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November 8, 2016
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November 2, 2016
Iraqi Kurdistan: Mosul and beyond
I spent last week in Irbil, Iraq along with Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. We met with a wide range of senior Iraqi and Kurdish officials, as well as journalists, analysts, and academics. The trip included a visit to Kirkuk after the terrorist attack there on October 21 as well as time spent near the frontlines, observing Peshmerga military operations against the Islamic State (also known by its Arabic acronym, Da’esh) and discussing the campaign with U.S. and Kurdish military officers.
This post describes my impression of events in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq. A prior post described my sense of developments in the liberation of Mosul and Iraqi politics more generally.
The view of Mosul from Irbil
Across the board, the Kurds appear generally pleased with the military aspects of the Mosul offensive.
Author
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Kenneth M. Pollack
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy
One area of the military campaign that many Kurds point to as a pleasant surprise has been the cooperation they have been receiving from the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and the U.S.-led coalition. This despite the complete absence of American air support for the Peshmerga on October 20, and the failure of the ISF to attack on October 23. Any number of Kurdish leaders, including some of the highest in the land, talked about how after 55 years (or more) of intermittent combat between the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga, the two forces were getting on extremely well. Not only were they working well together, but soldiers and officers on both sides showed respect toward one another and an easy camaraderie that bemused—and encouraged—their leaders.
Meanwhile, the Kurds indicated a consensus that they had no desire to go into Mosul itself. That sentiment held among many senior Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) personnel as well, who have the most to gain from taking the Kurdish sections of Mosul, which are pro-KDP and therefore potentially important voters.
Almost across the board, Kurdish leaders evinced a philosophical wait-and-see attitude to post-liberation Mosul. They adamantly believed it was a mistake not to have had an agreed-upon plan among all of the potential participants, and they fear that the Iraqi government will not be up to the challenge of handling it itself. However, they showed no inclination to get involved. Indeed, several very senior Kurdish leaders stated matter-of-factly that if the stabilization of Mosul fails and there is widespread fighting, they plan to do no more than defend their own lines, bring in refugees and leave the mess to the Iraqis and Americans to clean up. We heard no apocalyptic threats that widespread fighting in Mosul would inevitably trigger Kurdish intervention, which was noteworthy.
To the extent that the Kurds are concerned about the military campaign to defeat Da’esh, their fears dwell on events farther west, at Sinjar and Tal Afar. In both places, minority populations—Yazidis and Turkmen respectively—create sources of potential conflict. The Yazidis of Sinjar are caught between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK (and behind them, the Patriotic Union, or PUK, and Iran) on one side, and the KDP and Turkey on the other. For their part, the Turkmen of Tal Afar are divided between Sunnis who furnished many recruits and top leaders for Da’esh but are also “protected” by Turkey, and Shiites who were badly oppressed by the Sunnis and Da’esh. Not surprisingly, the Shiite Hashd ash-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces) have vowed to liberate their Shiite (Turkmen) brethren and punish the Sunnis for their embrace of Da’esh. The Kurds, particularly the Turkish-aligned KDP, echo Ankara’s warnings that a PKK move on Sinjar or a Hashd ash-Shaabi move on Tal Afar could unleash a Turkish invasion. That, in turn, could draw in KDP intervention on the Turkish side, and PUK intervention on the PKK-Iranian side. That would be disastrous, and even if the PUK and KDP avoided open combat, it would further poison their strained relations.

Persistent political stalemate
In part because of the uncertainty surrounding future developments at Sinjar and Tal Afar—and in part because the KRG has little bandwidth beyond that which is focused on Mosul—the domestic political scene remains frozen in Irbil. Of course, there are other reasons as well. The PUK remains locked in the ongoing battle for control of the party between the Talabani family and a group of challengers centered around KRG Vice President Khosrat Rasul Ali and former KRG Prime Minister Barham Salih. Meanwhile, the Gorran party—the second largest in the KRG parliament—is itself paralyzed by its mishandling of the 2015 protest moves against the KDP and the fact that its own outsized leader, Nawshirwan Mustafa, has been on extended medical leave abroad for chemotherapy. Most Kurds believe that Nawshirwan’s condition is terminal and Gorran seems in disarray, unable to do anything in his absence and unable to pick a new leader, even a temporary one.
There is a growing recognition across the Kurdish leadership that the current deadlock is an embarrassment and a failure on all of their parts. Unfortunately, both the PUK and Gorran seem too preoccupied with their own internal crises to do anything about it. Because governance lies primarily with the KDP at present, they are the ones most caught up in the Mosul fight and can afford to concentrate on it by arguing (not necessarily incorrectly) that neither Gorran nor the PUK is unified enough to hold meaningful negotiations. Still, senior KDP leaders claim that they plan to make dramatic—and constructive—moves after the liberation of Mosul to try to form a new government and get things moving again. Surprisingly, they are also adamant that there will be new elections in 2017. These could help or hurt depending both on the distribution of seats in the parliament and the ability of the PUK and Gorran to respond positively to any serious KDP effort to overcome their differences, assuming that there is one.
Progress toward independence…
Two factors that appear to be major contributors to the strangely positive feel to Irbil despite the problems swirling around it, are the progress the Kurds feel they have made on both independence and internal reform. In the past month, senior Kurdish officials including KRG President Mas’ud Barzani and Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani have had what they characterize as positive and constructive conversations with Shiite political leaders in Baghdad, including Prime Minister Abadi, regarding Kurdish independence. They say that Abadi and other moderate Shiite leaders were receptive to the KRG’s desire for independence—or at least full sovereignty within a confederal structure. The two sides have agreed to establish a joint committee to discuss a peaceful secession process, which Kurdish moderates have been seeking for years, in part as a way to forestall a precipitous move toward independence by more hardline Kurdish leaders.
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Barzani is no fool and understands that Abadi may well be driven by his immediate need for KDP support against Maliki, as I described in my previous post. Nevertheless, the Kurds do believe that Abadi is sincere in his willingness to allow the KRG to secede, and Abadi has expressed this sentiment to many others, including myself as recently as March 2016. Moreover, the Kurds have insisted that a decision to secede cannot be agreed to by Abadi alone; they have demanded that the entire Iraqi National Alliance (the Shiite umbrella group) bless any deal for independence. When pressed about Abadi’s ability to deliver on this critical question, and on the likelihood that the deal would survive if Abadi loses Iraq’s 2018 parliamentary election to former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki or Hashd ash-Shaabi leader Hadi al-Ameri, the Kurds acknowledged the risk. However, they also indicated that they believe this to be a reasonable way forward for them, one that they are determined to explore even if it leads nowhere.
Consequently, I found an important shift in Kurdish thinking about independence. The Kurds once believed that the road to independence ran through Ankara, but they now believe it runs through Baghdad. Most Kurdish leaders, at least KDP officials, continue to believe that they can convince Ankara to support an eventual, peaceful secession. However, they acknowledge that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s new problems with the Turkish and Syrian Kurdish populations—perhaps coupled with his increasingly volatile behavior—has made him a less reliable ally in this matter.
The Kurds once believed that the road to independence ran through Ankara, but they now believe it runs through Baghdad.
As part of their efforts in this area and another sign of tangible progress, the Kurds have been in discussions with the Central Bank of Iraq to open a branch in Irbil. This would finally give the KRG some ability to control local financial circumstances, and possibly pave the way toward a more expansive monetary policy under independence or confederation.
Indeed, another debate that the Kurds only seem to be tentatively approaching is the potential question of independence or confederation? Because discussions with Baghdad are still in their infancy, and much will depend on the KRG’s security and economic circumstances at the time that these negotiations reach maturity (if they ever do), it is impossible to know what the Kurds will decide. Still, the more moderate KRG leaders appear to believe that confederation could represent an acceptable interim status, with the expectation that this would eventually translate into full independence somewhere farther down the road. In particular, they stress that if the KRG can gain full sovereignty, full control of their defense policy (including the right to buy military hardware directly and receive end-user certificates), full control of their energy policy (including the right to sell oil on their own, and so eliminate the discount that they are forced to pay because of the uncertain legality of their current oil exports), and full control over monetary policy (including the right to print money, establish their own central bank, issue public debt and borrow from international financial institutions and other foreign lenders), they will be content with confederation.
…And progress on reform
Meanwhile, Kurdistan’s undervalued reform agenda continues to move along smartly, marking milestones that are quite remarkable in their own right. The KRG has completed a comprehensive external audit of the finance ministry and has engaged a former finance minister of Lebanon (highly-regarded for fighting corruption there) to overhaul the finance ministry in Irbil. The KRG has retained both Ernst & Young and Deloitte, to conduct a massive audit of the entire oil and gas sector—something that will now be done on an annual basis to root out corruption and inefficiency in that critical sector. In the past year, Irbil has reduced subsidies and cut government salaries by 49 percent, all part of an austerity program more severe than any other in recent years. The economist Athanasios Manis has calculated that KRG fiscal consolidation equaled 37 percent of GDP during the past three years. He notes that Greece, whose austerity program has famously pushed the country to the brink of revolution, only implemented a fiscal consolidation of 16.7 percent and that was over five years. Yet there has been no public backlash against these measures except for a strike by policemen who wanted to be classified as security personnel and so exempted from the salary cuts.
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The next two programs of KRG reform are aimed at further reducing costs and corruption. The first will target the electricity sector, privatizing distribution, metering (and charging for) consumption, and improving the distribution infrastructure to reduce “leakage” from the age and poor quality of much of the grid. The second will introduce a biometric registration program (including fingerprints and iris scans) for all KRG civil servants, including the Peshmerga. Only those registered in the biometric database will be able to collect paychecks, potentially eliminating tens or even hundreds of thousands of ghost workers and soldiers. This new program will begin in November and should be complete by January. Moreover, Irbil intends to marry the biometric database to an electronic payment system to ensure that salaries are paid automatically and expeditiously, and to further minimize the ability of thieves to collect unearned salaries.
These reforms are remarkable and little appreciated by the Kurdish public, which (understandably) focuses only on their unpaid salaries and the reduction in government services required by the austerity program.
Many Kurds still hope that independence will solve their problems in the short term, by allowing the KRG to borrow money both domestically and internationally, by eliminating the discount on KRG oil exports, and by giving them full control over their monetary policy. The fact that they now feel like there is real hope for a peaceful secession has been a significant psychological boon. However, over time, it is likely that if these far-reaching reforms in economics and governance continue and expand, they will ultimately be the greatest benefit to Kurdistan, potentially setting it on the course to eventual stability, if not real prosperity.
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November 1, 2016
Iraq in the eye of the storm
I spent last week in Irbil, Iraq along with Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. We met with a wide range of senior Iraqi and Kurdish officials, as well as journalists, analysts, and academics. The trip included a visit to Kirkuk after the terrorist attack there on October 21 as well as time spent near the frontlines, observing Peshmerga military operations against the Islamic State (also known by its Arabic acronym, Da’esh) and discussing the campaign with U.S. and Kurdish military officers.
This post describes my impression of events in Iraq, including political developments in Baghdad. A second post will describe my sense of developments in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Hard fighting, but on track
Militarily, the battle for Mosul appears to be going largely according to plan, so far. Coalition forces continue to push forward, tightening the noose around the city from multiple axes of advance. One of the big surprises was that Peshmerga and Iraqi army units have been cooperating remarkably well. Iraqi formations have conducted passages of lines through Peshmerga formations, and armor from the Iraqi Army 9th Mechanized Division has been supporting Kurdish attacks south of Irbil.
Author
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Kenneth M. Pollack
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy
Da’esh forces are fighting back very hard and giving ground only reluctantly. In many cases, the Iraqis and Kurds have preferred to surround and besiege Da’esh-held towns rather than take the heavy casualties they would likely incur clearing them. It is worth noting that the evidence and analysis seems mixed as to whether Da’esh is withdrawing forces from Mosul to conserve them for the defense of Raqqa, or pushing reinforcements into Mosul to bleed the coalition and postpone (or even prevent) a coalition offensive against Raqqa.
Nevertheless, Da’esh has not been able to defeat or derail the offensive. Although it is impossible to know Da’esh intentions for certain, it seems most likely that the attack on Kirkuk on October 21 was a long-planned counterattack. Da’esh is famous for attempting horizontal retaliation—attacking somewhere else to compensate for a loss, like its assault on Ramadi after the coalition took Tikrit in 2015. The Kirkuk attack falls into that pattern. In addition, the attack was a complex one, involving agents that had been infiltrated into the city at least days, and probably weeks or months, beforehand coupled with a larger infiltration of fighters after the Mosul operation had started. While the attack was frightening, it was swiftly defeated and had no impact on the operation.
That said, there have been problems. For instance, on October 23, the Iraqi Army and Kurdish Peshmerga were meant to launch simultaneous attacks on Da’esh from supporting axes of advance, but the Iraqi army simply did not attack at all. It is unclear why, but they returned to the fight with brio the next day, possibly to make up to the Kurds for their prior day’s failure.
Of potentially greater significance, there are indications that the United States has too little air power in the region to meet all of its support requirements. On October 20, the United States did not provide any air support to Kurdish forces. Senior Kurdish officials were absolutely livid about this lapse. It is unclear why, but American personnel in the field complain that there simply are not enough airframes available. That may be particularly acute at present with Kurdish and Iraqi army forces advancing along at least five axes of attack. Because Kurdish and Iraqi forces have become dangerously dependent on American air strikes to advance, coalition air power appears to be pulled in too many directions to support too many operations, leaving too little for many sectors and none at all for some.
Nevertheless, there is every indication that the coalition forces will continue to advance and should be in jump-off positions for the assault on Tikrit itself in the next few weeks, with the attack on the city proper likely to commence soon thereafter.

Post-liberation plans remain mysterious
One of the more surprising, and depressing, aspects of the operation has been how little is known about any post-liberation plans for securing, governing, and rebuilding Mosul. None of the Kurdish parties, none of the other Iraqi groups slated to participate in the operation, not the Turks, nor the Shiite Hashd ash-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces) are aware of any specific plans for this. They all insist that they have only been briefed in the most general terms and have not been asked to sign onto any detailed plans. The Kurds have agreed to keep their Peshmerga several kilometers back from the city and to leave the assault itself to the Iraqi security forces (ISF). The leaders of other groups who will participate in the operation have been given sectors to assault and guidance about what others will do to take the city, but nothing about what happens when the city is taken.
Of course, the U.S. government is not manned by complete idiots. American officials are well aware of the potential for problems in Mosul and therefore of the need for some kind of plan for how to handle the situation. Indeed, numerous reports indicate that while the United States may have started late, it has spent time and energy discussing this issue, including in conversations with its Iraqi and coalition partners. So I think it a mistake to assume that the Obama administration is simply ignoring this problem.
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Instead, all of this strongly suggests that the United States has decided to allow the Iraqi government to take the lead on post-liberation Mosul and handle the situation however it sees fit. The United States would then simply keep all of the other Iraqi and regional actors either out of the attack or out of the business of running Mosul once Da’esh has been defeated there.
If this is the course of action that the United States has chosen to adopt, it has certain advantages. It is, obviously, the simplest solution for the United States to yet another thorny Iraq problem. It obviates the need for complex planning and complicated deal-making among the different groups intent on staking their claim to part or all of Mosul. It has the advantage of being legally sound, since the government of Iraq has sovereignty over the city. It is unquestionably what Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi wants, and since he and the Iraqi government are America’s primary allies, conforming to his preferences makes it unlikely that the will take actions to deliberately complicate the operation. Finally, it obviates the need for painful and time-consuming negotiations among a welter of competing groups that could have pushed off the start of the offensive for weeks or months. That would make it nearly impossible to liberate Mosul before President Obama leaves office, which may also have been an important political consideration for a president who campaigned on a platform of ending the Iraq war at all costs.
However, leaving post-Da’esh Mosul entirely in the hands of Baghdad and simply following its lead also entails considerable risks. The government of Iraq has shown only a very modest capacity to conduct such operations. At Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah, the Iraqi government can claim a number of important achievements, but these were much smaller towns and there were as many problems as there were successes in these operations. The Iraqis have (hopefully) learned and will do better this time, but the scale of this operation—and the need to pursue ongoing operations elsewhere simultaneously—could swamp the capabilities of the central government.
Moreover, pursuing such an approach would also mean rolling the dice regarding various actors beyond the full control of the Iraqi government: the Hashd ash-Shaabi, Atheel al-Nujayfi’s Nineveh Guard, various Sunni tribes, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Turks. In the absence of an agreed-upon plan that gives all of these actors a well-defined mission and boundaries on their activities (both geographic and operational), they may choose to just grab whatever they can. Indeed, many expect that these groups will try to carve out sectors for themselves regardless of what the Iraqi government or the Americans say, and the danger is that this will turn into a violent free-for-all as different groups try to establish facts on the ground.
The apparent decision to simply follow Abadi’s lead and leave post-liberation Mosul to the Iraqi government raises the question of whether the Obama administration is repeating the same mistake it has in the past. From 2009 to 2014, the administration backed the government of Prime Minister Maliki to a far greater extent than the facts warranted. Throughout that period, U.S. officials endlessly defended his actions in public, and did little in private other than to urge restraint. These warnings typically had the same force as reminders to “please think of the environment before printing” at the bottom of emails.
The result was disastrous. Without any American pressure to change his behavior, Maliki subverted Iraq’s democracy, alienated the Sunni community, destroyed the Iraqi military, enabled the Da’esh conquest of northern Iraq, and drove the country back into civil war. Throughout, the Obama administration insisted that it was right and ignored warnings from a vast range of Iraqis, regional allies, coalition partners, and experts on Iraq. There is a disturbing sense that history may be repeating itself. While Abadi is a far cry from Maliki, with the best of intentions and some willingness to act on them, he has made mistakes and has a limited capacity to govern. At the most basic level, getting the stabilization and reconstruction of Mosul right is likely to be an enormously complex undertaking and any Iraqi government could doubtless benefit from external advice, assistance, and guidance—especially from the United States, the former occupying power who has done this many times in the past, both correctly and incorrectly. The mistakes made with Maliki should make clear the dangers of the United States uncritically backing an Iraqi prime minister who follows his own beliefs rather than what the historical record demonstrates is best warranted, no matter how much we may like him.

Crisis averted in Baghdad, but another brewing
Abadi himself appears to have been shaken by the most recent effort to bring down his government, but he also appears to have survived it and seems determined to win big at Mosul to ensure his re-election.
Over the summer, former Prime Minister Maliki engineered the forced resignations of Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi and Finance Minister Hoshyar Zebari. He had set his sights on Foreign Minister Ibrahim Jaafari next, and begun to create problems for Speaker of the Parliament Salim al-Jabouri. All expectations were that Maliki hoped to cause the fall of the government and so bring down Abadi, his former aide. Although Maliki may still be able get Jaafari dismissed and has effectively hobbled Jabouri to the point where he dare not oppose Maliki’s political moves, the word from Baghdad is that Abadi’s job is safe. The Obama administration made clear to all who would listen that they would pull their military support if Abadi were removed as prime minister, and that forced Abadi and his allies to back down. (It also demonstrated the revived influence of the United States.)
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At this point, most Baghdad political elites believe that Maliki will continue to pursue these various leaders, but largely out of a desire for revenge: Many of them were key players in his removal from the premiership in 2014. Several Iraqi leaders told us that Maliki is telling people that he regrets having agreed to step down as prime minister in 2014. In contrast, he is also claiming that he does not want to be prime minister again, although he wants to be able to choose the next one. This may be true, but I would note that in 2014, Maliki endlessly told people (including myself) that he did not want to be prime minister again after the 2014 elections, only to fight ferociously to be re-elected.
The current consensus appears to be that Abadi will remain prime minister until the 2018 elections. There is considerable discussion of delaying the 2017 provincial elections until April 2018 to hold them simultaneous with the national/parliamentary elections. This may be to save money, or to prevent Abadi from suffering the same fate as Maliki, who won the 2009 provincial elections only to then lose the 2010 national elections.
Combining the two elections also means that it will be harder to predict ahead of time how various candidates will do in the national elections. In particular, there is tremendous uncertainty about political developments in southern Iraq over the past two years while Iraq’s security forces and the attention of its political leadership have shifted from south to north to deal with Da’esh. It is entirely possible that various parties tied to the worst of the Shiite Hashd ash-Shaabi will win big in southern Iraq.
Consequently, while it is still a very long way to the 2018 elections, especially in Iraqi political terms, the three front runners in the election at present are Prime Minister Abadi, former Prime Minister Maliki, and Hashd ash-Shaabi chief Hadi al-Ameri. What’s more, although Abadi is still the favorite at this time, al-Ameri appears to have a considerably better chance of winning that previously believed likely. Because his militias have gained power and economic influence in southern and eastern Iraq in the absence of the ISF, he could win very big there. Although al-Ameri has close ties to Iran and has presided over many of the Hashd ash-Shaabi’s worst activities, he is pragmatic and has shown a willingness to work with the United States, such that Washington may not try to block him if he won the election.
Meanwhile, although Abadi has survived Maliki’s bid to unseat him, he remains hamstrung in Baghdad. He has little ability to push legislation through the Maliki-controlled parliament, his inner circle is too small to effectively run the sclerotic Iraqi bureaucracy, and most of his former political allies have deserted him. In short, he needs help.
He got two boosts earlier this month. The first came in in the revival of the pan-Shiite Iraqi National Alliance and their decision to name Ammar al-Hakim of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq as its head. Ammar was infuriated by Abadi’s failure to consult with him before making several precipitous moves that would have affected ISCI’s standing and patronage—particularly Abadi’s attempt to dismiss his cabinet and name a new technocracy instead. However, Ammar remains a moderate, wary of both Maliki and the more extreme Hashd ash-Shaabi leaders, particularly Moqtada al-Sadr and Hadi al-Ameri, who abandoned ISCI to turn its Badr militia into an independent party of his own. This makes Ammar a natural ally of Abadi’s. Second, Mas’ud Barzani and the Kurdistan Democratic Party decided to back Abadi in Baghdad in return for Abadi starting negotiations over eventual Kurdish independence. I will discuss the latter development at greater length in my next blog post.

Strangely calm and optimistic in the midst of battle
Despite the fact that the climactic battle with Da’esh for control of Mosul has begun and is far from completion, and despite the fact that few actually know American and Iraqi intentions for stabilizing and rebuilding the city after its liberation, Iraq seems strangely calm and optimistic. Observers from the capital report the same. Abadi has survived Maliki’s (and Muqtada al-Sadr’s) various efforts to unseat him. There is confidence that the war against Da’esh will be won and the fighting itself—and the expectation of victory—appears to be distracting many Iraqis from their political and economic problems. But all of it smacks of a false dawn. A great many fear that the liberation of Mosul will devolve into nightmarish infighting among the victors, like the Afghans after the fall of Kabul in 1992.
Moreover, the hope that Abadi will be able to translate victory at Mosul into progress on governance and reform seems overly hopeful, even though we should all hope for it as best we can. Abadi’s political rivals seem determined to contest him for the glory (Hadi al-Ameri) or simply deny him any greater influence in Baghdad (Maliki). Moreover, if the Iraqi government proves unable to handle the situation in post-liberation Mosul and there is largescale violence, let alone ethnic cleansing, far from benefitting from victory at Mosul, Abadi will be tarnished by post-liberation failures. All of this sets up a very uneasy 2017 for Iraq, a situation that can only be exacerbated by the uncertainty around a new American administration whose Iraq policy can barely be discerned, whichever candidate you believe may prevail next Tuesday.
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October 20, 2016
20161020 USA Today Pollack
September 29, 2016
Iraq and a policy proposal for the next administration
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump excoriated President Obama for prematurely disengaging from Iraq and so plunging it back into civil war. President Trump will now have the ability, and the responsibility, to avoid repeating Obama’s mistake. However, doing so is going to require treating Iraq as more than just a host for ISIS—let alone a gas station to be robbed—and instead enact policies that will help Iraq to slowly heal the wounds that allowed ISIS to spawn there. That isn’t as hard as it sounds, but it will require the new administration and its principal officials to see Iraq in a very different light.
What needs to be understood is that Iraq is caught in a quintessential ethno-sectarian civil war. It is not the case that Iraq is in civil war because ISIS is there; it is instead the case that ISIS is there because Iraq is in civil war, and eliminating the former will mean confronting the latter. Unfortunately, however, American policy toward Iraq has been badly misguided because it has attempted to address one of the symptoms of the civil war—the rise of ISIS—without addressing the dynamics of the civil war itself.
Civil Wars and the Lessons of History
The modern world has a great deal of experience with civil wars, and one of the stark lessons of this history is that civil wars do not lend themselves to half-measures. While it is entirely untrue that external actors cannot end a civil war, as is often claimed, such wars cannot be ended easily. History demonstrates that half-hearted interventions do not quell a civil war: they exacerbate it.
There is essentially only one approach that a well-meaning external actor can take to end someone else’s civil war. Very crudely, the approach requires three steps: (1) changing the military dynamics such that none of the warring parties believes that it can win a military victory, or that it will be slaughtered by one of its rivals if it lays down its arms; (2) forging a power-sharing agreement by which political authority and economic benefits are divided more or less in keeping with demographic realities; and (3) establishing at least one internal or external institution that is capable of ensuring that the first two conditions endure until trust among the communities and strong internal institutions can be rebuilt. There are multiple ways to handle each of these tasks, but any intervening nation that does not pursue this course of action, that does not bring enough resources, or that is not willing to sustain its commitment long enough to succeed will only make the situation worse.
Consequently, the minimalist approach to Iraq that the United States employed under the Obama administration is highly unlikely to secure American interests there over the long term. The military progress has been admirable, but without comparable political progress along the lines required to end a civil war and prevent its recurrence the exertions so far are likely to prove ephemeral. For Iraq, destroying ISIS and then leaving the country to the Iraqis to sort out their own political problems will not do it. The Iraqis are capable of addressing their myriad problems, but only with American assistance. Unless the United States wants to fight yet another war in Iraq in the near future, the incoming administration needs to be willing to deepen America’s role there.
The Big Picture of a New Iraq Policy
One of the big dangers in Iraq for the new administration is overcoming the false sense of security that ISIS is now effectively defeated and therefore there is nothing more to worry about in Iraq. While the military campaign to evict and eradicate ISIS in Iraq and Syria seems well in train, it cannot be the end of America’s involvement. If Washington repeats the same mistake it committed in both 2003 and again in 2011 by ignoring the political requirements to translate a successful military campaign into an enduring foreign policy achievement, none of the gains are likely to prove lasting. Iraq is likely to fall apart all over again, and President Trump will then face the same frustrating choice of paying the costs to stabilize Iraq yet again or running the potentially catastrophic risks of trying to walk away as both of his predecessors did.
Indeed, if the final eviction of ISIS is not handled properly, it could simply create the circumstances for more widespread conflict. Right now, fear and hatred of ISIS is perhaps the only thing that all Iraqis have in common. The danger is that if it is removed without establishing a process of national reconciliation—or better still, an actual accord—that gives Iraqis faith that their polity remains viable, the civil war will reignite and will shift from a fight of all against ISIS to a fight of all against all.
Iraq’s first great problem now is that its communities have once again lost their trust in one another. Trust is always the first casualty of civil war, and Iraq had only started to rebuild it in 2007–9 before the American withdrawal allowed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to pursue a sectarian agenda and strip Sunni trust of the Shi’a all over again. After the fall of Mosul, rebuilding that trust must be a top priority. In part for that reason, Iraq will almost certainly need to transition eventually to a combination of federalism and either confederation with the Kurds or independence for an Iraqi Kurdish state.
With regard to the latter, the Kurds constitute a separate nation, and they have made clear for the past century that they do not want to be a part of Arab Iraq. Their forced inclusion in the Iraqi state has resulted in nothing but conflict and misery for both the Kurds and the Arabs. Iraq and the Kurds would both be better off with an amicable divorce, but ensuring its amicability will take time, goodwill, and constructive diplomacy that seem in short supply right now. The United States has important interests in seeing this separation happen peacefully, but little else. The ways in which the Kurds and Arabs will choose to handle territorial issues (including the status of Mosul and Kirkuk), the distribution of oilfields, and the return of displaced persons are not issues on which the United States needs to take a position, but it will be critical that Washington serve as honest broker in helping the parties find solutions that both can accept. It may also be necessary for the United States to help each side make painful concessions, in part by providing bilateral or multilateral aid as compensation. Allowing the Kurds to opt out of Iraq would also increase the demographic and therefore electoral weight of Iraq’s Shi’a Arab community, which will make it all the more important for the United States to help Arab Iraq devise a more stable, equitable, and self-regulating political system of its own.
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For this reason, and because the opposite approach had failed miserably by 2014, paving the way for ISIS, Arab Iraq will have to develop a federal structure (as envisioned in the current Iraqi constitution) that delegates greater authority and autonomy to its various ethnic, sectarian, and geographic components. The traumatic experiences of three-and-a-half decades of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, two bouts of civil war, and Maliki’s brutal attempt to consolidate power in between, have made it inconceivable that Iraq’s communities will accept a return to an all-powerful, highly centralized Iraqi state.
However, in fittingly ironic fashion, the goal of a more decentralized, federal political system now requires a dedicated effort to strengthen Iraq’s central government. The problem is best understood this way: Decentralization can take two forms, empowerment or entropy. Obviously, the former is a positive form that can produce a functional state; the latter a disaster likely to produce war and misery. Decentralization via empowerment requires a reasonably strong and functional central government that grants specific authorities and the power to execute those tasks to subordinate and/or peripheral entities. Decentralization via entropy, in contrast, occurs when the central government lacks the strength to control its constituent parts—let alone to empower them—and so subordinates, peripheral entities, and actors outside the system altogether simply grab authority and resources and do with them whatever they like. Not only does such anarchy invariably dissolve into chaos and conflict, but the actors arrogating power to themselves also are rarely as strong as they would be if their power was delegated by an effective central government. One example of the distinction is the United States created by the Articles of Confederation compared to the United States created by the U.S. Constitution. Under the former, the central government was too weak and so the federal structure did not work, even though the states were far more powerful than they were under the Constitution. The result was anarchy, chaos, and internal conflict. The Constitution provided for a stronger central government, which paradoxically made a stable federal system—with still strong states—both possible and practical.
Unfortunately, what is happening in Iraq today is largely decentralization by entropy, not empowerment and…that is likely to produce renewed conflict in the future.
Unfortunately, what is happening in Iraq today is largely decentralization by entropy, not empowerment, and this is the second, related factor that is likely to produce renewed conflict in the future. It is this entropic pull that is causing the fragmentation that is now the leitmotif of Iraqi politics. The Sunnis have long suffered from a badly atomized leadership, but even that has worsened in recent years, exacerbated by Maliki’s brilliance in targeting any moderate, capable, and charismatic Sunni leader who might have unified that community. But now the Kurds, whose leadership once consisted of Mas’ud Barzani (head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP]) and Jalal Talabani (head of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK] party) and no one else, are now increasingly beset by divisions. The long-dormant KDP-PUK split has been reopened, to be joined by a split between the KDP and the opposition Gorran (“Change”) movement, and splits within each of these parties as well. Even the Shi’a leadership is fracturing. Iraqis often like to argue that the Marja’iye (the Shi’a religious establishment centered in Najaf) provides the Shi’a with a unified voice, but if that were ever true, it is proving less and less so. Now, dozens of Shi’a figures can claim leadership over important constituencies, including dozens of new militias, many of which operate outside the control of the central government. This centrifugal trajectory simultaneously paralyzes the Iraqi political system and pushes the country toward chaos and renewed conflict.
Specific Steps for Post-ISIS Iraq
In this context, a new American policy that would have a reasonable prospect of helping Iraq to avoid slipping back into civil war once ISIS is defeated will require the United States to pursue a number of interwoven courses of action.
Forge a New National Reconciliation Agreement
There is simply no way around this foundational requirement. Iraqis need a new power-sharing agreement that will allow all of the rival communities, but particularly the Sunni and Shi’a Arabs, to begin cooperating again. Without this, the military successes against ISIS will evaporate. In recent months, both the United States and the government of Iraq have trumpeted local reconciliation efforts as a bottom-up substitute for a top-down process of national reconciliation. While such grass-roots efforts can be very useful, historically they are no substitute for high-level reconciliation. Without the latter, local efforts are typically undone by rivalries among senior leaders and the result, once again, is renewed civil war. Yet the United States has made far too little effort to bring Iraq’s senior leadership together, hiding behind Baghdad’s desire to handle this matter itself and the self-fulfilling prophecy that Iraq’s leaders are too fragmented. The current Iraqi-led “process” has so far achieved nothing. On the other hand, it is worth noting that in 2007–8, Ambassador Ryan Crocker faced a similar problem of fragmented leadership, yet he and his team brokered exactly the kind of informal but effective national reconciliation that Iraq desperately needs once again.
Push Baghdad and Erbil Toward Short- and Long-Term Solutions
As noted above, it would be better for both Arab Iraqis and Iraqi Kurds if Iraqi Kurdistan were a separate country. Unfortunately, getting to that point without large-scale violence will be very difficult. There are borders to be negotiated, populations to be consulted, and foreign powers to be placated (or stonewalled). Moreover, in the near term, Kurdish political, economic, and security needs may require a closer relationship with Baghdad rather than a more distant one. The Obama administration has put considerable effort toward handling these immediate problems and has helped achieve a certain amount of success. However, without the framework of a long-term plan that creates the circumstances for peaceful Kurdish secession (along the lines of the Czechoslovak model), these near-term gains will erode and eventually collapse as they have so regularly in the past.
Help Baghdad Regain the Basic Capacities of Governance
Even the most extreme advocates of federalism in Iraq recognize that the central government will have to retain certain powers and prerogatives because they are responsibilities that only the central government can realistically discharge. This starts with the role of defending Iraq from external attack and helping its governorates and regions defend themselves against major internal security threats. It means helping Baghdad regain its Weberian monopoly on the use of violence, including demobilizing the Hashd ash-Shaabi (the militias created in 2014 after the fall of Mosul) and/or integrating them into the formal Iraqi security forces. Only after such a reform program will the central government be able to delegate part of its security authority to the internal security forces of its governorates and regions. Strengthening the central government would also give Baghdad the ability to conduct basic functions like gathering revenue and spending it on nationwide services such as power generation and distribution, infrastructure improvements, and economic development—functions that everyone accepts Baghdad will have to retain. That, in turn, requires both wider political reform to ensure a more functional central government overall and more specific reforms to address Iraq’s paralyzed legislature, its corrupt executive branch, and its politicized judiciary.
Strengthen the Abadi Government
The United States can provide Iraq with guidance and some resources to enact the kinds of reforms enumerated above, but most of that work can only be undertaken by the Iraqi government itself. This places a premium on helping the Iraqi government as best we can and far more than we have over the past eight years, which also raises the question of whether the United States should support the current Iraqi government or push for a different one. Although Haider al-Abadi has made mistakes as prime minister, he is still the best we are likely to get. Of greatest importance, he has a number of highly desirable qualities: He is politically courageous, he is not corrupt (as best anyone can tell), he has a clear and correct sense of what Iraq needs to do to escape the civil war trap, and he has shown a willingness and an ability to learn from his mistakes. We could have done a lot worse than Haider al-Abadi. Moreover, replacing him would be more likely to bring to power a worse leader than a better one. Consequently, Washington’s best bet will be to double down on Abadi in the expectation that greater American backing and partnership will enable him to pursue the national reconciliation and political reform that Iraq so desperately needs and that he has repeatedly called for. But that means keeping American skin in the game.
Develop a Robust, Long-Term Aid Program for Iraq
The Obama administration has proven that its early refusal to invest resources in Iraq—and its perverse claim that doing so was senseless because the United States had no influence there—was wrong. Since 2014, the United States has invested considerable resources in Iraq, including 5,000 ground troops, large-scale weapons deliveries, a major air campaign, and significant financial assistance, and as a direct result now has considerably more influence than at any time since 2011. After the fall of Mosul, the United States should maintain this commitment of resources to Iraq. Ideally, the United States would decrease some aspects of its support, like airstrikes and other fire support, and increase other elements to focus more on the political and economic tasks that need to be accomplished after the defeat of ISIS, which arguably are more challenging than the military task of liberating Iraq.
Retain and Rebuild the American Military Presence
Ideally, the United States would keep about five to ten thousand ground troops in Iraq. In terms of missions, these personnel are needed to thoroughly rebuild the Iraqi Security Forces—as the United States finally did in 2007–9—with large numbers of U.S. personnel training, advising, partnering with, and accompanying Iraqi forces down to company level or lower. As part of this, it would be helpful to have American combat battalions, or even brigades, regularly rotate into Iraq to exercise with Iraqi forces. The United States should retain a large special operations counterterrorism force to help Baghdad with the inevitable residual terrorist problem that will persist for some time, even under the best of circumstances, after the fall of Mosul. Further troops would be necessary for force protection, medical support, transportation, communications, and other administrative and security tasks. In addition to carrying out these key missions, the initial size of the force will also be important from a psychological perspective. The Iraqis need to believe that the United States is not abandoning them again, and that the American military presence left behind after the defeat of ISIS is large enough to prevent the country from coming apart at the seams or its government from using force against any of its constituent communities. While even a ten-thousand-man force would have only a very limited prospect of playing that role in practice, history has demonstrated that in postconflict scenarios, the symbolic role is of far greater significance than actual military capability as long as the peacekeeping force is believed to have some degree of capacity and a willingness to employ it.
Establish a Sustained Economic Aid Program
Low oil prices have created dire financial problems for Baghdad, and even more so for Erbil. A World Bank loan of $5.4 billion over three years will help, but it is far from making up Iraq’s shortfall. Additional outside aid can also have an outsized effect in Iraq because Baghdad is so inefficient, corrupt, and bottlenecked that foreign assistance provided directly to those who will spend it comes faster and is of greater utility than trying to squeeze dinars through the Iraqi political process. Moreover, as with a five- to ten-thousand-man military commitment, an economic aid program of (ideally) $1 billion to $2 billion per year for five years would reinforce the impression that the United States is renewing its long-term commitment to Iraq’s stability and development. That symbolism is worth far more than the practical impact of the dollars spent. Moreover, if that money is spent wisely, it can be used to further empower Prime Minister Abadi and other Iraqi leaders looking to move past sectarian differences and break the deadlocks suffocating the Iraqi political system. In this sense, and again coupled with a slightly enlarged long-term American military presence, such an aid program would go a long way to preserving (and perhaps expanding) the hard-won American influence in Iraq to help guide the country down the right path in the years ahead.
Read more in the Brookings Big Ideas for America series »







Iraq: A policy proposal for the next administration
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The principal problem of Iraq, and the principal problem for America with Iraq, are that the country remains caught in an ethno-sectarian civil war. It is that civil war (and the twin conflict in Syria) that has given rise to ISIS, and not the other way around. If the United States is to protect its interests in the Middle East over the long-term, Washington must abandon its single-minded focus on ISIS.
Author
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Kenneth M. Pollack
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy
That myopic preoccupation has repeatedly caused the United States to take actions that make sense in terms of the narrow defeat of ISIS, but which ultimately exacerbate the civil war, in turn making it more likely that ISIS—or a successor Salafi Jihadist group—will not only survive but further threaten American interests.
It has also limited the American response to other problems stemming from these civil wars such as the refugee problem swamping Europe and the problem of radicalization infecting the Middle East.
After ISIS has been militarily defeated in Iraq and reduced merely to a lingering terrorist problem, the United States needs to be prepared to make a major effort to help Iraq politically.
Security and economic assistance will be a necessary component of this effort because it is by providing security and economic support that the United States will generate the influence it requires to help guide the Iraqi political process.
In particular, the United States needs to focus its efforts on:
Forging a new national reconciliation agreement among Iraq’s senior leaders. While both Washington and Baghdad like to tout their “bottom-up” national reconciliation efforts, historically these have proven inadequate. Without top-level agreement, the bottom-up gets swept away.
Helping to empower the Abadi government. For a variety of hard-nosed reasons, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi remains the United States’ best partner in Iraq. We need to use our influence to help him build up his, and to help him find practical ways to implement his rhetorical commitments to government efficiency, national reconciliation, security sector reform, and the like.
Help Iraq move toward a federal system for the Arab parts of the country and help create a process by which Iraqi Kurdistan can eventually (and peacefully) achieve independence.
Background
Iraq, like Syria, is caught in a quintessential ethno-sectarian civil war, although each is at a different stage of conflict. American policy toward both has been badly misguided because it has attempted to address one of the symptoms of these civil wars—the rise of ISIS—without addressing the dynamics of the civil wars themselves. American strategy in Syria seeks cooperation with the Russians and encourages further conquests by the Kurds because this makes sense in fighting ISIS, but it simply feeds the flames of the civil war. America’s approach to Iraq has been slightly better, but is also overly focused on ISIS at the expense of Iraq’s long-term stability. That’s particularly problematic since the long-term eradication of the Salafi Jihadist threat from Iraq (of which ISIS is merely the latest manifestation) is wholly dependent on Iraq’s long-term stability. Thus, the military progress that the United States has made against ISIS, while very considerable on its own terms, is likely to prove ephemeral without a dramatic shift in the American approach to tackle the civil wars themselves.
The military progress that the United States has made against ISIS…is likely to prove ephemeral without a dramatic shift in the American approach to tackle the civil wars themselves.
The modern world has a great deal of experience with civil wars and one of the stark lessons of this history is that civil wars do not lend themselves to half-measures. While it is entirely untrue that external actors cannot end a civil war, as is commonly claimed, they cannot be ended easily. The history of these civil wars demonstrates that limited interventions do not quell a civil war, they exacerbate it.1
There is essentially only one approach that a well-meaning external actor can take to end somebody else’s civil war. Very crudely, that requires three steps:
changing the military dynamics such that none of the warring parties believes it can win a military victory or that it will be slaughtered by one of its rivals if it lays down its arms;
forging a power-sharing agreement by which political authority and economic benefits are divided more or less in keeping with demographic realities; and
establishing at least one institution (internal or external) capable of ensuring that the first two conditions endure until trust among the communities and strong internal institutions can be rebuilt. There are multiple ways to handle each of these tasks, but any intervening nation that does not pursue this course of action, that does not bring enough resources, and/or that is not willing to sustain its commitment long enough to succeed will only make the situation worse.
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So far, all of the options being discussed for U.S. policy toward Iraq and Syria fail these tests.2 Either they try to minimize American involvement altogether—as the Obama administration did—and allow American interests to be further undermined by the destabilizing effect of these wars, or they proffer minimal involvement that is highly unlikely to bring an end to either civil war, will almost certainly make them worse, and will waste American resources and further damage American relationships with our regional partners. For Syria, enclaves, no-fly zones, joint operations with the Russians, modest increases in aid to the existing opposition, and the like will not bring about a durable end to the conflict. However, they will enmesh America deeper into Syria and squander American resources. For Iraq, destroying ISIS and then leaving it to the Iraqis to sort out their political problems will not do it either. The Iraqis are capable of addressing their myriad problems, but only with American assistance.
If the United States is going to protect its vital interests in the Middle East, it is going to have to find the courage to end these civil wars before they consume the region, and our interests, altogether. And that means that the next administration must deal with each civil war on its own terms. This essay addresses what that should mean for Iraq.
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The big picture of a new Iraq policy
In Iraq, the United States needs to get past a renewed false sense of security. Washington has had considerable success in replacing the problematic Nuri al-Maliki with the progressive Haidar al-Abadi as prime minister, rebuilding elements of the Iraqi security forces, retaking much of the land once conquered by ISIS, securing considerable financial assistance for Iraq, and brokering some important deals to overcome several dangerous political crises. These are all very real achievements and the Obama administration deserves credit for its willingness to commit time, energy and resources to Iraq to effect these changes. But once again, the military campaign now nearing completion cannot be seen as the end of America’s involvement. If Washington repeats that mistake—the same one the United States committed in both 2003 and again in 2011—none of the gains to date are likely to prove lasting. The country is likely to fall apart all over again, and the United States will again face the same frustrating choice of paying the costs to stabilize Iraq (yet again) or running the potentially catastrophic risks of trying to walk away.
In Iraq, the United States needs to get past a renewed false sense of security.
Militarily, Iraq is in the endgame of its conflict against ISIS. The Salafi Jihadist state and its armies will probably be driven from Iraqi territory within the next 6 to 12 months. However, it is not necessarily in the endgame of its civil war. Indeed, if the final eviction of ISIS is not handled properly, it could simply create the circumstances for more widespread conflict. Right now, fear and hatred of ISIS is perhaps the only thing that all Iraqis have in common. The danger is that if it is removed absent a process of national reconciliation (or better still, an actual accord) that gives Iraqis faith that their polity remains viable, the civil war will re-ignite, and will shift from a fight of all against ISIS, to a fight of all against all.
Iraq’s first great problem now is that its communities have—once again—lost their trust in one another. Trust is always the first casualty of civil war, and Iraq had only started to rebuild it in 2007-2009 before the American withdrawal allowed Maliki to pursue a sectarian agenda and strip Sunni trust of Shiites all over again. After the fall of Mosul, rebuilding that trust must be a top priority.
In part for that reason, Iraq will almost certainly need to transition (eventually) to a combination of federalism and either confederation with the Kurds or independence for an Iraqi Kurdish state.
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With regard to the latter, the Kurds constitute a separate nation who have made clear for the past century that they do not want to be a part of Arab Iraq. Their forced inclusion in the Iraqi state has resulted in nothing but conflict and misery for both the Kurds and the Arabs. Iraq and the Kurds would both be better off with an amicable divorce, but ensuring its amicability will take time, goodwill, and constructive diplomacy that seem in short supply right now. The United States has important interests in seeing this separation happen peacefully, but little else. How the Kurds and Arabs will choose to handle territorial issues—including the status of Mosul and Kirkuk—the distribution of oilfields and the return of displaced persons are not issues on which the United States needs to take a position, but it will be critical that Washington serve as honest broker in helping the parties find solutions that both can accept. It may also be necessary for the United States to help each side make painful concessions, in part by providing bilateral or multilateral aid as compensation. Allowing the Kurds to opt out of Iraq would also increase the demographic (and therefore electoral) weight of Iraq’s Shiite Arab community, which will make it all the more important for the United States to help Arab Iraq devise a more stable, equitable and self-regulating political system of its own.
For that reason and because the opposite approach had failed miserably by 2014, paving the way for ISIS, Arab Iraq will have to develop a federal structure (as envisioned in the current Iraqi constitution) that delegates greater authority and autonomy to its various ethnic, sectarian and geographic components. The traumatic experiences of three and a half decades of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, two bouts of civil war, and Maliki’s brutal attempt to consolidate power in between, have made it inconceivable that Iraq’s communities will accept a return to an all-powerful, highly-centralized Iraq state.3
However, in fittingly ironic fashion, the goal of a more decentralized, federal political system now requires a dedicated effort to strengthen Iraq’s central government. The problem is best understood this way: Decentralization can take two forms, empowerment or entropy. Obviously, the former is a positive that can produce a functional state, the latter a disaster likely to produce war and misery. Decentralization via empowerment requires a reasonably strong and functional central government that grants specific authorities and the power to execute those tasks to subordinate and/or peripheral entities. Decentralization via entropy, in contrast, occurs when the central government lacks the strength to control its constituent parts—let alone to empower them—and so subordinates, peripheral entities, and actors outside the system altogether simply grab authority and resources and do with it whatever they like. Not only does such anarchy invariably dissolve into chaos and conflict, but the actors arrogating power to themselves are rarely as strong as they would be if their power was delegated by an effective central government. One example of the distinction is the United States created by the Articles of Confederation compared to the United States created by the U.S. Constitution. Under the former, the central government was too weak and so the federal structure did not work, even though the states were far more powerful than they were under the Constitution. The result was anarchy, chaos and internal conflict. The Constitution provided for a stronger central government, which paradoxically made a stable federal system—with still strong states—both possible and practical.
Unfortunately, what is happening in Iraq today is largely decentralization by entropy, not empowerment and…that is likely to produce renewed conflict in the future.
Unfortunately, what is happening in Iraq today is largely decentralization by entropy, not empowerment and that is the second, related factor that is likely to produce renewed conflict in the future. It is this entropic pull that is causing the fragmentation, or “hyperfragmentation” as Denise Natali has put it, that is now the leitmotif of Iraqi politics. The Sunni have long suffered from a badly atomized leadership, but even that has worsened in recent years, exacerbated by Maliki’s brilliance in targeting any moderate, capable and charismatic Sunni leader who might have unified that community. But now the Kurds, whose leadership once consisted of Mas’ud Barzani and Jalal Talabani and no one else, are now increasingly beset by divisions. The long-dormant split between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) has been re-opened, to be joined by a Gorran-KDP split, and splits within each of these parties as well. Even the Shiite leadership is fracturing. Iraqis often like to argue that the Marja’iye (the Shiite religious establishment centered in Najaf) provides Shiites with a unified voice, but if that were ever true, it is proving less and less so. Now, dozens of Shiite figures can claim leadership over important constituencies, including dozens of new militias, many of which operate outside the control of the central government. This centrifugal trajectory simultaneously paralyzes the Iraqi political system and pushes the country toward chaos and renewed conflict.
Specific steps for post-ISIS Iraq
In this context, a new American policy that would have a reasonable prospect of helping Iraq to avoid slipping back into civil war once ISIS is defeated will require the United States to pursue a number of interwoven courses of action.
Forge a new national reconciliation agreement. There is simply no way around this foundational requirement. Iraqis need a new power-sharing agreement that will allow all of the rival communities, but particularly the Sunni and Shiite Arabs, to begin cooperating again. Without this, the military successes against ISIS will evaporate. In recent months, both the United States and the government of Iraq have trumpeted local reconciliation efforts as a bottom-up substitute for a top-down process of national reconciliation. While such grass-roots efforts can be very useful, historically they are no substitute for high-level reconciliation. Without the latter, local efforts are typically undone by rivalries among senior leaders and the result, once again, is renewed civil war. Yet the United States has made far too little effort to bring Iraq’s senior leadership together, hiding behind Baghdad’s desire to handle this itself and the self-fulfilling prophecy that Iraq’s leaders are too fragmented. The current, Iraqi-led “process” has so far achieved nothing. On the other hand, it is worth noting that in 2007-2008, Ambassador Ryan Crocker faced a similar problem of fragmented leadership, yet he and his team brokered exactly the kind of (informal but effective) national reconciliation that Iraq desperately needs once again.
Push Baghdad and Irbil toward short- and long-term solutions. As noted above, it would be better for both Arab Iraqis and Iraqi Kurds if Iraqi Kurdistan were a separate country. Unfortunately, getting to that point without largescale violence will be very difficult. There are borders to be negotiated, populations to be consulted, and foreign powers to be placated (or stonewalled). Moreover, in the near term, Kurdish political, economic and security needs may require a closer relationship with Baghdad rather than a more distant one. The Obama administration has put considerable effort toward handling these immediate problems and has helped achieve a certain amount of success. However, without the framework of a long-term plan that creates the circumstances for peaceful Kurdish secession (along the lines of the Czechoslovak model) these near-term gains will erode and eventually collapse as they have so regularly in the past.
Help Baghdad regain the basic capacities of governance. Even the most extreme advocates of federalism in Iraq recognize that the central government will have to retain certain powers and prerogatives because they are responsibilities that only the central government can realistically discharge. This starts with the role of defending Iraq from external attack—and helping its governorates and regions defend themselves against major internal security threats. It means helping Baghdad regain its Weberian monopoly on the use of violence, including demobilizing the Hashd ash-Shaabi (the Militias created in 2014 after the fall of Mosul) and/or integrating them into the formal Iraqi security forces. Only after that has happened can the central government then delegate part of it to the internal security forces of its governorates and regions. It also entails the ability to conduct basic functions like gathering revenue and spending it on nationwide services like power generation and distribution, infrastructure improvements, and economic development. That, in turn, requires both wider political reform to ensure a more functional central government overall and more specific reforms to address Iraq’s paralyzed legislature, its corrupt executive branch and its politicized judiciary.
Strengthen the Abadi government. The United States can provide Iraq with guidance and some resources to enact the kinds of reforms enumerated above, but most of that work can only be undertaken by the Iraqi government itself. That places a premium on helping the Iraqi government as best we can and far more than we have over the past eight years, which also raises the question of whether the United States should support the current Iraqi government or push for a different one. Although Haidar al-Abadi has made mistakes as prime minister, he is still the best we are likely to get. Of greatest importance, he has a number of highly desirable qualities: He is politically courageous, he is not corrupt (as best anyone can tell), he has a clear (and correct) sense of what Iraq needs to do to escape the civil war trap, and he has shown a willingness and ability to learn from his mistakes. We could have done a lot worse than Haidar al-Abadi. Moreover, replacing him would be more likely to bring to power a worse leader than a better one. Consequently, Washington’s best bet will be to double down on Abadi in the expectation that greater American backing and partnership will enable him to pursue the national reconciliation and political reform that Iraq so desperately needs and that he has repeatedly called for. But that means keeping American skin in the game.
Develop a robust, long-term strategic partnership with Iraq. The Obama administration has proven that its early refusal to invest resources in Iraq—and its perverse claim that doing so was senseless because the United States had no influence there—was wrong. Since 2014, the United States has invested considerable resources in Iraq, including 5,000 ground troops, largescale weapons deliveries, a major air campaign, and significant financial assistance, and as a direct result now has considerably more influence than at any time since 2011. After the fall of Mosul, the United States should maintain this commitment of resources to Iraq. Ideally, the United States would decrease some aspects of its support (like airstrikes and other fire support) and increase other elements to focus more on the political and economic tasks that need to be accomplished after the defeat of ISIS, which are arguably more challenging than the military task of liberating Iraq.
Retain and rebuild the American military presence. Ideally, the United States would keep about 5,000 to 10,000 ground troops in Iraq. In terms of missions, these personnel are needed to thoroughly rebuild the Iraqi Security Forces—as the United States finally did in 2007-2009—with large numbers of U.S. personnel training, advising, partnering and accompanying Iraqi forces down to company level or lower. As part of this, it would be helpful to have American combat battalions, or even brigades, regularly rotate into Iraq to exercise with Iraqi forces. The United States should retain a large Special Operations Forces Counterterrorism force to help Baghdad with the (inevitable) residual terrorist problem that will persist for some time even under the best of circumstances after the fall of Mosul. Further troops would be necessary for force protection, medical support, transportation, communications, and other administrative and security tasks. In addition to carrying out these key missions, the initial size of the force will also be important from a psychological perspective. The Iraqis need to believe that the United States is not abandoning them again, and that the American military presence left behind after the defeat of ISIS is large enough to prevent the country from coming apart at the seams or its government from using force against any of its constituent communities. While even a 10,000-man force would have only a very limited prospect of playing that role in practice, history has demonstrated that in post-conflict scenarios, the symbolic role is of far greater significance than actual military capability as long as the peacekeeping force is believed to have some degree of capacity and a willingness to employ it.4

Establish a long-term American aid program. Low oil prices have created dire financial problems for Baghdad (and even more so for Irbil). A World Bank loan of $5.4 billion over three years will help, but it is far from making up Iraq’s shortfall. Additional outside aid can also have an outsized effect in Iraq because Baghdad is so inefficient, corrupt and bottlenecked that foreign assistance provided directly to those who will spend it comes faster and is of greater utility than trying to squeeze dinars through the Iraqi political process. Moreover, as with a 5,000 to 10,000-man military commitment, an economic aid program of (ideally) $1 to $2 billion per year for five years would reinforce to Iraqis that the United States is renewing its long-term commitment to Iraq’s stability and development.5 Symbolically, that is worth far more than the practical impact of the dollars spent. Moreover, if that money is spent wisely, it can be used to further empower Prime Minister Abadi and other Iraqi leaders looking to move past sectarian differences and break the deadlocks suffocating the Iraqi political system. In this sense, and again coupled with a slightly enlarged long-term American military presence, such an aid program would go a long way to preserving (and perhaps expanding) the hard-won American influence in Iraq to help guide the country down the right path in the years ahead.
Reach a modus vivendi with Iran. Although American influence in Baghdad has grown significantly in the past year or so, Iran is still the most important foreign power in Iraq. The United States is unlikely to accomplish much in Iraq if Tehran is determined to thwart us and it seems unlikely that the next administration would be willing to commit the kind of resources to Iraq that would allow Washington to replace Tehran as the most influential external player in Baghdad. However, Iran has always demonstrated that it has a hierarchy of interests in Iraq and is nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic. Without going into a long explanation of Iranian motives in Iraq and the evidence for them, what is most important is that Iran has not tried to stop the United States from doing what it has been doing in Iraq since 2014. Moreover, on several occasions Iran has provided critical, if tacit, assistance for those efforts. What Tehran appears to see as its principle interest in Iraq is having a unified Iraq under a democratic government—which is the best assurance that Iraq will be both stable and dominated by its Shiite community, which will always want to be on decent terms with Tehran. Although significant differences could arise in future, especially over the role of the Hashd ash-Shaabi if Tehran sees them as a critical lever in wielding influence in Iraq, there is nothing about the above steps that runs contrary to Iran’s core interests in Iraq, and much that is entirely consistent with them. It would even be useful for the United States to see if some degree of coordination out of shared interests may be possible. That would be especially helpful to try to secure Iranian buy-in for longer term American objectives such as a greater political role for the Sunni Arab community and eventual independence for Iraq’s Kurds, both of which Iran opposes at present.
Time and again since the 2003 invasion, we have seen that the Iraqis cannot do the most important things that they need to do on their own, but have been able to do them with American help.
Preserving American influence, preserving a stable Iraq
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President Obama liked to intone that Americans cannot do what Iraqis need to do for themselves. At best, that statement was a tautology and therefore useless as a guide to policy. In truth its implications were an incorrect excuse for American inactivity. Time and again since the 2003 invasion, we have seen that the Iraqis cannot do the most important things that they need to do on their own, but have been able to do them with American help. It is equally wrong to believe, as many in the Obama administration once claimed, that American assistance allowed the Iraqis to indulge their worst habits and avoid taking the hard steps they needed to for the good of their country. These same officials insisted that removing the United States from the equation would force the Iraqis to finally do the right thing because they had no other choice. In reality, whenever the Iraqis have found themselves in such circumstances, they invariably have made the worst choice, to their detriment and ours. They do so not necessarily because they are knaves or fools (although some undoubtedly are). They do so because they are caught in a Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all, in which self-preservation argues for taking actions that marginally improve one’s own position at the expense of everyone else’s. That, in turn forces everyone else to do the same and so renders everyone less and less safe and secure, let alone prosperous. Escaping such circumstances typically requires an external actor capable of creating better, more cooperative outcomes for everyone. That is the role the United States successfully played during the surge of 2007-2008 and also at times after 2014. It is a role we must continue to play in the future if we are to prevent Iraq sliding back into the civil war trap.
Read more in the Election 2016 and America’s Future series.







September 19, 2016
Racing to the finish line, ignoring the cliff: The challenges after Mosul
The campaign to liberate Mosul—Iraq’s second largest city—has been in the works for months and, depending on who you ask, is in some stage of ramping up or is already underway. The military campaign is still far from finished, but it is becoming increasingly likely that the present coalition of Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), Peshmerga, Hashd ash-Shaabi (or Popular Mobilization Units), an assortment of local militias, and a generous dose of Western assistance and support will recapture the city. Indeed, even Islamic State spokesmen have acknowledged the precarious position of their territory.
Authors
I
Ian Merritt
Research Assistant
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Kenneth M. Pollack
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy
However, the growing push to retake the city threatens to replicate an unfortunately common American experience in the region: catastrophic success. There is widespread awareness of the impending humanitarian and political crises that could follow liberation, but too little has been done to minimize—much less resolve—these inevitable challenges. The near singular focus of the United States on destroying the Islamic State is unfortunately obscuring a potentially graver threat to U.S. regional interests: the renewal of civil war in Iraq.
Attacking the symptom, not the disease
The United States is justifiably determined to see the Islamic State (also known by its Arabic acronym Da’esh) driven out of Iraq, but ultimately the group is merely a horrifying symptom of much greater failures in the region. The destruction of Da’esh—or more realistically the loss of its territory as it is forced to revert back to its guerrilla/terrorist origins—will likely expose the deep sectarian tensions and grievances that have been somewhat masked by the common struggle against it.
In 2014, Da’esh pulled off its incredible sweep of conquest through northwestern Iraq in great measure due to the Sunni community’s marginalization by the Maliki government’s sectarian abuses. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s election was an important step forward, but it has not yet been translated into demonstrable reconciliation and empowerment of the Sunni community, especially at the highest levels where the history of civil wars demonstrates it is of paramount importance. Instead, the experience and abuses (real and imagined) of government-supported Hashd ash-Shaabi forces participating in the liberation of Sunni cities, including Ramadi and Fallujah, has threatened to reignite wider Sunni-Shiite violence. Abadi’s recent confirmation of Hashd ash-Shaabi participation in the liberation of Mosul has been met with serious objections from an otherwise fractured Sunni leadership. While the Hashd ash-Shaabi certainly provide some military benefit, at the very least through sheer numbers, their presence in an already volatile situation could dangerously exacerbate these sectarian tensions.
The Kurdish Peshmerga have been widely recognized as the most effective force fighting Da’esh. However, Kurdish successes have also raised tensions with their nominal coalition partners. As the Peshmerga continue to advance beyond the previous borders of the Kurdistan Region and liberate non-Kurdish towns and villages, the local Sunni Arab population, Baghdad, and other actors feel increasingly threatened. At the very least, such Kurdish advances threaten to radically revise Iraqi’s territorial status quo. As the similar experience in Syria demonstrates, the shared fight against the Islamic State may not be sufficient to deter fighting between U.S. partners.
As is so often the case in the Middle East, the situation is still more complex. The Arab Sunnis are far from a united bloc, and a not insignificant number have—willingly or not—sided with Da’esh. Two of the most important Sunni leaders are the current Nineveh governor, Nofal Hammadi, and the recently-removed former governor, Atheel al-Nujaifi, who now leads a large Turkish-backed Sunni militia, the Hashd al-Watani. Both men, who ominously command thousands of fighters, are jockeying against each other and trying to leverage Baghdad as they prepare for the Mosul operation. This combination of competing ethno-sectarian claims and a welter of armed groups—all determined to participate in, if not lead, the liberation of Iraq’s second-largest city—create a dangerous combination of abundant kindling and too many people striking matches. Until now, serious communal violence has largely been averted by the necessity of defeating the universal threat posed by Da’esh, but the fall of Mosul could change the balance. At the very least, there could be considerable score-settling throughout as Da’esh is pushed back and returnees confront collaborators.
This combination of competing ethno-sectarian claims and a welter of armed groups…create a dangerous combination of abundant kindling and too many people striking matches.
Impending humanitarian crisis
The projected number of displaced persons expected to flee Mosul that will need assistance ranges from 100,000 to over a million. Dealing with such a large number of people under ideal circumstances would be difficult, much less in a war-ravaged environment beset by sectarian tensions, semi-functional governance, and an abundance of armed groups. The United Nations, USAID, and other humanitarian organizations have been organizing extensively to care for this additional wave of internally displaced people (IDPs). However, there remains a tremendous resource gap for the already-overstretched humanitarian network as it attempts to prepare an already-overburdened country.
The experience of retaking other Da’esh-held cities included widespread destruction of infrastructure and consequently massive displacement of populations often lacking even basic necessities. Beyond the serious resource deficit, the neighboring northern provinces most likely to receive this new influx of IDPs are still struggling with the millions that fled previously, but it would be a logistical and political nightmare to try to move large numbers of Sunnis into the Shiite south. This could be another iteration of the all-too-common story in today’s Middle East: conflict creates population displacement, which destabilizes neighboring areas, causing a spillover of violence, only for the pattern to repeat.
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The missing piece
According to many would-be participants, the United States still has no serious proposal for a political and security framework to address the fundamental governance challenge of a liberated Mosul—despite U.S. officials recognizing its central role in securing genuine stability. The Abadi government, while certainly not actively instigating sectarian divisions, has made frustratingly little progress on integrating Sunnis. The recent sacking of Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi, a Sunni from Mosul, during the buildup of the Mosul operation is only the most recent demonstration of this self-destructive tendency.
Da’esh exposed the obvious failures of Iraq’s current political structure, but without significant structural reforms and meaningful improvements in governance, Iraq will remain vulnerable to the “son-of-Da’esh.” However, there are some constructive proposals that the United States could consider and develop. Dylan O’Driscoll of the Irbil-based Middle East Research Institute recently released a report that supports the creation of a federal region for Nineveh (and perhaps encompassing additional Sunni areas). He also advocates further decentralization at the sub-regional level to empower and protect the numerous ethnic and religious minorities. Variants of this federal model have been proposed before, but ultimately such a dramatic structural change is highly unlikely absent serious American leadership.
It’s not all bad?
One minor bright spot has been the rehabilitation of the United States in Iraqi politics since 2014 following the rise of Da’esh and the near-collapse of the state. American military support is almost universally recognized (grudgingly by some Shiites) as playing a critical role in defeating Da’esh. There is even more widespread recognition that only Washington could secure the financial aid to alleviate Iraq’s fiscal nightmare in the aftermath of the collapse of global oil prices.
Consequently, the United States enjoys real political leverage in Baghdad again through this military and economic support. While there is certainly no proposal to return anywhere close to pre-2011 levels of involvement, many Iraqis are actively calling for greater American leadership in pushing a realistic and durable political solution. The next few months will probably witness the liberation of Da’esh’s largest city and de facto capital in Iraq, but a much more complicated challenge looms on the horizon.
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July 14, 2016
Why the Iran deal’s second anniversary may be even more important than the first

At the time that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran was being debated here in Washington, I felt that the terms of the deal were far less consequential than how the United States responded to Iranian regional behavior after a deal was signed. I see as largely having borne out that analysis. While both sides have accused the other of "cheating" on the deal in both letter and spirit, it has so far largely held and neither Tehran nor Washington (nor any of the other signatories) have shown a determination to abrogate the deal or flagrantly circumvent its terms. However, as have noted, the real frictions have arisen from the U.S. geostrategic response to the deal.
I continue to believe that the Obama administration was ultimately correct that signing the JCPOA was better than any of the realistic alternatives—even if I also continue to believe that a better deal was possible, had the administration handled the negotiations differently. However, its regional approach since then has left a fair amount to be desired:
The president gratuitously insulted the Saudis and other U.S. allies in his various interviews with Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic .
After several alarming Iranian-Saudi dust-ups, administration officials have none-too-privately condemned Riyadh and excused Tehran in circumstances where both were culpable.
Washington has continued to just about ignore all manner of Iranian transgressions from human rights abuses to missile tests, and senior administration officials have turned themselves into metaphorical pretzels to insist that the United States is doing everything it can to assist the Iranian economy.
And the overt component of the administration's Syria policy remains stubbornly focused on ISIS, not the Bashar Assad regime or its Iranian allies, while the covert side focused on the regime remains very limited—far smaller than America's traditional Middle Eastern allies have sought.
To be fair, the administration has been quite supportive of the Gulf Cooperation Council war effort in Yemen—far more so than most Americans realize—but even there, still much less than the Saudis, Emiratis, and other Sunni states would like.
To be blunt, the perspective of America's traditional Sunni Arab allies (and to some extent, Turkey and Israel) is that they are waging an all-out war against Iran and its (Shiite) allies across the region. They have wanted the United States, their traditional protector, to lead that fight. And they feared that the JCPOA would result in one of two different opposite approaches: either that the United States would use the JCPOA as an excuse to further disengage from the geopolitical competition in the region, or even worse, that Washington would use it to switch sides and join the Iranian coalition. Unfortunately, their reading of events has been that this is precisely what has happened, although they continue to debate whether the United States is merely withdrawing or actively changing sides. And as both Bruce Reidel and I have both stressed, this perception , provoking more crises and worsening proxy warfare with Iran that will inevitably aggravate an already dangerously-unstable Middle East and raises the risk of escalation to something even worse.
U.S. President Barack Obama walks with Saudi King Salman at Erga Palace upon his arrival for a summit meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia April 20, 2016. Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque.
Looking to year two
All that said, I wanted to use the first anniversary of the JCPOA to think about where we may be on its second anniversary. By then, we will have a new president. Donald Trump has not laid out anything close to a coherent approach to the Middle East, nor does he have any prior experience with the region, so I do not believe we can say anything reasonable about how he might handle the region if he somehow became president. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has had considerable experience with the region—as first lady, senator, and secretary of state—and she and her senior aides have discussed the region to a much greater extent, making it possible to speculate on at least the broad contours of her initial Middle East policy.
In particular, Clinton has been at pains to emphasize a willingness to commit more resources to deal with the problems of the Middle East and a fervent desire to rebuild the strained ties with America's traditional Middle Eastern allies. From my perspective, that is all to the good because an important (but hardly the only) factor in the chaos consuming the Middle East has been the Obama administration's determination to disengage from the geopolitical events of the region and distance itself from America's traditional allies. The problem here is not that the United States always does the right thing or that our allies are saints. Hardly. It is that the region desperately needs the United States to help it solve the massive problems of state failure and civil war that are simply beyond the capacity of regional actors to handle on their own. The only way to stop our allies from acting aggressively and provocatively is for the United States to lead them in a different, more constructive direction. In the Middle East in particular, you can't beat something with nothing, and while the United States cannot be the only answer to the region's problems, there is no answer to the region's problems without the United States.
My best guess is that our traditional allies will enthusiastically welcome a Hillary Clinton presidency, and the new president will do all that she can to reassure them that she plans to be more engaged, more of a leader, more willing to commit American resources to Middle Eastern problems, more willing to help the region address its problems (and not just the problems that affect the United States directly, like ISIS). I think all of that rhetorical good will and a sense (on both sides) of putting the bad days of Obama behind them will produce a honeymoon period.
[T]he second anniversary of the JCPOA could prove even more fraught for America and the Middle East than the first.
But I suspect that that honeymoon will come to an end after 6 to 18 months, perhaps beginning with the second anniversary of the JCPOA and occasioned by it. I suspect that at that point, America's traditional allies—the Sunni Arab States, Israel, and Turkey—will begin to look for President Clinton to turn her words into action, and from their perspective, that is probably going to mean doing much more than President Obama. I suspect that they will still want the United States to join and/or lead them in a region-wide war against Iran and its allies. And while I think that a President Clinton will want to do more than President Obama, I see no sign that she is interested in doing that much more.
Syria is one example. The GCC wants the United States to commit to a strategy that will destroy the Assad regime (and secondarily, eliminate ISIS and the Nusra Front). Clinton has said she was in favor of a beefed-up covert campaign against the Assad regime and that she is in favor of imposing a no-fly zone over the country. If, as president, she enacts both, this would be a much more aggressive policy than Obama's, but , neither is likely to eliminate the Assad regime, let alone stabilize Syria and end the civil war—the two real threats to both the United States and our regional allies (and our European allies).
Even more to the point, I cannot imagine a Hillary Clinton administration abrogating the JCPOA, imposing significant new economic sanctions on Iran, or otherwise acting in ways that it would fear could provoke Tehran to break the deal, overtly or covertly. That may look to our traditional allies like Washington is trying to remain on the fence, which will infuriate them. After Obama, and after Clinton's rhetoric, they expect the United States to stand openly and resolutely with them. At the very least, such American restraint will place further limits on the willingness of a Clinton administration to adopt the kind of confrontational policy toward Tehran that our regional allies want, and that her rhetoric has led them to expect.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (C) speaks with Jordan's Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh (L) and United Arab Emirates Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash as they participate in the Libya Contact Group family photo at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi June 9, 2011. Photo credit: Reuters/Susan Walsh.
Reconcile, or agree to disagree?
Let me be clear, I am not suggesting that the United States should adopt the GCC analysis of what is going on in the region wholeheartedly. I think that it overstates Iran's role as the source of the region's problems and so distracts from what I see as the region's real problems—state failure and civil wars—even if the Iranians have played a role in exacerbating both.
Instead, my intent is simply to highlight that there are some important strategic differences between the United States and its regional allies, differences that are not all Barack Obama's fault but reflect important differences that have emerged between the two sides. If this analysis is correct, then the second anniversary of the JCPOA could prove even more fraught for America and the Middle East than the first. The honeymoon will be over, and both sides may recognize that goodwill and rousing words alone cannot cover fundamental divergences in both our diagnosis of what ails the region and our proposed treatment of those maladies. If that is the case, then both may need to make much bigger adjustments than they currently contemplate. Otherwise, the United States may find that its traditional allies are no longer as willing to follow our lead, and our allies may discover that the United States is no longer interested in leading them on the path they want to follow.
Authors
Kenneth M. Pollack







The Iran deal, one year out: What Brookings experts are saying

How has the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—signed between the P5+1 and Iran one year ago—played out in practice? Several Brookings scholars, many of whom surrounding official congressional review, offered their views.

Strobe Talbott, President, Brookings Institution:
At the one-year mark, it’s clear that the nuclear agreement between Iran and the major powers has substantially restricted Tehran’s ability to produce the fissile material necessary to build a bomb. That’s a net positive—for the United States and the broader region.
Robert Einhorn,
Senior Fellow, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Senior Fellow, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, Foreign Policy program:
One year after its conclusion, the JCPOA remains controversial in Tehran and Washington (), with opponents unreconciled to the deal and determined to derail it. But opponents have had to scale back their criticism, in large part because the JCPOA, at least so far, has delivered on its principal goal—blocking Iran’s path to nuclear weapons for an extended period of time. Moreover, Iran’s positive compliance record has not given opponents much ammunition. The IAEA found Iran in compliance in its two quarterly reports issued in 2016.
But challenges to the smooth operation and even the longevity of the deal are already apparent.
A real threat to the JCPOA is that Iran will blame the slow recovery of its economy on U.S. failure to conscientiously fulfill its sanctions relief commitments and, using that as a pretext, will curtail or even end its own implementation of the deal. But international banks and businesses have been reluctant to engage Iran not because they have been discouraged by the United States but because they have their own business-related reasons to be cautious. Legislation proposed in Congress could also threaten the nuclear deal.
For now, the administration is in a position to block new legislation that it believes would scuttle the deal. But developments outside the JCPOA, especially Iran’s regional behavior and its crackdown on dissent at home, could weaken support for the JCPOA within the United States and give proponents of deal-killing legislation a boost.
A potential wildcard for the future of the JCPOA is coming governing transitions in both Washington and Tehran. Hillary Clinton would maintain the deal but perhaps a harder line than her predecessor. Donald Trump now says he will re-negotiate rather than scrap the deal, but a better deal will not prove negotiable. With President Hassan Rouhani up for re-election next year and the health of the Supreme Leader questionable, Iran’s future policy toward the JCPOA cannot be confidently predicted.
A final verdict on the JCPOA is many years away. But it is off to a promising start, as even some of its early critics now concede. Still, it is already clear that the path ahead will not always be smooth, the longevity of the deal cannot be taken for granted, and keeping it on track will require constant focus in Washington and other interested capitals.
Suzanne Maloney, Deputy Director, Foreign Policy program and Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program:
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has fulfilled neither the worst fears of its detractors nor the most soaring ambitions of its proponents. All of the concerns that have shaped U.S. policy toward Tehran for more than a generation—terrorism, human rights abuses, weapons of mass destruction, regional destabilization—remain as relevant, and as alarming, as they have ever been. Notably, much the same is true on the Iranian side; the manifold grievances that Tehran has harbored toward Washington since the 1979 revolution continue to smolder.
An important truth about the JCPOA, which has been wielded by both its defenders and its detractors in varying contexts, is that it was transactional, not transformational. As President Barack Obama repeatedly insisted, the accord addressed one specific problem, and in those narrow terms, it can be judged a relative success. The value of that relative success should not be underestimated; a nuclear-armed Iran would magnify risks in a turbulent region in a terrible way.
But in the United States, in Iran, and across the Middle East, the agreement has always been viewed through a much broader lens—as a waystation toward Iranian-American rapprochement, as an instrument for addressing the vicious cycle of sectarian violence that threatens to consume the region, as a boost to the greater cause of moderation and democratization in Iran. And so the failure of the deal to catalyze greater cooperation from Iran on a range of other priorities—Syria, Yemen, Iraq, to name a few—or to jumpstart improvements in Iran’s domestic dynamics cannot be disregarded simply because it was not its original intent.
For the “new normal” of regularized diplomatic contact between Washington and Tehran to yield dividends, the United States will need a serious strategy toward Tehran that transcends the JCPOA, building on the efficacy of the hard-won multilateral collaboration on the nuclear issue. Iranians, too, must begin to pivot the focus of their efforts away from endless litigation of the nuclear deal and toward a more constructive approach to addressing the deep challenges facing their country today.
Bruce Riedel,
Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy and Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Director, Intelligence Project, Foreign Policy program:
As , one unintended but very important consequence of the Iran nuclear deal has been to aggravate and intensify Saudi Arabia's concerns about Iran's regional goals and intentions. This fueling of Saudi fears has in turn fanned sectarian tensions in the region to unprecedented levels, and the results are likely to haunt the region for years to come.
Riyadh's concerns about Iran have never been primarily focused on the nuclear danger. Rather, the key Saudi concern is that Iran seeks regional hegemony and uses terrorism and subversion to achieve it. The deal deliberately does not deal with this issue. In Saudi eyes, it actually makes the situation worse because lifting sanctions removed Iran's isolation as a rogue state and gives it more income.
Washington has tried hard to reassure the Saudis, and President Obama has wisely sought to build confidence with King Salman and his young son. The Iran deal is a good one, and I've supported it from its inception. But it has had consequences that are dangerous and alarming. In the end, Riyadh and Tehran are the only players who can deescalate the situation—the Saudis show no sign of interest in that road.
Norman Eisen,
Visiting Fellow, Governance Studies:
The biggest disappointment of the post-deal year has been the failure of Congress to pass legislation complementing the JCPOA. There is a great deal that the legislative branch could do to support the pact. Above all, it could establish criteria putting teeth into U.S. enforcement of Preamble Section III, Iran's pledge never to seek nuclear weapons. Congress could and should make clear what the ramp to seeking nuclear weapons would look like, what the triggers would be for U.S. action, and what kinds of U.S. action would be on the table. If Iran knows that, it will modulate its behavior accordingly. If it does not, it will start to act out, and we have just kicked the can down the road. That delay is of course immensely valuable—but why not extend the road indefinitely? Congress can do that, and much more (e.g. by increasing funding for JCPOA oversight by the administration and the IAEA), with appropriate legislation.
Richard Nephew, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, Foreign Policy program:
Over the past year, much effort has gone into ensuring that the Iran deal is fully implemented. To date, the P5+1 has—not surprisingly—gotten the better end of the bargain, with significant security benefits accruing to them and their partners in the Middle East once the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified the required changes to Iran's nuclear program. Iran, for its part, has experienced a natural lag in its economic resurgence, held back by the collapse in oil prices in 2014, residual American and European sanctions, and reluctance among banks and businesses to re-engage.
But, Iran's economy has stabilized and—if the deal holds for its full measure—the security benefits that the P5+1 and their partners have won may fall away while Iran's economy continues to grow. The most important challenge related to the deal for the next U.S. administration (and, presumably, the Rouhani administration in its second term) is therefore: how can it be taken forward, beyond the 10- to 15-year transition period? Iran will face internal pressure to expand its nuclear program, but it also will face pressure to refrain both externally and internally, should other countries in the region seek to create their own matching nuclear capabilities.
The best next step for all sides is to negotiate a region-wide arrangement to manage nuclear programs –one that constrains all sides, though perhaps not equally. It must ensure—at a minimum—that nuclear developments in the region are predictable, understandable, and credibly civilian (something Bob Einhorn and I addressed in a recent report). The next White House will need to do the hard work of convincing countries in the region—and beyond—not to rest on the victory of the JCPOA. Rather, they must take it for what it is: another step towards a more stable and manageable region.
Tamara Wittes, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program:
This week, Washington is awash in events and policy papers taking stock of how the Iran nuclear deal has changed the Middle East in the past year. The narratives presented this week largely track the positions that the authors, speakers, or organizations articulated on the nuclear deal when it was first concluded last summer. Those who opposed the deal have marshaled evidence of how the deal has "emboldened" Iran's destabilizing behavior, while those who supported the deal cite evidence of "moderated" politics in the Islamic Republic. That polarized views on the deal last year produce polarized assessments of the deal's impact this year should surprise no one.
In fact, no matter which side of the nuclear agreement’s worth it presents, much of the analysis out this week ascribes to the nuclear deal Iranian behavior and attitudes in the region that existed before the deal's conclusion and implementation. Iran has been a revisionist state, and a state sponsor of terrorism, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Saudi-Iranian rivalry predates the revolution; Iran's backing of Houthi militias against Saudi and its allies in Yemen well predates the nuclear agreement. Most notably, the upheavals in the Arab world since 2011 have given Iran wider opportunities than perhaps ever before to exploit the cracks within Arab societies—and to use cash, militias, and other tools to advance its interests and expand its influence. Iran has exploited those opportunities skillfully in the last five years and, , was likely to continue to do so regardless of diplomatic success or failure in Vienna. To argue that the nuclear deal somehow created these problems, or could solve them, is ahistorical.
It is true that Iran's access to global markets might free even more cash for these endeavors, and that is a real issue worth tracking. But since severe sanctions did not prevent Iran from spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support and supply Hezbollah, or marshaling Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and militia fighters to sustain the faltering regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, it's not clear that additional cash will generate a meaningful difference in regional outcomes. Certainly, the nuclear deal's conclusion and implementation did not alter the trajectory of Iranian policy in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon to any noticeable degree—and that means that, no matter what the merits or dangers of the JCPOA, the United States must still confront and work to resolve enduring challenges to regional instability—including Iran's revisionist behavior.
Kenneth M. Pollack,
Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program:
When the JCPOA was being debated last year, I felt that the terms of the deal were far less consequential than how the United States responded to Iranian regional behavior after a deal was signed. I see the events of the past 12 months as largely having borne that out. While both sides have accused the other of "cheating," the deal has so far largely held. However, have noted, the real frictions have arisen from the U.S. geostrategic response to the deal.
I continue to believe that signing the JCPOA was better than any of the realistic alternatives—though I also continue to believe that a better deal was possible, had the administration handled the negotiations differently. However, the administration’s regional approach since then has been problematic—with officials condemning Riyadh and excusing Tehran in circumstances where both were culpable and ignoring some major Iranian transgressions, for instance (and with President Obama gratuitously insulting the Saudis and other U.S. allies in interviews).
America's traditional Sunni Arab allies (and to some extent Turkey and Israel) feared that either the United States would use the JCPOA as an excuse to further disengage from the region or to switch sides and join the Iranian coalition. Their reading of events has been that this is precisely what has happened, and it is .
I think our traditional allies would enthusiastically welcome a Hillary Clinton presidency. She would likely do all that she could to reassure them that she plans to be more engaged and more willing to commit American resources and energy to Middle Eastern problems. But those allies will eventually look for her to turn words into action. I cannot imagine a Hillary Clinton administration abrogating the JCPOA, imposing significant new economic sanctions on Iran, or otherwise acting in ways that it would fear could provoke Tehran to break the deal. Our allies may see that as Washington trying to remain on the fence, which will infuriate them.
So there are some important strategic differences between the United States and its regional allies. The second anniversary of the JCPOA could therefore prove even more fraught for America and the Middle East than the first.
Authors
Strobe TalbottRobert EinhornSuzanne MaloneyBruce RiedelNorman EisenRichard NephewTamara Cofman WittesKenneth M. Pollack







July 6, 2016
Civil wars and U.S. engagement in the Middle East

"At the end of the day, we need to remember that Daesh is more a product of the civil wars than it is a cause of them. And the way that we’re behaving is we’re treating it as the cause. And the problem is that in places like Syria, in Iraq, potentially in Libya, we are mounting these military campaigns to destroy Daesh and we’re not doing anything about the underlying civil wars. And the real danger there is—we have a brilliant military and they may very well succeed in destroying Daesh—but if we haven’t dealt with the underlying civil wars, we’ll have Son of Daesh a year later." – Ken Pollack
“Part of the problem is how we want the U.S. to be more engaged and more involved and what that requires in practice. We have to be honest about a different kind of American role in the Middle East. It means committing considerable economic and political resources to this region of the world that a lot of Americans are quite frankly sick of… There is this aspect of nation-building that is in part what we have to do in the Middle East, help these countries rebuild, but we can’t do that on the cheap. We can’t do that with this relatively hands off approach.” – Shadi Hamid
In this episode of “Intersections,” Kenneth Pollack, senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and Shadi Hamid, senior fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World in the Center for Middle East Policy discuss the current state of upheaval in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and the political durability of Islamist movements in the region. They also explain their ideas on how and why the United States should change its approach to the Middle East and areas of potential improvement for U.S. foreign policy in the region.
Show Notes
Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World
Fight or flight: America’s choice in the Middle East
Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East
Ending the Middle East’s civil wars
A Rage for Order: The Middle East in turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS
Building a better Syrian opposition army: How and why
With thanks to audio engineer and producer Zack Kulzer, Mark Hoelscher, Carisa Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim, Eric Abalahin, Fred Dews and Richard Fawal.
Subscribe to the Intersections on iTunes, and send feedback email to intersections@brookings.edu.
Authors
Shadi HamidAdrianna PitaKenneth M. Pollack
Image Source: © Stringer . / Reuters







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