We Can't Just Withdraw

If only Iraq were like Vietnam. After the 60-day siege of An Loc in the spring of 1972, where heavily outnumbered South Vietnamese troops and their American advisors rebuffed several North Vietnamese divisions, the Saigon government found itself in a superficially strong position, which gave President Richard M. Nixon the fig leaf he needed for a final withdrawal. South Vietnam had rarely been safer since the start of the war. You could travel around the country in relative security. Optimism might have been unwarranted, but it wasn't altogether blind.

More crucially, Vietnam had ultimately two chains of command, the South and North Vietnamese governments. Negotiations through third parties were easily organized, if hard to conduct. Vietnam was merely split, but Iraq is pulverized. To call Iraq a civil war is to be kind: within each sectarian community there is no group really in control. Nouri al-Maliki's government is little more than another faction that adds complexity rather than coherence to the situation.

Because no one is able to monopolize the use of force among either the Sunnis or Shiites, within each community various groups are in fierce competition over who can best defend it, which translates into who can murder more members of the other community. Even formal groupings like Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army are aggregations of many smaller factions and death squads, whom their leaders don't always control. Only when the political struggle within each sectarian community calms down can the civil war itself be ameliorated. Right now, there is no one on any side with the pivotal power to negotiate with the other.

An emerging school of thought says that the only real leverage we're going to have is the threat of withdrawal, which would concentrate the minds of the various groups to seek modalities with each other for governing the country. That's a bet, not a plan. You could also bet that any timetable for withdrawal will lead to a meltdown of the Iraq Army according to region and sect. Even if we promise that all of our military advisors will stay put, in addition to our air and special operations assets, no one in a culture of rumor and conspiracy theory might believe us.