Crocker (and Tom R.) are wrong: The Iraqis won't extend the U.S. presence

While Tom Ricks is away from
his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be
posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on April 18, 2011.

Here's a thoughtful response to the post I had last week about where the
post-2011 U.S. military presence in Iraq might be based.

Meanwhile, on the Southern Iraq watch: Someone bombed
a U.S. convoy near Hilla the other day.  

By Adam L. Silverman, Ph.D.

Best Defense guest Iraqi affairs analyst

While I appreciate both Ambassador Ryan Crocker's remarks
and forethought on this, as well as Mr. Ricks' commentary, and keeping in mind
that I've not been in Iraq since the end of 2008, I think that any meaningful
attempt to renegotiate the security agreement, or parts of it, are very
unlikely.

I do think that you're going to see an ongoing, but comparatively small U.S.
presence of trainers covered under the Security Force Advising concept, but
we're talking relatively small footprint here. The Iraqis, and here I'm
referring to every major faction, have made it very, very clear beginning with
our Sawha allies out in Anbar starting back in 2007, that they are waiting for
us to leave. They are waiting for us to leave in order to settle scores. The
Sunnis and non-expatriate Shiite that make up the Sawha and primary opposition
that composed the Iraqiyya Party (which was disenfranchised from forming the
most recent Iraqi government after winning the largest plurality due to Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki's directing the power of the state at them in a
successful attempt to reverse
the electoral outcome) know they can't really win a head on confrontation, but
they've made it repeatedly clear that they are ready to fight (back). Maliki is
waiting for us to go so that he can cut his forces loose on these folks once and
for all and put an end to them. The Sadrists want us gone -- badly! The Kurds
want their own state and are just waiting for us to stop paying attention long
enough so that they can find an opportune moment to declare independence.
Moreover, given past and/or ongoing Iranian support for the bulk
of the parties in the governing coalition (Dawa, Sadrists, the Kurds, ISCI/Badr)
they won't allow their proxies to agree to anything that significantly prolongs
any significant U.S. presence. They'll tolerate training of security forces as a
large
number of the Arab portion of the Iraqi Army (IA) are Badr Corps, which is
tied
directly to the Quds Force. So whatever we teach the IA, we're teaching the
Iranians. No need for subterfuge at all. [[BREAK]]

No one is going to argue harder than I that we have a moral responsibility to
do right by the Iraqis, but I don't see how staying helps us do so. We had
actual legal requirements to do certain things, like fix the power grid, when we
were officially recognized as an occupying power. Now we're guests. Without a
doubt the electrical infrastructure in Iraq was terrible when U.S. forces
arrived in 2003 and the early attempts at repair and reconstruction led to the
creation of new targets for the insurgent forces, but a lot of what we wound up
doing wrong, or not doing at all, was based on what the CPA enshrined in their
bizarre and ideologically driven attempts to turn Iraq into a test lab for all
sorts of bizarre political and economic ideas. I remember being told that we
weren't to do anything to fix the Iraqi power grid as the Iraqis were going to
privatize the power
generation industry. My understanding was that this was based on an earlier CPA
decision to privatize power generation and distribution in Iraq, based on
attempts to do it in the United States, which, as many have documented, have
been largely disastrous and done nothing to improve the United States' aging and
crumbling power infrastructure. In Iraq not enough power doesn't just mean no
air conditioning, it also means not much water being pumped into the irrigation
canals, which means little agricultural production. This has led to migrations
of the population to towns and cities looking for work where they can be
recruited to emplace IEDs and commit other bad acts; not because they hate
Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds or Americans, but because they're desperate for cash
to feed their families. 

Despite all the hard work by the U.S. military, our coalition allies, and
civilian agency partners that led to successes at the tactical and operational
level, we have failed at the strategic level in Iraq. As General David Petraeus
stated
before testifying to Congress in April 2008: "Iraqi leaders have failed to take
advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving
their political differences." Part of the failure here was when the leverage was
available to push the Iraqis towards societal reconciliation and the beginnings
of societal/social reconstruction the Bush (43) Administration wasted the space,
the COIN break if you will, by having AMB Crocker try to negotiate a SOFA
agreement that the Iraqis wouldn't and didn't accept. At the same time
negotiations were ongoing for provincial elections. As I've written before here
at Best Defense and in other places too: the Iraqis rolled
us on both sets of negotiations. They ran the clock out on us, forcing us into
the security agreement as the U.N. occupation authority was running out and into
blessing a hybrid electoral process for the provincial elections that was the
worst possible combination -- open list and proportional representation -- if we
wanted to overcome the problems with the 2005 elections. It also didn't help
that one of the State Department's own election specialists did not understand
the system that the Iraqi High Electoral Commission had put into place. I know
he didn't understand it because I had to explain how it was going to work to him
at least five times and that was after he read the briefing paper I wrote on it
for my brigade commander so that he would understand why it was a potential
problem.

I appreciate that Crocker would like to do right by the Iraqis, I would like
to do right by the Iraqis, but I just don't see any way that they are going to
allow significant numbers of American troops to stay. The major Iraqi factions
don't want a significant U.S. troop presence as it prevents them from settling
their scores, which is what they really want to do. The Iranians that are direct
patrons for Dawa and ISCI/Badr and indirect patrons to the Sadrists and the
Kurds don't want it and won't allow it. They want us out of their near abroad as
well. And how we've been positioning ourselves vis-a-vis the Arab Spring is
making our other allies in the area very nervous too. I honestly hope I'm wrong
about what is likely to happen in Iraq after U.S. forces draw down the rest of
the way -- but I think that the events of the last several years make that
unlikely.

Adam L. Silverman is the culture and foreign language advisor at the U.S.
Army War College. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily
reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or Daisuke
Matsuzaka.