CNAS: Conditional Engagement

I spent the first half of my day at an intimate gathering of about 900 other members of the broadly-defined foreign policy community at the annual conference of the Center for New American Security.  Not bad, since they originally planned on 400 in a room which seated 300.  The opening panel offered an overview of American grand strategy options, with Michele Flournoy presenting the conclusions of a CNAS report on that topic and Derek Chollett presenting an overview of his new book (co-authored with my friend and GWU colleague Jim Goldgeier) on US foreign policy in the 1990s.  The discussion by Joseph Nye, Mitchell Riess, Bill Kristol, and John Ikenberry was quite lively and interesting, but I won't say much more about it unless anyone really wants me to (go here from a taste, and here and here and here).

I was mainly there for the second panel, featuring the new report by Colin Kahl arguing for "conditional engagement" as the way forward in Iraq, with commentary by Gen. Jack Keane and Brian Katulis.   Yes, this is the same report of which an earlier draft presented in a private workshop was leaked to Eli Lake by a professionally irresponsible "colleague" who shall not be named. And yes, two of them are my friends whose earlier round of debate over these points was published here at Abu Aardvark and in a symposium I edited for the journal Middle East Policy.  But since my last name doesn't start with a "K", I wasn't eligible to participate in this session.

Kahl (and the supporting paper, co-authored with Michelle Flournoy and Shawn Brimley, available here) laid out a sophisticated, sharp analysis of the current state of Iraqi politics, noting both the real security progress and their tenuous nature, along with the real, massive unresolved problems.  aid out his argument for "conditional engagement" as a middle ground between the "unconditional engagement" of the Bush administration (and, implicitly, John McCain) and the "unconditional withdrawal" of unnamed liberal critics.  He also differentiated his "CE" from "conditional disengagement", with the difference being the extent to which the timeline of withdrawal is negotiated with the Iraqi government.  He argues that the US needs to use its commitment as a bargaining chip, in order to remove the blank check and moral hazard problems of our current policy - is there anything the  Maliki government might conceivable do which would lead Bush (or McCain) to withdraw American support?   He proposes beginning with a substantial "down payment" on withdrawal, removing several brigades, after which the US should maximize its bargaining leverage by making further withdrawals contingent upon the performance of the Iraqi government along a range of issues of interest to the United States.   

General Jack Keane then spoke for quite a while.  He showed little sign of having actually read Kahl's paper, but that didn't stop him from offering a standard stump speech:  we're winning the war, if we haven't already won it, and our momentum probably isn't reversible at this point.   He gave the standard account (do they actually distribute talking points?):  AQI operationally defeated, mainstream Sunni insurgency gave up, Sunni rejection of AQ helping us win the war on terror, Sadr marginalized, Maliki got off to bad start in Basra but then won a decisive victory, all the benchmarks but one have been met, provincial elections will solve lots of problems.   The only part which surprised me was Keane's blunt dismissal of any need to integrate the "Sons of Iraq" into the Iraqi security forces:  "we're not bringing 90,000 hoodlums into the Iraqi security forces... we don't have to accommodate these people."  They aren't qualified, they know it, and they will just have to deal with it, he said - never mind that these are the same people who evidently were quite adequately qualified to fight a multi-year insurgency against the United States to the point of near-victory in 2006, by Keane's own account. 

Finally, Brian Katulis pushed Kahl on what he described as a mismatch between his analysis and his recommendations.  In fact, he argued, "conditional engagement" sounds a lot like what Bush's team is doing right now, behind the scenes - even if the threat of withdrawal is not credible and not effective, Petraeus and Crocker and their team are certainly constantly pressuring the Iraqi government.   Since 2007, he argued, Bush and the Congressional opposition alike have both consistently used the changing US political environment as a way to put pressure on Maliki to act (something I may have more to say about quite soon).   He pushed Kahl to specify exactly how the pressure would work.  He also pointed to the Iraqi uproar over the US-Iraqi negotiations to make a wider point:  US engagement may not be quite the "carrot" that Kahl thinks it is, at least to anyone other than the narrow group of Green Zone politicians who depend on US military support to survive politically.   He then pushed the argument for a clean break and wider regional focus (cf CAP's Strategic Reset). 

More on this later - I had planned to offer my own thoughts and not just a summary, but I have to run out and teach now.   I do think that Peter Feaver's suggestion in Q+A that Kahl's plan represents Obama's "real" position - which I suspect will likely be a theme others pick up after the conference, despite Kahl's furious denial that he spoke for the campaign - misses the point.  Katulis would have just as strong a claim to represent Obama's "real" position, as would a number of others.  The more accurate takeaway is that there is serious thinking about Iraq going on within Democratic circles and within the campaign, with tough arguments and sharp, pragmatic analysis.   And that's a good thing. (I thought Michael Crowley did a decent job with this in a little-noticed TNR article a while back.) 

Comments

[Zathras]

The obvious response to all this serious thinking -- that it is all about Iraq, not about what Iraq is costing the United States -- is one I've made often enough that there's no need to make it at any length here.

So I'll make another point. Serious thinking is fine for a university seminar, but someone will have to make government policy; some ideas will win and some will lose, because the advocates of some ideas will make policy and advocates of others won't. Who will make policy on Iraq in an Obama administration?

The importance of this can be seen by looking at who has made policy on Iraq in the Bush administration. Different people in different offices have called different shots at different times, sometimes getting all their own way and sometimes having to split the difference with the heads of competing power centers within the administration. Some decisions haven't gotten made; some were made in haste only to be revisited later, and revisited again after that. Over and over the Americans in Iraq found themselves responding to events rather than shaping them, and so too did Americans in Washington. It is no accident that over five years since the war started it is still being funded by emergency appropriations bills.

Would a President Obama take a different approach? The question here is one of policy process, not substance. We have all these clever people in Obama's campaign organization wrangling over conditional resets of strategic engagements, but if they all end up in an Obama administration we'll have a foreign policy novice trying to sort out their disagreements, along with the very contrary views of the military command in Baghdad, under the pressure of events. How is this going to work?

I have pretty firm ideas as to how foreign policy ought to be made. They aren't particularly clever or very original; they emphasize clear chains of command, orderly procedures, and continual, strenuous effort to give priority to the important over the merely urgent. A foreign policy made along these lines will inevitably make of some serious thinkers deeply frustrated critics, because at some point discussion has to stop and decisions need to be made. But that's what I think. What does Obama think? Frankly, it looks to me as if he is resolved to think about thinking about all this later, after the election. He'll bring in a foreign policy team with disparate views, struggle to reconcile them, and end up reacting to events. I'd be happy to be proven wrong about this.

[SenatorMark4]

The idea that some politicians have ideas that will lead to policy and others don't is misleading. Politicians will always be prepared to talk...forever! The thing that makes this American experiment in democracy a more perfect union is that our founders completely understood this issue. That is why we have a House of Representatives that is up for election every two years. Show progress or go home. Because our governmental bodies are wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate entities, which can easily buy any third world "parliament", we don't demand that American blood and treasure be used to give those people the same freedom we enjoy here. If you can't throw out the tax man every two years you can't be free!!!

[smaug]

Kahl's plan is not the Obama plan. The Obama plan is closer to "conditional disengagement." This was an option that Kahl's earlier paper initially ignored. Obama's CD is not the same as Kahl's CD because Kahl conceives of conditionality as the Iraqi governments commitment to political change whereas Obama means conditions on the ground. Either way, I think Kahl is wrong to push CE over CD.