Iraq: A policy proposal for the next administration

Racing to the finish line, ignoring t... 20161020 USA Today Pollack

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

REUTERS/Azad Lashkari – U.S soldiers walk on a bridge with in the town of Gwer northern Iraq August 31, 2016. Picture taken August 31, 2016.

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.