciently organized to rise up. What was not anticipated was that there was no uprising because the Shiites were well organized and under control — and that they would not risk themselves prior to U.S. victory. Instead, they would turn to confront the Americans after the war.

In other words, U.S. leaders expected that, at worst, they would have time to consolidate their hold on Iraq while the Shiites pulled themselves together and, at best, the Shiites would collaborate with the Americans. Every war has its nasty surprise, and this is the nasty surprise for the Americans: The Shiites have decided not to give the Americans the breathing room they needed, but have moved directly into confrontation with the United States.

The Americans, on encountering the problem, quite correctly looked across the border at Iran — warning Tehran not to interfere in Iraqi affairs. The Iranians in fact are the center of gravity of the problem: Iraqi Shiites, suppressed for a generation by Hussein, have consistently looked east toward Iran for what little support they could expect. The United States, having failed to support a Shiite rising in 1991, was viewed as a dubious ally, prepared to fi ght to the last drop of Shiite blood. Therefore, it now appears that Iran was able to covertly organize at least a signifi cant portion of the Iraqi Shiite community, and through this organization is managing Shiite resistance to the United States. It should be emphasized that there is no evidence of Iranian coercion. The Iraqi Shiites appear to be quite prepared to play their role, and there is no reason to believe that the Iranians can push the Iraqi Shiite community in directions that do not coincide with their interests. The problem for the United States is that those interests appear to coincide for now: Demanding that Tehran keep its agents out of Iraq is locking the barn door long after the horse has already left. Iranians clearly have been operating covertly in Iraq for years.

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To get a handle on this problem, we need to begin by considering the geopolitics of the region. As the two major powers in the Persian Gulf region, Iraq and Iran are historical rivals, dating back to Babylon and Persia. The rivalry between them has been the protection for the region: States like Saudi Arabia or Kuwait maintain their independence primarily because Iraq and Iran are locked in a permanent balance of power, with each preventing the other from trying to domi-nate the region.

After the Iraq-Iran war, for example, Iran’s relative weakness freed Iraq to invade Kuwait. At that point, Kuwait’s only hope was the intervention of an outside power: the United States. Washington attempted to do two things: First, to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty; second, to restore the balance of power in the region. It did this fi rst by massively damaging the Iraqi army, rendering it no stronger than that of Iran — but without destroying that army. U.S. leaders understood that the destruction of the Iraqi army would make Iran the dominant power in the region. Since Washington did not want to station a large military force in the region, its ideal outcome was to restore the balance of power between Iraq and Iran by damaging and containing the Iraqi army and hoping that Hussein would fall of his own accord. However, the U.S. calculation was that even if Hussein didn’t fall, that outcome was preferable to a complete Iraqi collapse.

The strategy adopted by the United States in invading Iraq essentially abandoned the traditional balance-of-power strategy. The reason was that an overriding consideration — al Qaeda — had emerged in the intervening years. Washington’s primary interest shifted from protecting the balance of power in the Persian Gulf to forcing regional powers to cooperate aggressively in the war against al Qaeda.

The balance of power gave states like Saudi Arabia room to maneuver. Their fi rst line of security was the Iraq-Iran equation. So long as that held, their dependence on the United States was somewhat limited and therefore the pressure on them to cooperate against al Qaeda could be resisted. The United States had to change this equation. The way to do so was to bring direct military power to bear on all countries in the region. The means for doing this was to invade and occupy Iraq. The problem with this was what to do with Iraq’s traditional adversary and balancer — Iran. Or to put it differently, what would Iran’s policy be after such an invasion? The equation is complicated by the fact that Iran is not only a bystander; it is a prime reason for invading Iraq. From Iraq, U.S. troops will be able to pressure — or even strike — Iran.

The United States has three direct issues with Iran:

• Offi cials in Washington believe al Qaeda has received support from important elements in Iran on at least an intermittent basis, and that the government of Iran is unwilling or unable to stop it. The United States also regards the Iranian revolution as a general inspiration for anti-American Islamic operatives.

• U.S. leaders are concerned that Iran is developing weapons of mass destruction, and they are particularly concerned about the country’s ability to develop nuclear weapons.

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• Combining the fi rst point with the second point, Washington is concerned that, quite apart from what Iran might do with these weapons, the weapons might fall into the hands of al Qaeda or similar groups and be used against the United States.

Given the U.S. concern with al Qaeda, the United States clearly intends to use its position in Iraq to bring pressure — the degree of which will be determined by Iranian actions — on Iran.

Tehran’s interests obviously run counter to those of Washington. The Iranians indeed are concerned that the United States might wage war against Iran. Geography and other factors would appear to make this a much tougher proposition than invading Iraq. However, given the U.S. performance in Iraq, offi cials in Tehran must operate under the worst-case assumption, which is that should the United States choose military action — something no longer inconceivable — it might succeed as effectively as it did in Iraq. Therefore, the Iranians must avoid doing anything to provoke war with the United States. They must choose their actions in a context in which American confi dence is extremely high and where, therefore, American behavior is fundamentally unpredictable.

There also is an opportunity on the table, risky as it is. Iran’s historical enemy, Iraq, has been smashed. Iraq’s army has disintegrated. For the moment, it appears that its society is disintegrating as well. If, by some miracle, the United States was to withdraw its forces from Iraq, Iran would, by default, become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, achieving its historical dream. Now, the Iranians are not dreamers and believe in miracles only offi cially. They understand fully the danger they are in and they know that the United States is not about to withdraw its forces. The Iranians are caught between their primordial fear — invasion and occupation by a great power — and their primordial dream: hegemony over the Persian Gulf.

It is a strange moment requiring subtle policies. Tehran appears to have created a multi-tiered solution:

• Do nothing to provoke the United States on a national level. Having provided a degree of support during the war, Iran was praised by Britain. At the recent meeting of foreign ministers in Riyadh, Iran did not dramatically break with those who suggested that a period of U.S. rule in Iraq was inevitable, nor did it demand immediate withdrawal. Tehran’s overt position was moderate and one of cooperating with the inevitable. On a state level, the Iranians have not given the Americans any reason or justifi cation to strike.

• Try to control U.S. behavior in Iraq by making it clear that the path to stability in Iraq now runs through Tehran. The Shiite demonstrations are designed to drive home to the Americans that effective occupation of Iraq is dependent on the willingness of the Shiites to cooperate. The demonstrations are designed to show that the Shiites are capable of disrupting the situation dramatically and for an unpredictable period of time. This will force Washington to turn to Tehran.

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• Knowing that the United States is not about to withdraw from the region, pull Washington into a relationship in which it must manage its occupation of Iraq through Iran — while gradually increasing demands and setting expectations that will lead to the U.S. withdrawal. In other words, Iran will cooperate on a state-to-state basis on a variety of topics, ranging from weapons inspections and guarantees to intelligence cooperation on al Qaeda. As the United States overcomes al Qaeda and loses its interest in the region, Iran will be in a position to dominate.

There are several problems with this strategy, which the Iranians know well or that are inherent in their situation:

• The ability and willingness of the Iraqi Shiites to maintain their current stance might be limited economically or politically. They might not enjoy the role Iran has nominated them for or, alternatively, the United States might succeed in bribing them to quiescence.

• The assumption that the United States does not intend to use main force to crush the Shiite rising is probably true — but not certain. Iran could fi nd itself playing a very bad hand.

• The Iranians are going to have to make substantial and diffi cult concessions to the United States on a state level. If the policy goes awry, they will have given away much for little.

• The internal politics of Tehran are so complex that it is diffi cult to execute long-term strategies, no matter how rational. The complexity of this strategy is enormous and extends over a long period of time. Washington is better able than Tehran to play a long hand.

These are all excellent reasons for Iran not to pursue the strategy outlined above. The only thing to recommend it is that Tehran really doesn’t have a better plan. The U.S. occupation of Iraq and the clear intention to use that occupation to force Iran to behave in a different manner than it has leaves Tehran with the choice of resistance or compliance. Since neither is a satisfactory choice for Iran, the most rational move is to attempt both at the same time.

For the moment, this has introduced an element of complexity into the American position. The most important variable, not yet known, is the staying power of the Shiites. This could dissipate in a few days without any help from Iran. Or it could dissipate only after Iran intervenes, leading to an ongoing dependency Washington does not want to have. Therefore, the question of the moment is what is the U.S. intelligence read on the Shiites and their long-term behavior and whether this intelligence will be more reliable than the intelligence — at least that which was made public — prior to the war in Iraq. This is a case where an intelligence failure that is noncatastrophic still can lead the United States into substantial strategic complexities.

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U.S. Strategy: Perception vs. DeceptionJul 21, 2003

SummaryThe Bush administration’s continued unwillingness to enunciate a coherent picture of the strategy behind the war against al Qaeda — which explains the war in Iraq — could produce a dangerous domino effect. Lurking in the shadows is the not fully articulated perception that the Iraq war not only began in deception but that planning for the Iraq war was incompetent — a perception driven by the realization that the United States is engaged in a long-term occupation and guerrilla war in Iraq, and the belief that the United States neither expected nor was prepared for this. Ultimately, this perception could erode Bush’s support base, cost him the presidency and, most seriously, lead to defeat in the war against al Qaeda.

AnalysisWe keep waiting for the moment when Iraq does not constitute the major global event of the week. We clearly are not there yet. In Iraq, the reality is fairly stable. The major offensive by the guerrillas forecast by both U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and what seemed to be a spokesman for al Qaeda last weekend did not materialize. The guerrillas tried to shoot down a C-130 coming into Baghdad International Airport, and that was a signifi cant escalation, but they missed — and it was only a single act. Casualties continue to mount, but with the dead averaging at just more than 10 per week, it has not come close to reaching a decisive level.

The deterioration of support in Washington and London is not yet decisive. Support for U.S. President George W. Bush sank from a percentage in the high 70s in the wake of the war, to just more than 50 percent in the past 10 days. But as we read the successive polls, the slump that hit when the WMD issue came to the fore — along with the realization that the United States was dealing with a guerrilla movement — has not accelerated. It slumped and held. Meanwhile, London headlines have focused on the apparent suicide of weapons expert David Kelly, the probable source for a BBC story about British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s manipulation of intelligence data. It is unclear whether these reports have had an impact on public opinion.

However, the current issue is not public opinion. Lurking behind this issue is the not fully articulated perception that the Iraq war not only began in deception but that planning for the Iraq war was incompetent — a perception driven by the realization that the United States is engaged in a long-term occupation and guerrilla war in Iraq, and the belief that the United States in particular was neither expecting nor prepared for this.

A cartoon republished in the New York Times News of the Week section by Mike Smith of the Las Vegas Sun sums up this perception. A general, holding a paper titled “Guerrilla War In Iraq,” says to a table full of generals, “We need to switch to Plan B.” Another general responds, “There was a Plan A?” The media loves the trivial and can’t grasp the signifi cant. If the United States fabricated evidence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as critics are claiming,

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the question is not whether it did so. The question is: Why did it do so? In other words, why was invading Iraq important enough to lie about — if indeed it was a lie, which is far from clear. The emerging perception is that there was no Plan A and there is no Plan B — that the decision to invade was arbitrary and that the lying was therefore gratuitous.

In other words, the Bush administration has a four-part public relations problem:

1. The perception that it lied about weapons of mass destruction

2. The perception that it had no strategic reason for invading Iraq

3. The perception that it was unprepared for the guerrilla war

4. The perception that it is at a loss for what to do next

As we argued last week, lying in foreign policy does not bother the American public. From Woodrow Wilson’s “too proud to fi ght” slogan in the 1916 presidential campaign, to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war planning with the British while publicly denying such plans, to John F. Kennedy claiming that the United States had nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs, what bothers the American public is the idea that the lying is not designed to hide the strategy, but to hide the fact that there is no strategy.

The media are clever. The public is smart. The media have the ability to generate intellectual mayhem within Washington. What should be troubling for Bush is that, as we review the local papers this past weekend, the deepest concern creeping into letters to the editor is that there is no underlying strategy, no point to it — and no exit. Bush clearly retains a massive support base that is not, as we have said, continuing to erode. The media’s fi xation on “what did he know and when did he know it” will not erode it by itself, but the administration’s continued unwillingness to reveal a strategy behind the war on al Qaeda likely will.

The core problem the United States has had in enunciating a strategy rests on this: Since Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has not carried out a strategic operation. It has carried out a series of tactical operations — Bali, Mombasa, Riyadh, Casablanca and so on — but it has not struck again at the United States in an operation of the magnitude of Sept. 11. The operations outside the United States are not, by themselves, suffi cient to justify the global war the United States is waging. Preventing another Sept. 11 is worth the effort. However, as time passes, the perception — if not the reality — grows that Sept. 11 was al Qaeda’s best and only shot at the United States. If that is true, then the level of effort we have seen on a global basis — including the invasion of Iraq and certainly the continued occupation of Iraq in the face of insurrection — simply isn’t worth it. Or put differently, the United States is fi ghting an illusion and exhausting resources in the process.

The mere assertion of the threat will work if Bush and his advisers have a pristine record of honesty with the public. At the point where the public has reason to doubt the word of the president on anything concerning the war, it will affect his ability to be authoritative on anything

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concerning the war. Moreover, the president’s basis for information on al Qaeda’s intentions and capabilities rests with confi dence in the quality of intelligence he is getting. The current crisis over who failed to identify the forgery is trivial. However, it melds into two other serious intelligence crises. First, did the intelligence community fail in its analysis of Iraqi WMD? Second, and more serious in our view, did the intelligence community fail to understand former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s war plan and, therefore, fail to understand that the fall of Baghdad was not the end of the war but the beginning of the guerrilla phase?

Reasonable arguments can be made to justify each of these failures. However, at the end of the day, if the CIA did not know about the forgery, did not understand the WMD situation in Iraq and did not anticipate the guerrilla war, then why should the public believe it regarding the on-going threat of al Qaeda? Pushing the argument further, if the intelligence community did in fact know about each of these things and the president chose to ignore them, then why should the public believe Bush when he talks about al Qaeda?

Bush cannot afford a crisis in the intelligence community or in the public perception of his use of intelligence. More than any of the other world wars in which the United States has participated, this is an intelligence war. Al Qaeda does not have a geographical locus. It does not have a clean organizational chart. It is as much an idea as an organization. Everything that followed Sept. 11 has depended on the public’s confi dence in its intelligence community. If that confi dence is destroyed, then everything else said about al Qaeda — including that it is an ongoing threat that justifi es a global war — becomes subject to debate.

If the CIA cannot be trusted, then the president can’t be trusted. If the president can’t be trusted, then the urgency of the war cannot be trusted. If the urgency of the war can’t be trusted, then the massive exertion being demanded of the U.S. military and public cannot be justifi ed. Thus, having CIA Director George Tenet fall on his sword and accept responsibility for the 16 words in the President’s speech might make a lot of sense inside the beltway, but it is an act of breathtaking recklessness in the rest of the country. Even if he were responsible — which we regard as pretty dubious — the White House does not seem to understand that destroying the credibility of the CIA is the same thing as destroying the war effort. The entire war effort is based on the public’s trust of the CIA’s portrayal of the ongoing threat from al Qaeda. If the CIA isn’t to be trusted, why should anyone believe that al Qaeda is a threat?

This self-destructive behavior by the Bush administration is not at all confi ned to undermining the credibility of the CIA. Rumsfeld’s incomprehensible behavior regarding the guerrilla war in Iraq was another axis of self-destruction. Back in May, any reasonable observer of the situation in Iraq — including Stratfor — saw that there was an organized guerrilla war under way. However, Rumsfeld, as late as June 30, not only continued to deny the obvious, but actually hurled contempt at anyone who said it was a guerrilla war. Rumsfeld’s obstinate refusal to acknowledge what was obvious to everyone was the sort of behavior designed to undermine confi dence in U.S. strategy by both the public and the troops in the fi eld. Rumsfeld kept arguing that this was

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not Vietnam, which was certainly true, except in the sense that Rumsfeld was behaving like Robert McNamara. As in Vietnam — and this is the only comparison there is between it and Iraq — the behavior of the leadership made even supporters of the war and the troops in the fi eld feel that there was no strategy.

Napoleon once said, “In battle, the morale is to the material as 2 is to 1.” Maintaining the morale of one’s forces depends on maintaining confi dence in the military and political commanders. When forces are killing U.S. troops — forces that the defense secretary dismisses — the only conclusion the troops can draw is that either they are not very good soldiers, since they can’t stop them, or that the defense secretary has taken leave of his senses. Either way, it undermines morale, increasing the need for the material. It is militarily ineffi cient to tell self-evident lies to troops.

Similarly, the United States is fi ghting a war against a barely visible force that cannot be seen by the naked eye, but only by the esoteric tools of the intelligence community. Making the head of that community appear to be a liar or a fool might make good sense in Washington, but it undermines trust in the one institution in which trust is essential if the war is to be prosecuted. It is not casualties that undermine public morale. It is the reasonable belief that if the CIA is incompetent, then neither the justifi cation for the war nor the strategy driving the war can be trusted.

Bush has created a crisis. It is far from a fatal crisis, but it is a crisis that requires a radical readjustment in approach. The public explanation of the war and the reality of the war must come into alignment. Stratfor has extensively chronicled the underlying strategy of the war, and we will not repeat it here. That strategy has never been enunciated publicly. The connection between the war against al Qaeda, the Iraq campaign and future actions throughout the world never has been laid out in a conceptual framework. This is a complex war. It does not reduce itself to the simple dictum of Desert Storm enunciated by Secretary of State Colin Powell: First we will cut off the enemy, then we will surround the enemy, then we will kill the enemy. That was a good line and truly refl ected the solution.

This war does not reduce to one-liners. However, there is a threat and there is a strategy. WMD make wonderful one-liners and they are not altogether irrelevant. But that is not what the war against Iraq was about, it is not the reason for fi ghting a guerrilla war and it is certainly only part of the broader war. The most dangerous thing Bush can do from his standpoint is to continue to play a bad hand rather than endure the pain of having to throw it in and reshuffl e the deck. However, it will be easier to explain the real force driving U.S. strategy than to allow his presidency to degenerate into an argument of who forged a letter and whether he knew it.

The basic strategy behind a war always has been publicly discussed. In World War II, after Dec. 7 and the German declaration of war, the basic outlines of the war plan were widely discussed in the media — in spite of censorship. Everyone knew the Germany First strategy, the goal of landing in France at some point, the purpose of the bombing campaign, the nature

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of island hopping. No one expected to know the landing site in France or the next island to be invaded in the Pacifi c, but everyone understood the core strategy.

This is a much more complex war. That increases — not decreases — the need for strategic clarity among the public and the troops. The United States is not randomly in Iraq, and it is not there because Hussein was a butcher or because he might have had WMD. Those are good reasons, but not the real reason. The United States is in Iraq to force Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran to change their behavior toward al Qaeda and other Islamist groups. The United States already has overwhelmed the Saudis and is engaged in threatening Syria and Iran. This is visible to everyone who is watching. That is why the United States is in Iraq. It might or might not be good strategy, but it is a strategy that is much better than no strategy at all.

Admitting this undoubtedly will create a frenzy in the media concerning the change in explanation. But there will be nothing to chew on, and the explanation will be too complex for the media to understand anyway. They will move on to the next juicy murder, leaving foreign policy to the government and the public. We suspect that before this is over, both Tenet and Rumsfeld will have to go, but that matters more to them than to the republic, which will endure their departure with its usual equanimity. Alternatively, Bush will continue to allow the battle to be fought over the question of “what did he know and when did he know it,” which is a battle he cannot win. Bush has a strategic decision to make. He must align strategy with public perception or have his presidency ripped apart.

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Iraq: New StrategiesMay 17, 2004 By George Friedman

Last week, Stratfor published an analysis, “The Edge of the Razor,” that sketched out the problems facing the United States in Iraq. In an avalanche of responses, one important theme stood out: Readers wanted to know what we would do, if we were in a position to do anything. Put differently, it is easy to catalogue problems, more diffi cult to provide solutions.

The point is not only absolutely true, but lies at the heart of intelligence. Intelligence organizations should not give policy suggestions. First, the craft of intelligence and state-craft are very different things. Second, and far more important, intelligence professionals should always resist the temptation to become policy advocates because, being mostly human, intelligence analysts want to be right — and when they are advocates of a strategy, they will be tempted to fi nd evidence that proves that policy to be correct and ignore evidence that might prove the policy in error. Advocating policies impairs the critical faculties. Besides, in a world in which opinions are commonplace, there is a rare value in withholding opinions. Finally, intelligence, as a profession, should be neutral. Now, we are far from personally neutral in any issue affecting our country, but in our professional — as opposed to our personal — lives, our task is to look at the world through the eyes of all of the players. Suggesting a strategy for defeating one side makes that obviously diffi cult.

That said, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. We normally try to fi gure out what is going to happen, what other people are going to do — whether they know it or not — and explain the actions of others. At times, people confuse Stratfor’s analysis for our political position. This time — this once — we will write for ourselves — or more precisely, for myself, since at Stratfor our views on the war range even wider than those among the general public.

The MissionThe United States’ invasion of Iraq was not a great idea. Its only virtue was that it was the best available idea among a series of even worse ideas. In the spring of 2003, the United States had no way to engage or defeat al Qaeda. The only way to achieve that was to force Saudi Arabia — and lesser enabling countries such as Iran and Syria — to change their policies on al Qaeda and crack down on its fi nancial and logistical systems. In order to do that, the United States needed two things. First, it had to demonstrate its will and competence in waging war — something seriously doubted by many in the Islamic world and elsewhere. Second, it had to be in a position to threaten follow-on actions in the region.

There were many drawbacks to the invasion, ranging from the need to occupy a large and complex country to the diffi culty of gathering intelligence. Unlike many, we expected extended resistance in Iraq, although we did not expect the complexity of the guerrilla war that emerged. Moreover, we understood that the invasion would generate hostility toward the United States within the Islamic world, but we felt this would be compensated by dramatic shifts in the behavior of governments in the region. All of this has happened.

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The essential point is that the invasion of Iraq was not and never should have been thought of as an end in itself. Iraq’s only importance was its geographic location: It is the most strategically located country between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush. The United States needed it as a base of operations and a lever against the Saudis and others, but it had no interest — or should have had no interest — in the internal governance of Iraq.

This is the critical point on which the mission became complex, and the worst conceivable thing in a military operation took place: mission creep. Rather than focus on the follow-on operations that had to be undertaken against al Qaeda, the Bush administration created a new goal: the occupation and administration of Iraq by the United States, with most of the burden falling on the U.S. military. More important, the United States also dismantled the Iraqi government bureaucracy and military under the principle that de-Baathifi cation had to be accomplished. Over time, this evolved to a new mission: the creation of democracy in Iraq.

Under the best of circumstances, this was not something the United States had the resources to achieve. Iraq is a complex and multi-layered society with many competing interests. The idea that the United States would be able to effectively preside over this society, shepherding it to democracy, was diffi cult to conceive even in the best of circumstances. Under the circumstances that began to emerge only days after the fall of Baghdad, it was an unachievable goal and an impossible mission. The creation of a viable democracy in the midst of a civil war, even if Iraqi society were amenable to copying American institutions, was an impossibility. The one thing that should have been learned in Vietnam was that the evolution of political institutions in the midst of a sustained guerrilla war is impossible.

The administration pursued this goal for a single reason: From the beginning, it consistently underestimated the Iraqis’ capability to resist the United States. It underestimated the tenacity, courage and cleverness of the Sunni guerrillas. It underestimated the political sophistication of the Shiite leadership. It underestimated the forms of military and political resistance that would limit what the United States could achieve. In my view, the underestimation of the enemy in Iraq is the greatest failure of this administration, and the one for which the media rarely hold it accountable.

This miscalculation drew the U.S. Army into the two types of warfare for which it is least suited.

First, it drew the Army into the cities, where the work of reconstruction — physical and political — had to be carried out. Having dismantled Iraqi military and police institutions, the Army found itself in the role of policing the cities. This would have been diffi cult enough had there not been a guerrilla war. With a guerrilla war — much of it concentrated in heavily urbanized areas and the roads connecting cities — the Army found itself trapped in low-intensity urban warfare in which its technical advantages dissolved and the political consequences of successful counterattacks outweighed the value of defeating the guerrillas. Destroying three blocks of Baghdad to take out a guerrilla squad made military sense, but no political sense. The Army could neither act effectively nor withdraw.

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Second, the Army was lured into counterinsurgency warfare. No subject has been studied more extensively by the U.S. Army, and no subject remains as opaque. The guerrilla seeks to embed himself among the general population. Distinguishing him is virtually impossible, particularly for a 20-year-old soldier or Marine who speaks not a word of the language nor understands the social cues that might guide him. In this circumstance, the soldier is simply a target, a casualty waiting to happen.

The usual solution is to raise an indigenous force to fi ght the guerrillas. The problem is that the most eager recruits for this force are the guerrillas themselves: They not only get great intelligence, but weapons, ammunition and three square meals a day. Sometimes, pre-existing militias are used, via a political arrangement. But these militias have very different agendas than those of the occupying force, and frequently maneuver the occupier into doing their job for them.

StrategiesThe United States must begin by recognizing that it cannot possibly pacify Iraq with the force available or, for that matter, with a larger military force. It can continue to patrol, it can continue to question people, it can continue to take casualties. However, it can never permanently defeat the guerrilla forces in the Sunni triangle using this strategy. It certainly cannot displace the power and authority of the Shiite leadership in the south. Urban warfare and counterinsurgency in the Iraqi environment cannot be successful.

This means the goal of reshaping Iraqi society is beyond the reach of the United States. Iraq is what it is. The United States, having performed the service of removing Saddam Hussein from power, cannot reshape a society that has millennia of layers. The attempt to do so will generate resistance — and while that resistance can be endured, it cannot be suppressed.

The United States must recall its original mission, which was to occupy Iraq in order to prosecute the war against al Qaeda. If that mission is remembered, and the mission creep of reshaping Iraq forgotten, some obvious strategic solutions re-emerge. The fi rst, and most important, is that the United States has no national interest in the nature of Iraqi government or society. Except for not supporting al Qaeda, Iraq’s government does not matter. Since the Iraqi Shia have an inherent aversion to Wahabbi al Qaeda, the political path on that is fairly clear.

The United States now cannot withdraw from Iraq. We can wonder about the wisdom of the invasion, but a withdrawal under pressure would be used by al Qaeda and radical Islamists as demonstration of their core point: that the United States is inherently weak and, like the Soviet Union, ripe for defeat. Having gone in, withdrawal in the near term is not an option.

That does not mean U.S. forces must be positioned in and near urban areas. There is a major repositioning under way to reduce the size of the U.S. presence in the cities, but there is, nevertheless, a more fundamental shift to be made. The United States undertook responsibility for security in Iraq after its invasion. It cannot carry out this mission. Therefore, it has to abandon

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the mission. Some might argue this would leave a vacuum. We would argue there already is a vacuum, fi lled only with American and coalition targets. It is not a question of creating anarchy; anarchy already exists. It is a question of whether the United States wishes to lose soldiers in an anarchic situation.

The geography of Iraq provides a solution. The bulk of Iraq’s population lives in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. To the south and west of the Euphrates River, there is a vast and relatively uninhabited region of Iraq — not very hospitable, but with less shooting than on the other side. The western half of Iraq borders Saudi Arabia and Syria, two of the countries about which the United States harbors the most concern. A withdrawal from the river basins would allow the United States to carry out its primary mission — maintaining regional pressure — without engaging in an impossible war. Moreover, in the Kurdish regions of the northeast, where U.S. Special Forces have operated for a very long time, U.S. forces could be based — and supplied — in order to maintain a presence on the Iranian border.

Iraq should then be encouraged to develop a Shiite-dominated government, the best guarantor against al Qaeda and the greatest incentive for the Iranians not to destabilize the situation. The fate of the Sunnis will rest in the deal they can negotiate with the Shia and Kurds — and, as they say, that is their problem.

The United States could supply the forces in western and southern Iraq from Kuwait, without the fear that convoy routes would be cut in urban areas. In the relatively uninhabited regions, distinguishing guerrillas from rocks would be somewhat easier than distinguishing them from innocent bystanders. The force could, if it chose, execute a broad crescent around Iraq, touching all the borders but not the populations.

The Iraqi government might demand at some point that the United States withdraw, but they would have no way to impose their demand, as they would if U.S. forces could continue to be picked off with improvised explosive devices and sniper fi re. The geographical move would help to insulate U.S. forces from even this demand, assuming political arrangements could not be made. Certainly the land is inhospitable, and serious engineering and logistical efforts would be required to accommodate basing for large numbers of troops. However, large numbers of troops might not be necessary — and the engineering and logistical problems certainly will not make headlines around the world.

Cutting LossesCertainly, as a psychological matter, there is a retreat. The United States would be cutting losses. But it has no choice. It will not be able to defeat the insurgencies it faces without heavy casualties and creating chaos in Iraqi society. Moreover, a victory in this war would not provide the United States with anything that is in its national interest. Unless you are an ideologue — which I am not — who believes bringing American-style democracy to the world is a holy mission, it follows that the nature of the Iraqi government — or chaos — does not affect me.

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What does affect me is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is trying to kill me. Countries such as Saudi Arabia permitted al Qaeda to fl ourish. The presence of a couple of U.S. armored divisions along the kingdom’s northern border has been a very sobering thought. That pressure cannot be removed. Whatever chaos there is in Saudi Arabia, that is the key to breaking al Qaeda — not Baghdad.

The key to al Qaeda is in Riyadh and in Islamabad. The invasion of Iraq was a stepping-stone toward policy change in Riyadh, and it worked. The pressure must be maintained and now extended to Islamabad. However, the war was never about Baghdad, and certainly never about Al Fallujah and An Najaf. Muqtada al-Sadr’s relationship to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the makeup of the elders in Al Fallujah are matters of utter and absolute indifference to the United States. Getting drawn into those fi ghts is in fact the quagmire — a word we use carefully and deliberately.

But in the desert west and south of the Euphrates, the United States can carry out the real mission for which it came. And if the arc of responsibility extends along the Turkish frontier to Kurdistan, that is a manageable mission creep. The United States should not get out of Iraq. It must get out of Baghdad, Al Fallujah, An Najaf and the other sinkholes into which the administration’s policies have thrown U.S. soldiers.

Again, this differs from our normal analysis in offering policy prescriptions. This is, of course, a very high-level sketch of a solution to an extraordinarily complex situation. Nevertheless, sometimes the solution to complex situations is to simplify them.

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The IRR: Emptying the CupboardJul 06, 2004By George Friedman

SummaryThe U.S. Department of Defense is now activating the Army’s Individual Ready Reserve for combat duty. Given the inherent problems associated with such a move, it is clear that U.S. war planners were caught in a trap: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “revolution in warfare” has not evolved as expected.

AnalysisOn July 6, 5,600 members of the U.S. Army’s Individual Ready Reserve will start to receive notices that they are being recalled to active duty. Members of the IRR are generally soldiers who have completed their primary active-duty assignments. They are not part of the regular Reserves or the National Guard, but are simply kept on a list as available for recall. In general, this has been simply a formality. IRR members have been called up on only two occasions: Once was in 1968, following the Tet Offensive; the other was in 1991, in the context of Operation Desert Storm. There have already been some smaller call-ups of essential specialties, but this is the fi rst large-scale mobilization. The Army has indicated that there likely will be more.

The recall is neither routine, nor what the Army would like to be doing.

First, the reactivated reservists will have been out of the Army for several years. They might not be in appropriate mental or physical condition for a tour in a combat zone — where, according to the Army, most are going to be sent. Since the current plan is to keep them on active duty for no more than a year, there is little time for an extensive conditioning program if the troops are to spend much time in theater. These are not the forces commanders want to lead if they have a choice.

Second, although this call-up might fi x the Army’s quantitative problem in the short run, it can wreak havoc in the long run. The volunteer army depends, obviously, on the willingness of people to join. That rests on a large number of variables, one of which is the idea that the volunteer can control his term of service, building it into his or her long-term plans. It has always been understood, in the fi ne print, that calling up the IRR was possible, and soldiers who are being recalled cannot complain that they did not know — they can complain only that they did not expect it to happen. However, people who have already served and completed their tours — and are busy with careers, children and mortgages — are now going to be sent into combat zones. Their younger siblings, cousins and friends are going to be watching the chaos in their lives and could well decide that, while they would be prepared to serve a given term and even have that term extended during war, giving the Army control over their lives — and those of their families — for years afterward is simply not worth it.

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The Army, the Defense Department and the Offi ce of the President are all acutely aware of this problem. Nevertheless, they have chosen to go this route. Given the inherent defects of the choice and its obvious potential cost, they did not make this move frivolously; this was something that was absolutely necessary. That said, the question now is this: How did the U.S. Army get into the position of having to make this choice?

The call-up of the IRR in 1968 came in the midst of a crisis surrounding Vietnam. The United States had miscalculated troop requirements and found itself short of critical specialties that it could not make up from the pool of available conscripts. No one planned for the circumstances that presented themselves in 1968 — or for those that prompted Desert Storm either. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait left little time to redesign the Army’s force structure, and by 1991 it was dealing with a surprise. The IRR has been utilized twice, both times in the face of the unexpected. Sometimes it was mismanagement, sometimes reality, but always it was an attempt to cope with the unexpected — and unwanted — event. The 2004 call-up obviously fi ts into this category. The issue is what was unanticipated, and why it was not expected.

The Sept. 11 attacks certainly were unanticipated. This cannot be disputed, although whether they should have been is going to be an interminable debate. However, this large-scale activation of the IRR is taking place not six months after Sept. 11, but almost three years later. That indicates a much broader and deeper surprise than the attacks themselves.

The fi rst surprise had to do with the nature of warfare. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was an advocate of what has been called “the revolution in warfare.” This concept is the belief that as technology of all sorts comes online, the need for massed armies will decline. Few would debate that a revolution in warfare is under way. The issue is whether it has matured to a suffi cient degree that policymakers can depend on it, or whether it still has several generations to go.

Throughout his tenure, Rumsfeld has been highly critical of the Army. He felt that it was too heavy, in the sense of relying on armor and artillery — supply hogs that take a long time to get to the theater of operations. Rumsfeld’s view of the war against al Qaeda was that it would require very small, very fast and very lethal forces to execute. Rumsfeld was right, but he failed to factor in two things.

The fi rst was that while the deployment of small, fast, lethal forces potentially could take out al Qaeda units and could be used to destabilize nation-states, those units could not be used to take control of those nations. There is a huge difference between shattering a government and governing a country. Indeed, there is little value in destabilizing a nation unless it can be pacifi ed; otherwise, destabilization opens the door to al Qaeda, rather than shutting down the network. Therefore, insuffi cient thought was given to the problem of pacifi cation — not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan. Denying terrain to al Qaeda means being present on the ground in suffi cient numbers to make a difference. Rumsfeld constantly tried to fi nd a way to transfer responsibility for the ground to an indigenous government — failing to recognize that the high-tech destruction of the state creates a vacuum that either is fi lled with U.S. forces or left in chaos.

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Rumsfeld focused on the fi rst phase of the war: regime change. This phase was certainly amenable to the kind of war he favored. But the second phase — regime construction — is not at all infl uenced by the revolution in warfare. It requires a large security force — and even that might not be enough. Rumsfeld’s hostility toward the Army’s cumbersome, traditional ways of doing things caused him to make a massive miscalculation: Rather than building up Army ground forces in 2002 and 2003, he restricted the growth of the Army, thereby leaving it short of troops for the prolonged second phase of the war.

Rumsfeld’s second surprise was a persistent underestimation of the enemy. In particular, he seemed to genuinely believe that with the occupation of Baghdad, all organized resistance would cease. The idea that there would be people in Iraq who, out of support for the Baathist regime or simple patriotism, would resist the American occupation in an extended and effective way seems never to have been factored into plans. Indeed, when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was very much concerned about extended resistance, argued before the war that in excess of 200,000 troops would be needed in Iraq for an extended period, Rumsfeld attacked him as being alarmist. Rumsfeld failed to plan for occupying a country of 25 million people or policing a city of 5 million people — both in the face of resistance, albeit relatively light resistance.

Occupying a country or a city takes manpower. That is a requirement — though not necessarily the only one — for success. Rumsfeld’s view of warfare did not take into account the complexities of occupation. The tension between Rumsfeld and the Army created a situation in which dramatically pyramiding responsibilities for the Army were not met with equivalent increases in manpower.

This is the fi rst global war the United States has waged in which neither the command structure of the armed forces nor the force structure evolved dramatically in the opening years. The fact that there has not been a doubling or tripling in size of the U.S. Army is startling. In spite of the fact that it is involved in a variety of combat operations in remote areas of the world — and that the enemy can choose to open new theaters of operation that are unexpected (such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan) — the armed forces have not grown substantially in three years.

Rumsfeld apparently thought the war would be easier than it has been, and he believed that technology would be more effective than it possibly could be. The need to occupy, pacify and govern hostile nations was not built into the war plan — nor is it there now. The fact is that the call-ups from the IRR are Band-Aids on a fundamental issue: The United States is involved in a land war in Asia again, and it is trying to fi ght that war with a military — especially an Army — that was designed for peacetime in the 1990s. It cannot possibly stretch.

The central conceptual problem in Vietnam was that the United States did not want to spend its resources on doing the things that might give it an opportunity to win the war. Having insuffi cient resources, the United States simply decided that they were suffi cient.

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In Vietnam, the military had recourse to a draft. It did not work very well. Not only did it create deep social tension between those who served and those who did not, but also a two-year term was not suffi cient to master most of the specialties of warfare — including rifl eman skills. Between two years of service and a one-year tour in Vietnam, the military lost its people just when they were learning to do their jobs. The draft — particularly as it was structured during the Vietnam era — was the failure point, not the solution.

Two-year conscription is simply too short a period of time to master the specialties the military needs now. Today’s military does not consist of cannon fodder, but of highly trained specialists who need two years to begin becoming profi cient at their jobs. Moreover, another draft in which half the eligible candidates were exempt would rip the United States apart. Universal conscription creates too large a manpower pool. It creates more problems than it solves. What it needs is an expansion of the volunteer force.

For that, very large sums of money are needed, making it attractive to choose the military as a profession. The problem is that the United States is out of time. The time for this expansion should have been early 2002, when it became clear that al Qaeda would not be easily defeated and that other military campaigns would be coming. Had the Bush administration asked Congress for suffi cient money to expand the volunteer Army, large numbers of well-trained troops would be coming out of the chute just about now.

No such request was made. Rumsfeld ignored Army requests for increased manpower, focusing instead on surgical tools for regime change. The force structure did not undergo a quantum expansion. As a result, when the worst-case rather than the best-case scenario came to pass in Iraq — guerrilla war — the United States was unprepared for it. It had to reach into the IRR for a few thousand men. The military is, in effect, cannibalizing itself, using up its reserves. Since this war is not likely to end soon, and the IRR is not a bottomless well, it is clear that something will have to be done.

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Iraq, the Constitution and the Fate of a PresidentOct 13, 2005By George Friedman

The elections scheduled in Iraq for Dec. 15 have generated what is becoming a permanent feature of Iraqi politics. The process of establishing a constitution has become the battleground among the three major ethnic factions over the nature of political arrangements in Iraq, the distribution of power, the character of the regime and, of course, how oil revenues will be shared. Each milestone on the road to a constitution has become an occasion for intensifying both the negotiating and military process, with no milestone becoming defi nitive. Thus, the Oct. 15 referendum will give way to December’s general elections, and today’s negotiations set the stage for the next round of negotiations.

All of this can be taken two ways. One way to view it is that the Iraqi situation is fundamentally insoluble, that the various parties cannot achieve a permanent resolution to the problem. Another way of looking at it is that this process is the permanent solution: Iraq will be an endless reshuffl ing of a fi nite political deck, with no end in sight. There are other countries that live this way, and the solution is that they muddle through: politics and the state are devalued, while the rest of society — clans, families, corporations, organized crime — are emphasized. An Iraq with eternally shifting politics is not incompatible with the notion of a functioning society.

This assessment, of course, ignores a number of things. First, Iraq is occupied by U.S. troops. Second, there is a war going on in which the Sunnis are fi ghting the occupation. The Iranians are in the wings — actually, on the stage — trying to dominate Iraq as much as possible. A border war is raging along the Syrian frontier. A broader war involving the United States and jihadists is still sputtering along. Therefore, any hope has to be viewed through the prism of this violence, and the question is simple: can the emerging political process ultimately reduce — “eliminate” is too much to ask — the level of violence? Put another way, from the U.S. side, can the present political process solve the problems of occupation while yielding the political goals Washington wanted? From the jihadist side, can the uncertainty of the political process be exploited to create the conditions for what Ayman al-Zawahiri described in a recent letter: the jihadist domination of Iraq? Or, will the confl ict between political goals undermine the process and create permanent war instead of permanent instability?

The core difference between this milestone and the last — the generation of a proposed constitution for consideration by the legislature and, through this referendum, the public — is that, whereas the last round of negotiations ended in an inability of the Shia and Kurds to reach an agreement with the Sunnis, this one has ended in an agreement of sorts. That agreement frames the situation, inasmuch as it is less an agreement than a framework for ongoing negotiations.

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Some Sunni leaders have opposed any agreement or participation in the constitutional referendum; others have supported participation with a “no” vote. What appears to have been crafted between the Shia and negotiating Sunni groups is this:

• If the constitution is approved, it will be a temporary, not permanent, constitution.

• After a general election on Dec. 15 that would be based on this constitution, a committee of the National Assembly would review the document once again.

• The new parliament would have four months to complete changes to the document.

• A new vote would be held to ratify that fi nal constitution.

In other words, the agreement that has been reached here between the Sunnis, Shia and Kurds is simply that all sides will focus on the constitutional negotiations.

That’s not a bad deal, if the negotiations can encompass a large enough spectrum of each group’s leadership and if everyone agrees to put other issues on hold. You can spend a lot of time debating the rules under which you will debate the issues, and you can defuse other issues if that is what everyone wants to do. The problem here is that it is not clear that this is what everyone wants.

A major Sunni organization — the Iraqi Islamic Party — has agreed to these rules. Other groups, at least as or more important than the Iraqi Islamic Party, have not. Neither the Association of Muslim Scholars nor the Iraqi General Conference appear at this moment to have changed their position, which is that Sunni voters should reject the new constitution. That in itself is not as alarming as it appears. The Sunnis, and other factions, are represented by several groups, and these groups sometimes play “good cop, bad cop” very effectively. The signal the Sunnis are giving is that they are not rejecting the constitutional process out of hand, but that they will need serious coaxing before the vote comes about. They are taking it down to the wire, which is the rational thing to do under the circumstances.

Three serious pressures are converging on the Sunnis. First, simply refraining from participating in the Oct. 15 referendum could free the Shia and Kurds to set up a regional federal system that would leave the Sunnis as the weakest player — and the one with least access to future oil revenues. At the same time, the traditional Sunni leadership, deeply complicit in the Baath dictatorship, has substantial reason to fear the jihadists. The jihadists are not part of the traditional leadership and are, in fact, ideological enemies of Baathism. If the jihadists grow in strength, the traditional leadership might fi nd itself displaced by them over time. On the other hand, agreeing to participate in the country’s political process would open the Sunni leadership up to charges of being, not only lackeys of the United States, but also stooges to the hated Shia. More than any other group in Iraq, the Sunnis need for the jihadists to be defeated. On the other hand, they know they can’t count on the Americans to deliver this defeat. They are under pressure to fi nd a political solution, but also under powerful pressure not to fi nd one. So, they churn around, generally heading toward a solution but never quite getting there.

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The position of the Shia is simpler, and they have more ways of winning. If the constitution leads to a simple federalist government, the Shia will dominate southern Iraq and can deal with the Sunnis at their leisure. If a centralized government is created, the Shia will be — with the Kurds — the majority. The only thing the Shia can’t live with is the one thing the Sunnis want: a constitution so contrived that the Sunnis can block major initiatives by the Shia.

The Kurds can live with a lot of solutions and can create informal realities based on geography and their own military strength and American backing. Their interest is less institutional than geopolitical — they want Mosul and Kirkuk. More precisely, they want to dominate the northern oil fi elds and trade, and to exclude the Sunnis as far as possible from these interests. Whether that is accomplished through constitutional or business means is of less interest to them than that it be done.

The form of the constitution, therefore, matters most to the Sunnis. They need it to be written a certain way, and then to have guarantees that its provisions will be respected. At the moment, this coincides with the American interest. A radical federalism that creates a de facto Shiite state in the south is not at all in the American interest: It would have the potential to expand Iranian power in ways far more signifi cant that a nuclear weapons program, by bringing a Shiite force — perhaps Iraqi, or perhaps Iraqi and Iranian — to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The specter of a Shiite force inciting Shiite populations in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia has always been a fear, but the possibility of the Iranian army taking up positions on the frontier would change the balance of power in the region decisively.

The countries in the Saudi peninsula are no match for the Iranians. Add in the Syrians, who long have been allies of sorts to Iran, and you get a situation in which the United States would have to retain a presence in order to protect the regional balance of power. The Saudis do not want U.S. forces in the kingdom, to say the least, and the United States does not want to be there — it would generate even more jihadist threats. Therefore, Washington does not want to see the federal solutions favoring the Shia come into being, nor does it want to see a centralized government dominated by the Shia. Having used the Shia to contain the insurrection in the Sunni regions, the United States now fi nds itself aligned with the Sunnis and with the former Baath Party.

These things happen in war and geopolitics. But there are two problems here. First, the United States has made it very clear that it will be withdrawing its forces — at least some of them — from Iraq in 2006. Second, everyone reads U.S. polls. President George W. Bush is in political trouble in the United States and, now, within the Republican Party itself. As with Nixon and Ford found in Vietnam, following Watergate, the threat posed by the United States declines as the president’s political weakness grows. And with the decline of the U.S. military threat, there is a decline of U.S. infl uence. Last week’s discussion of air strikes inside Syria — and the leak that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposed such strikes — is an example of the problem. Where the administration had had credibility for action before, that credibility has now decreased.

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The administration’s political weakness does not seem to be reversing. Should Karl Rove be indicted in the Valerie Plame affair — and at the moment, the rumors in Washington say that he will be — the president will have lost his chief aide, and the administration will have been struck another blow.

At this moment, it is possible to make the constitutional process into a container for diverse Iraqi interests. It is also possible to see a point where the Sunni Baathists would turn on the jihadists in order to protect their political position. But all of this hinges on the guarantees that are provided by each side, and the ability and willingness of the United States to compel compliance with those guarantees. The paradox is that the most likely path to a successful withdrawal from Iraq is the perception that the United States is going to stay there forever — and can do it. But as Bush weakens in Washington, the ability of various Iraqi factions to rely on U.S. guarantees declines.

Geopolitics teaches the interconnectedness of events. The current American strategy requires suffi cient stability to be generated in Iraq to permit a U.S. military withdrawal. That requires that the United States must be taken seriously as a military force. But the weaker Bush is — for whatever reason, fair or not — the less credible becomes his pledge to stay the course. There are few parallels between Iraq and Vietnam save this: the political climate in Washington determines the seriousness with which American power is taken on the battlefi eld.

It would seem, then, that Bush has two problems. The fi rst is whether he can stabilize and increase his power in the United States. The second is whether he can extract a clear strategy from the complexity of Iraq. The answer to the second question rests in the answer to the fi rst. At the moment, the Iraqi constitutional talks seem to be saying, “Bush is not broken, but we aren’t committing to anything until we see the polls in December.”

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Iraq: If Not Now, When?May 2, 2006 By George Friedman

If there is an endgame to the American presence in Iraq, it is now. The Iraqis have reached a general compromise on the composition of a new government. The agreement was blessed by the joint visit to Baghdad of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There also have been statements — though later retracted — by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani that U.S. and Iranian offi cials have held meetings in Dokan, a city in the northern Kurdish region. Talabani also has said that he and American offi cials had met with the leaders of seven separate Sunni guerrilla groups and that he expected to meet with others who had taken up arms against the occupation.

The formation of the government was preceded and succeeded by a complex series of negotiations in which there are at least fi ve sides, each of which (including the United States at this point) is factionalized. There are the three main Iraqi players — Shia, Kurds and Sunnis — plus the United States and Iran. That makes for a complex negotiation and one that can readily fail. The endgame could turn into the beginning of an entirely new round of warfare and chaos. But this much can be said: If no agreement can be reached now, it is hard to imagine how an agreement will be reached in the future. If not now, when? The times will not be more propitious than they are now.

Each party has an interest in a settlement. Each side could lose as much as it might gain in the future. The three internal factions — Shia, Sunnis and Kurds — are all getting substantially less than they wanted, but each could possibly lose even more if the fi ghting continues. The external powers, the United States and Iran, face similar circumstances. Certainly, everyone wants to explore what a settlement would look like, hence the fl urry of very quiet and highly deniable meetings and discussions. It may work or it may fall apart, but it would seem to be the time to examine each side’s bargaining position and what they are likely to settle for.

United StatesThe Americans came in with the goal of occupying Iraq, reshaping its society to suit them and using Iraq as a base from which to project power and infl uence throughout the region. However, the war did not go as they hoped or expected. The United States defeated the Iraqi army but found itself facing a Sunni insurgency and complex Shiite political maneuvers. The goal of reshaping Iraqi society is gone; the possibility of infl uencing the future structure and policy of any emerging Iraqi government remains. Iraq has not served as a platform from which to project power. Rather, it has served as a magnet that attracted outside forces. However, the possibility of some agreement that would allow the United States to base forces in Iraq is not out of the question.

At this point, however, the primary American goal is to hand off responsibility for providing security in Iraq. The U.S. military has not been able to provide security under any circumstances.

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It clearly cannot suppress the Sunni insurgency — but in its current posture, the United States continues to carry the burden of counterinsurgency operations without any real expectation of success. Leaving aside the fact that the United States continues to absorb casualties, there are now more than 100,000 troops in Iraq — a number that is obviously insuffi cient for the mission, but which drains U.S. logistical and manpower resources to a degree that dealing with unexpected crises elsewhere in the world would be diffi cult.

Since this position is untenable, the United States must make a move.

One option would be to surge additional force into Iraq. The current political confi guration in the United States does not make that an option for the Bush administration, even if this was wished, and even if a surge of troops would suppress the Sunni insurrection. Therefore, the United States has two pressing goals. First, it must abandon the mission of counterinsurgency, transferring it in some way to Iraqi forces. Second, it needs to withdraw its forces from Iraq. Ideally, the United States would not withdraw all forces but would leave behind enough to serve as a rapid-reaction force in the region. This force would be based outside of populated areas. However, the basing issue is secondary to the withdrawal issue.

In addition, and of great strategic importance to the United States, the government of Iraq must not become a client of Iran. Given the size of the Shiite population in Iraq, guaranteeing this outcome will not be easy, but it is clearly the focus of U.S. negotiations at this time. If Iraq were to become a client of the Shiite regime in Tehran, then the entire balance of power in the region would tilt in favor of Iran, putting the Arabian Peninsula at risk. That is something that the United States (not to mention others, like Saudi Arabia) would fi nd intolerable. Faced with a choice of continued inconclusive warfare and an Iran-dominated Iraq, the United States would likely choose warfare. That is how high the stakes would be. Therefore, the key negotiating strategy for the United States is to fi nd a way to withdraw its forces from Iraq — possibly leaving a residual force behind — after creating a government in Baghdad that would be able to balance or buffer Iran.

In other words, at this point, American policy in Iraq is to restore the status quo prior to 2003, with a different regime in Baghdad and the possibility of an ongoing, noninvolved American military presence in the country.

IranIn Iran’s ideal scenario, Iraq would become a satellite state. This would involve the installation of a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad so beholden to Iran that Iraq essentially would be an extension of Iran. If that were to happen, Iran would have achieved the geopolitical goal of major-power status: It would be the unchallenged native power in the Persian Gulf. Given the existence of indigenous Shiite populations throughout the Arabian Peninsula, Iran not only would be in a position to infl uence events in other countries, but would have the opportunity to use direct force against them.

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The prize would be Saudi Arabia. If Iraq fell under Iranian control, the road to the oil fi elds of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states would be wide open. Other than the United States, there would be no power in a position to block the Iranians.

For Iran, this would be more than a matter of oil. If Iraq belonged to Iran and no outside power intervened, Shiite power could be amplifi ed in the region. Sunnis, of course, vastly outnumber Shia within the Muslim world — a structural impediment that, realistically, constrains Iran’s ability to project itself as the leader of the Islamic world. Nonetheless, Iran has a need to burnish its credentials in this area and to be viewed as a regional hegemon. Control of Gulf oil would make Iran a regional power, but a rebalancing of Sunni and Shiite infl uence within the region would be heady stuff indeed.

In order for Iran to achieve this goal, the United States would have to withdraw from Iraq without having created a force that could block Iranian ambitions. Having the United States invade Iraq was in the Iranian interest because it got rid of Saddam Hussein. Having the Americans bog down in an endless war was in the Iranian interest because it offered the best chance of achieving Tehran’s ultimate ambition. Iran has, therefore, been torn between two realities: On the one hand, in order to achieve its ambition, Iran needed a strong Sunni insurgency in Iraq — but on the other, if a strong Sunni insurgency existed, Tehran’s desire for the complete domination of Iraq could be thwarted.

Iran wound up with its own worst-case scenario. First, the Sunni insurgency swelled, creating a force that could not easily be controlled by the Shia. Second, the United States showed more endurance than the Iranians had hoped. In due course, the Iranian threat actually created a bizarre circumstance in which the United States and the Sunnis were simultaneously fi ghting and working together to block Iranian aspirations — the Sunnis by demanding participation in the Iraqi government, and the United States by supporting their demands. Out of this came a third undesirable outcome: The Iraqi Shia, seeing themselves trapped between Iranian geopolitical ambitions and the threat of civil war without American protection, moved away from dependency on Iran and toward a much more complex position.

Unless the Sunnis were suddenly to collapse and the Americans were simply to withdraw, Iran no longer can expect to create a protectorate in Iraq. Its current goal must be much more modest: It must have an Iraq that is no threat to Iran. To this end, the Iranians need several things:

1. Guarantees as to the size and armament of the future Iraqi armed forces; they can be suffi cient for internal security and defense but must not have offensive capability.

2. A degree of control over the makeup of the Iraqi government — in particular, the right to block any appointment that is too close to the former Baathist elite and would have too

much control over the defense or intelligence establishments.

3. Strict limits on Kurdish autonomy in order to guarantee that Kurdish separatism does not spill over into Iran. In this, the Iranians have an ally in Turkey.

4. A tight timeline for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces.

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In the back of their minds, the Iranians will accept these conditions as a major improvement over the status quo of 2003, but they will always see this as a springboard for their deeper ambitions. They will take a deal that keeps Iraq weak and gets the Americans out.

The ShiaAs we have noted previously, the Shia are fragmented and have a complex bargaining position as a result. However, two irreducible elements are present. First, the Shia do not want the Sunnis to return to a dominant political position in Iraq. This is essential and non-negotiable. Second, they want to be in a position to control Iraq’s oil economy and the various industries that support it. In other words, the Shia want to control Iraq’s government.

Until the fi rst battle of Al Fallujah, it appeared that Washington would give them that prize — but when the Americans entered into negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, it became clear that the United States was not going to simply play that role. The Shia then counted on Sunni intransigence — which evaporated in December 2005, when the Sunnis participated in elections. The vigor of the Sunni rising eliminated the likelihood that it could be suppressed, except at a price to the Shia that they were unwilling to pay. The Shia, therefore, had to face either perpetual and uncertain civil war or accept the idea of Sunni participation in the government.

They had already abandoned the idea of complete control of Iraq’s oil when they entered into an alliance with the Kurds. It was not clear who would control the northern oil regions, but it was not going to be the Shia. With the entry of the Sunnis into the government, the Shia accepted the idea that they would lead but not control the Iraqi government. Therefore, their position on oil became a regional rather than national position. For the Shia, the key now is to guarantee that a substantial portion of southern oil wealth remains under Shiite control and is not simply controlled by the government.

The Iraqi Shia remain heavily infl uenced by Iran, but they understand that playing Iran’s game could decimate them. They will settle for control of the key ministries in Baghdad and a large piece of the southern oil economy. When the Americans leave, and in what sequence, is of far less interest to them than the control of the economy.

The SunnisThe Sunnis have gone from being the dominant power in Iraq to being a minority ethnic group, and the only one of the three with no oil clearly in their territory. At the same time, their insurgency has achieved what it was designed to do: The Sunnis have not become an irrelevant force in Iraq. The ability to sustain an insurrection against the Americans as well as to strike against the Shia established that it would be better to include them in a political settlement than to exclude them. Their skillful use of the jihadist threat particularly drove home the fact that they could not simply be ignored. By portraying the jihadists as an uncontrollable outside force, the Sunnis set themselves up as the only force that could control the jihadists. That was their key bargaining chip, and they used it well.

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The interests of the Sunnis are relatively simple. First, they want to participate in the Iraqi government. Second, they want a share of Iraq’s oil income and a degree of control over the northern oil fi elds. Third — and this will complicate attempts to convince insurgents to give up weapons — they want American forces to remain in-country in order to guarantee that the Shia don’t attack them, that Iran does not intervene and that the Iraqi government does not fall under Iranian control. The Sunnis may dream of regaining the power and privilege they enjoyed in Baathist Iraq, but in practical terms, they have shed a huge amount of blood simply in order not to be dismissed while Iraq’s future is shaped.

The KurdsThe Kurds want, ideally, an independent nation. That means going to war with Iran, Turkey and Syria — therefore, they will not get an independent nation. They can gain a degree of autonomy in Iraq, but the degree will depend less on the Sunnis and Shia, who have other issues to worry about, than it will on Tehran, Ankara and Damascus, none of whom want the Kurds to have too much autonomy. The Americans have been the guarantors of autonomy for the Kurds in Iraq since 1991. However, the Americans also want to get out of the business of guaranteeing things in Iraq. The Turks and Iranians both have leverage with the Americans. Therefore, the United States, as part of its exit strategy, might well become the force to contain the Kurds.

The second issue for the Kurds is oil. They are the dominant population in the north, where some of Iraq’s signifi cant oil fi elds are located, and they want to consolidate their hold. Some Shia are amenable to this, but the Sunnis want a share in Kurdish oil. The Sunnis ultimately will not participate in an arrangement in which the Shia and Kurds draw oil wealth directly but in which the Sunnis have access to it only after it is disbursed through the central government. Had the Sunnis not fought so tenaciously, they perhaps could have been ignored. Ignoring them now is dangerous. Therefore, the issue for the Kurds is precisely how much they will have to give the Sunnis directly. This is a matter of money and, in the end, money matters are negotiable.

The Kurds know they will not get a Kurdish state that incorporates Iranian and Turkish Kurds at this time. They also believe that if they gain a degree of autonomy and oil wealth, they will be in a position to take advantage of other opportunities later. If not, there is still the oil wealth.

ConclusionThere is a basic understanding of what is possible currently in Iraq. Everyone has their plans for the future, but right now, the idea of a coalition government is a given. But two issues remain outstanding.

The fi rst is the status of U.S. forces in Iraq. The United States will not permit its forces to remain as targets for guerrillas, although the Sunnis and Shia might fi nd this useful. Therefore, there will be a withdrawal, with a substantial drawdown this year. However, the Sunnis and Kurds both want an American force to remain, and the Americans want that, too. The Iranians and Iraqi Shia want the Americans out earlier. So the timing is one issue to negotiate.

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The other issue is oil — how the revenues and resources are divided up among the three ethnic communities. As we have said, that is about money and, when it gets down to that, compromise is possible. However, the Sunnis and Kurds are afraid of Shiite strength, which means they want the Americans to remain in place. The Shia can charge for that in terms of oil revenues. Treaties have been based on less.

The problem with the endgame in Iraq is not so much the divergence of interests among the players — they tend to converge now more than to diverge. The problem is that there are so many parties to the negotiations and that these parties are themselves divided, the Americans not least among them. In other words, there are too many players to create a stable basis for negotiations. On the one side, reality pulls them together; on the other side, the sheer mechanics of the negotiation are mind-boggling.

We think that something will be worked out, simply because the logic of each player requires a settlement. It will result in a diminishment of violence, not its elimination. That is the best that can be hoped for. But we also believe that the train is leaving the station. If an agreement cannot be reached now that allows for a phased and managed withdrawal of U.S. forces, then the only remaining options for the United States will be to continue to fi ght a counterinsurgency indefi nitely, with insuffi cient force, or a unilateral withdrawal.

Documents

146276 Stratfor Extra Iraq 11 06