Thread: Experts discuss 'soft-partitioning' of Iraq

An Iraq for All Iraqis

By Hayder Karim
Monday, July 16, 2007; Page A15

When one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, the Askariya shrine in my birthplace of Samarra, Iraq, was bombed again last month, I was asleep in a hotel steps away from the United Nations.

Again, I woke to grief.

This, alas, is a familiar routine.

I am an Iraqi. I am 31, and I have lived with war nearly every day of my life. Yet earlier last month, I stood among a dozen Iraqi religious leaders -- Sunni and Shiite -- during a conference at the United Nations and forged a commitment to peace.

I embraced my Iraqi brothers and sisters. We testified publicly about our commitment to building a peaceful Iraq for all Iraqis. And while I frequently wake in sorrow for the country I love, I still hold in my heart a great passion -- and real hope -- for peace. I know many Americans see only a divided Iraq. But I believe that Iraqis working together can forge an alliance for reconciliation and reconstruction.

I am my parents' eldest son. My father, a Shiite, is a retired military officer; my mother, a Sunni, is a primary school science teacher. For 150 years, members of my family have been religious leaders -- Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish.

This used to be the way of things, one group marrying another, immigrating into each other's regions. There was no question of where one belonged.

But now, because of my work as a coordinator for religious dialogue in Iraq, it's not safe for me to stay in the country. Often I have expected death -- my neighbors', my loved ones', my own.

I didn't become a doctor because I wanted to heal people in the traditional sense. I did it because to be a doctor is to be an activist for peace. I love that in studying medicine, one learns that it is human nature to want to live and to want suffering to end.

A year ago, it was still safe to walk the streets in Baghdad. People could go to work, to school, to markets. But six months ago life became more difficult, and I began to take precautions. I could wear Western clothes -- polo shirts and jeans -- but they had to look old, and I certainly couldn't wear a suit. If I was in a car, it, too, had to be old. The point was never to make yourself stand out.

There was less need for me to visit friends because so many had left -- to Jordan, Syria, Dubai, even Australia. I spoke to those few who stayed only by phone. Danger was everywhere, in random bullets and frequent roadside bombs.

I was last in Baghdad in early June, and everything has changed. My parents barely leave their house. A hundred families used to live on my street; now there are three. My neighborhood is a ghost town. There's no electricity, no gas for cooking or for cars. People rely on generators and scrounge for wood.


My mother refuses to leave. She can manage in a war, she says; she and my father just minimize their needs. She wants to stay in Iraq because she insists it's her destiny.

I miss my family, my friends, my work. But I maintain hope. Freedom is a responsibility, and Iraqis must seize it.

In my work as a peacemaker, people often ask me what should be done. The answer to this big question is simple. We start by determining who is opposing the political process in Iraq and who is really in control. Who has the courage to stand up and take responsibility?

In my own way, I do my best for my country. I know how to work with Iraqis because I am one of them. Two weeks after the U.S. occupation, I was working in a nonprofit emergency clinic in a Sunni mosque, supported by Christians, helping Sunnis, Shiites and Christians.

It was through this work that I met officials of the international coalition Religions for Peace. In May 2003, I helped to organize a historic gathering of Iraqi religious leaders in Amman, Jordan. I oversaw an eight-car convoy, traveling without armed guards or government security, on the dangerous 14-hour drive from Iraq to Jordan.

In Amman, for the first time in my life, I experienced peace: possessing a concept of the future, knowing that you will see your friends again, living in the world as a normal human being.

I want the same thing in my country.

The writer, a surgeon, is Iraq coordinator for Religions for Peace.

Hayder Karim - An Iraq for All Iraqis - washingtonpost.com

There are people who want peace.

What, indeed, is the answer?

interesting, just as i mention col. anderson in the lebanon thread, he shows up again just recently.

washingtonpost.com

Exit Strategies
Would Iran Take Over Iraq? Would Al-Qaeda? The Debate About How and When to Leave Centers on What Might Happen After the U.S. Goes.

By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, July 17, 2007; Page A01

If U.S. combat forces withdraw from Iraq in the near future, three developments would be likely to unfold. Majority Shiites would drive Sunnis out of ethnically mixed areas west to Anbar province. Southern Iraq would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups. And the Kurdish north would solidify its borders and invite a U.S. troop presence there. In short, Iraq would effectively become three separate nations.

That was the conclusion reached in recent "war games" exercises conducted for the U.S. military by retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson. "I honestly don't think it will be apocalyptic," said Anderson, who has served in Iraq and now works for a major defense contractor. But "it will be ugly."


In making the case for a continued U.S. troop presence, President Bush has offered far more dire forecasts, arguing that al-Qaeda or Iran -- or both -- would take over Iraq after a "precipitous withdrawal" of U.S. forces. Al-Qaeda, he said recently, would "be able to recruit better and raise more money from which to launch their objectives" of attacking the U.S. homeland. War opponents in Congress counter that Bush's talk about al-Qaeda is overblown fear-mongering and that nothing could be worse than the present situation.

Increasingly, the Washington debate over when U.S. forces should leave is centering on what would happen once they do. The U.S. military, aware of this political battlefield, has been quietly exploring scenarios of a reduced troop presence, performing role-playing exercises and studying historical parallels. Would the Iraqi government find its way, or would the country divide along sectarian lines? Would al-Qaeda take over? Would Iran? Would U.S. security improve or deteriorate? Does the answer depend on when, how and how many U.S. troops depart?

Some military officers contend that, regardless of whether Iraq breaks apart or outside actors seek to take over after a U.S. pullout, ever greater carnage is inevitable. "The water-cooler chat I hear most often . . . is that there is going to be an outbreak of violence when we leave that makes the [current] instability look like a church picnic," said an officer who has served in Iraq.

However, just as few envisioned the long Iraq war, now in its fifth year, or the many setbacks along the way, there are no firm conclusions regarding the consequences of a reduction in U.S. troops. A senior administration official closely involved in Iraq policy imagines a vast internecine slaughter as Iraq descends into chaos but cautions that it is impossible to know the outcome. "We've got to be very modest about our predictive capabilities," the official said.

Mistakes of the Past

In April of last year, the Army and Joint Forces Command sponsored a war game called Unified Quest 2007 at the Army War College in Pennsylvania. It assumed the partition of an "Iraq-like" country, said one player, retired Army Col. Richard Sinnreich, with U.S. troops moving quickly out of the capital to redeploy in the far north and south. "We have obligations to the Kurds and the Kuwaitis, and they also offer the most stable and secure locations from which to continue," he said.

"Even then, the end-of-game assessment wasn't very favorable" to the United States, he said.

Anderson, the retired Marine, has conducted nearly a dozen Iraq-related war games for the military over the past two years, many premised on a U.S. combat pullout by a set date -- leaving only advisers and support units -- and concluded that partition would result. The games also predicted that Iran would intervene on one side of a Shiite civil war and would become bogged down in southern Iraq.

T.X. Hammes, another retired Marine colonel, said that an extended Iranian presence in Iraq could lead to increased intervention by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states on the other side. "If that happens," Hammes said, "I worry that the Iranians come to the conclusion they have to do something to undercut . . . the Saudis." Their best strategy, he said, "would be to stimulate insurgency among the Shiites in Saudi Arabia."

In a secret war game conducted in December at an office building near the Pentagon, more than 20 participants from the military, the CIA, the State Department and the private sector spent three days examining what might unfold if the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group were implemented.

One question involved how Syria and Iran might respond to the U.S. diplomatic outreach proposed by the bipartisan group, headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.). The gamers concluded that Iran would be difficult to engage because its divided government is incapable of delivering on its promises. Role-players representing Syria did engage with the U.S. diplomats, but linked helping out in Baghdad to a lessening of U.S. pressure in Lebanon.

The bottom line, one participant said, was "pretty much what we are seeing" since the Bush administration began intermittent talks with Damascus and Tehran: not much progress or tangible results.

Amid political arguments in Washington over troop departures, U.S. military commanders on the ground stress the importance of developing a careful and thorough withdrawal plan. Whatever the politicians decide, "it needs to be well-thought-out and it cannot be a strategy that is based on 'Well, we need to leave,' " Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, a top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Friday from his base near Tikrit.


History is replete with bad withdrawal outcomes. Among the most horrific was the British departure from Afghanistan in 1842, when 16,500 active troops and civilians left Kabul thinking they had safe passage to India. Two weeks later, only one European arrived alive in Jalalabad, near the Afghan-Indian border.

The Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan, which began in May 1988 after a decade of occupation, reveals other mistakes to avoid. Like the U.S. troops who arrived in Iraq in 2003, the Soviet force in Afghanistan was overwhelmingly conventional, heavy with tanks and other armored vehicles. Once Moscow made public its plans to leave, the political and security situations unraveled much faster than anticipated. "The Soviet Army actually had to fight out of certain areas," said Army Maj. Daniel Morgan, a two-tour veteran of the Iraq war who has been studying the Soviet pullout at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., with an eye toward gleaning lessons for Iraq. "As a matter of fact, they had to airlift out of Kandahar, the fighting was so bad."

War supporters and opponents in Washington disagree on the lessons of the departure most deeply imprinted on the American psyche: the U.S. exit from Vietnam. "I saw it once before, a long time ago," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam veteran and presidential candidate, said last week of an early Iraq withdrawal. "I saw a defeated military, and I saw how long it took a military that was defeated to recover."

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), also a White House hopeful, finds a different message in the Vietnam retreat. Saying that Baghdad would become "Saigon revisited," he warned that "we will be lifting American personnel off the roofs of buildings in the Green Zone if we do not change policy, and pretty drastically."

The Al-Qaeda Threat


What is perhaps most striking about the military's simulations is that its post-drawdown scenarios focus on civil war and regional intervention and upheaval rather than the establishment of an al-Qaeda sanctuary in Iraq.

For Bush, however, that is the primary risk of withdrawal. "It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaeda," he said in a news conference last week. "It would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we'd allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan." If U.S. troops leave too soon, Bush said, they would probably "have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous."

Withdrawal would also "confuse and frighten friends and allies in the region and embolden Syria and especially Iran, which would then exert its influence throughout the Middle East," the president said.

Bush is not alone in his description of the al-Qaeda threat should the United States leave Iraq too soon. "There's not a doubt in my mind that Osama bin Laden's one goal is to take over the Kingdom of the Two Mosques [Saudi Arabia] and reestablish the caliphate" that ended with the Ottoman Empire, said a former senior military official now at a Washington think tank. "It would be very easy for them to set up camps and run them in Anbar and Najaf" provinces in Iraq.

U.S. intelligence analysts, however, have a somewhat different view of al-Qaeda's presence in Iraq, noting that the local branch takes its inspiration but not its orders from bin Laden. Its enemies -- the overwhelming majority of whom are Iraqis -- reside in Baghdad and Shiite-majority areas of Iraq, not in Saudi Arabia or the United States. While intelligence officials have described the Sunni insurgent group calling itself al-Qaeda in Iraq as an "accelerant" for violence, they have cited domestic sectarian divisions as the main impediment to peace.

In a report released yesterday, Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that al-Qaeda is "only one part" of a spectrum of Sunni extremist groups and is far from the largest or most active. Military officials have said in background briefings that al-Qaeda is responsible for about 15 percent of the attacks, Cordesman said, although the group is "highly effective" and probably does "the most damage in pushing Iraq towards civil war." But its activities "must be kept in careful perspective, and it does not dominate the Sunni insurgency," he said.

'Serious Consequences'

Moderate lawmakers such as Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) have concluded that a unified Iraqi government is not on the near horizon and have called for redeployment, change of mission and a phased drawdown of U.S. forces. Far from protecting U.S. interests, Lugar said in a recent speech, the continuation of Bush's policy poses "extreme risks for U.S. national security."

Critics of complete withdrawal often charge that "those advocating [it] just don't understand the serious consequences of doing so," said Wayne White, a former deputy director of Near East division of the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau. "Unfortunately, most of us old Middle East hands understand all too well some of the consequences."

White is among many Middle East experts who think that the United States should leave Iraq sooner rather than later, but differ on when, how and what would happen next. Most agree that either an al-Qaeda or Iranian takeover would be unlikely, and say that Washington should step up its regional diplomacy, putting more pressure on regional actors such as Saudi Arabia to take responsibility for what is happening in their back yards.

Many regional experts within and outside the administration note that while there is a range of truly awful possibilities, it is impossible to predict what will happen in Iraq -- with or without U.S. troops.

"Say the Shiites drive the Sunnis into Anbar," one expert said of Anderson's war-game scenario. "Well, what does that really mean? How many tens of thousands of people are going to get killed before all the surviving Sunnis are in Anbar?" He questioned whether that result would prove acceptable to a pro-withdrawal U.S. public.

White, speaking at a recent symposium on Iraq, addressed the possibility of unpalatable withdrawal consequences by paraphrasing Winston Churchill's famous statement about democracy. "I posit that withdrawal from Iraq is the worst possible option, except for all the others."