CATO: Assessing the Surge

This morning I took part in a panel discussion at the Cato Institute called "assessing the surge."  It appears that last week's fireworks did not exhaust interest in the subject;  the room was full - the organizer estimated about 150 people.  The other panelists were Daveed Gartenstein-Ross from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Weekly Standard (pinch-hitting for Clifford May), James Dobbins of RAND, and Chris Preble of Cato.   Luckily, my worst fears were not realized;  nobody wanted to talk about Ayn Rand.

My comments for the most part won't surprise anyone who reads the blog regularly.   In the first half, I outlined where I agreed with the Petraeus/Crocker report:  there has been no political progress at the national level and in fact things have regressed - and therefore, by the original logic of the surge, it has failed;  there has been little progress in the south, where intra-Shia violence is escalating;  sectarian cleansing of Baghdad proceeds apace;  and there have been some changes in the Sunni areas.  I pointed out that the reduction of violence in Baghdad and other mixed cities results in part from the brutal fact that sectarian cleansing has succeeded - and that there is no prospect on the horizon for the return of these refugees and displaced persons, who constitute a new Iraqi community likely consumed by sectarian resentment fueled by immediate harsh experience and formulating new communal narratives which are the farthest thing from "bottom up reconciliation."  I gave my usual argument about what happened in the Sunni areas, which I won't recapitulate here.   I concluded with my mind-boggling experience yesterday of watching an American neoconservative on al-Jazeera lecturing a Sunni Iraqi tribal shaykh - in English - about what is really going on in  the Sunni tribal areas, and warned against believing our own propaganda about the Sunni areas.

All the speakers were interesting:  Garenstein-Ross gave a much more sober and guarded assessment than I had expected from a Weekly Standard writer, and we actually ended up agreeing about more than we disagreed (though I don't understand how he could argue that the Bush administration's spin was misleading and overly optimistic in 2005 and 2006, while simultaneously expecting us to believe that now, in 2007, we should take their claims at face value).   Preble gave a sobering analysis focused on domestic politics which argued that the real model was Korea and that the US was not leaving Iraq any time soon in spite of the strategic failures and the hostile public opinion. 

I found James Dobbins the most interesting speaker (including myself).  Drawing on his own long experience as a diplomat  and as a student of interventions, he argued forcefully for a version of the Iraq Study Group's 'diplomatic surge' which would bring all of Iraq's neighbors into a Dayton-like (or Bonn-like) conference.  The US brought Milosevic and Tudjman to Dayton knowing perfectly well the amount of blood on their hands and the boost it would give to their domestic political fortunes, because that was the only way to end the violence - and it worked.  He argued that no civil war can ever be resolved if the country's neighbors don't want it to be resolved;  the US can either contain Iran or stabilize Iraq, but it can't have both.   

At the end, I elaborated on Dobbins' Dayton example by suggesting an alternative lesson of the Anbar model which is rarely discussed.   After years of failed warfare against the Sunni insurgency, the US decided to talk with and then cooperate with "former" insurgents with a lot of American blood on their hands.  They discovered that it worked (at least for the short term).   It's ironic that the same people who currently most vigorously defend the "Anbar Model" of working with these "former insurgents" usually strongly oppose any serious dialogue with Syria or Iran.  If there's one good thing which could come out of the current American Sunni strategy in Iraq, perhaps it will be the recognition that talking to one's enemies can sometimes have positive results.

I'll put up a link to the video when Cato puts it online.   

UPDATE: Ilan Goldenberg offers up his thoughts on the panel; he was also impressed by Jim Dobbins.

Comments

[Solomon2]

The US brought Milosevic and Tudjman to Dayton knowing perfectly well the amount of blood on their hands and the boost it would give to their domestic political fortunes, because that was the only way to end the violence - and it worked.

And did not the boost in Milosevic's political fortunes allow him to set the stage for the Kosovo conflict four years later? Do you think the world needs more such "successes"?

[The Lounsbury]

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. Maybe Milo was able to do Kosovo bec. of Dayton, but maybe it would have happened anyway. The logical fallacy is post hoc, ergo prompter hoc.

[Aaron R]

For those of us slower with Arabic, is there a "best of" of that youtube clip (meaning, for example, 2:41-3:30) you would recommend checking out? I can handle bits and pieces but it would take me ages to process all 45 minutes of it!

[Zathras]

My impression is that while the American efforts to cooperate with Sunni Arab tribal leaders in Anbar has many cheerleaders among the political class here, the efforts themselves were almost entirely made by military officers on the ground in Anbar.

These are not the people influencing policy with respect to diplomatic contacts with Syria and Iran. Actually, I suspect that some of the Bush administration's strongest champions of cooperating with the Sunni Arab tribes in Anbar would have resisted the idea bitterly had they known in advance that it was being pursued.

[Solomon2]

Lounsbury: I am not reasoning by the logic of whether or not it makes sense to "make peace" with the unrepentent if in the long run it means enabling them so they can return to do more harm than ever before. It is a difficult question which demands consideration by every judge, not a logical fallacy - nor can such an error of judgment be dismissed as such afterwards.

[aardvark]

solomon2 - I don't disagree that it's a tough call, and I was personally very uneasy with the Dayton invitations at the time... but it was also clear that without doing it that way, the bloodshed in Bosnia was going to continue ad infinitum... and (after Srebrenica) could be expected to get even worse very soon. I don't think that the path from Dayton to Kosovo was as direct or obvious as your first suggestion - a lot of contingencies along the way - not least of which being that if Albright had played the diplomacy better in 98-99, the worst of Kosovo would never have happened. The analogy isn't perfect to Iraq, but I think the core logic does apply: you can't get stability if the most powerful neighbors don't want it, and while serious talks don't guarantee anything they also seem to be a necessary condition.

[Babak]

Dr. Lynch - I also thoroughly enjoyed the conference and it was a pleasure to meet you in person. I too was rather surprised by the level of agreement on the panel including David's comments though I felt he was spinning an overly optomistic version of the future as Weekly Standard writers are wont to do.

As you indicated, Amb. Dobbins did indeed have the most salient comments. Here are a few quotes of his that I want to mention in particular:

talking about the important lessons of counter-insurgency doctrine he said: "you can not stabilize a 'failing' state if the neighbors don't want you to"

and... "if there is no plan - each state will back a local group"

and what I felt was the probably the most astute observation and analysis of our disasterous circumstances in the ME currently:

" We can either stabilize Iraq OR contain Iran - We can't do both"

I think if that particular piece of analysis was truly understood in the halls of congress and in policy circles around town - we would be discussing far different (and actually productive) policy options.

[Pete Moore]

Marc,
Have you seen Jason Brownlee's World Politics review of the nation-building books? Dobbins' book is among them and Jason thoroughly tears it apart. To compare Dobbins' CATO comments with what he argued in that book is quite interesting.

[Peter Principle]

"We can either stabilize Iraq OR contain Iran - We can't do both"

The problem is that the US may not be able to do either. Because from Iran's point of view, the best way to guarantee the failure of the second objective is to ensure the failure of the first one.

Actually, the current situation may be the best case scenario -- compared to one in which the US gives up on Iraq and focuses all its attention, and power, on destabilizing the regime and/or knocking out Iran's nuclear program.

So it might be in Tehran's interest to pretend to cooperate in a regional diplomatic process, long as that process never actually leads to a stzble Iraq.

[bb]

Milosevic. Dayton. There's nothing like boosting the domestic fortunes of blood dripping totalitarian dictators. Pinochet comes to mind. Pity Kissinger wasn't on the panel, he would have some keen insights to offer

[aardvark]

bb - sorry, but the moral purity fails me when the only plausible alternative to such talks was continued slaughter, rape, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Bosnians. Reading about Milosevic drinking fine whiskey in Dayton was infuriating, but not as infuriating as watching Bosnians being butchered while the US did nothing.

[alle]

I'm so sick of this manufactured outrage about how the US must not talk to "rogue states", or terrorists. One need not go even to Yugoslavia to find examples of where that has been done before. There are plenty of present examples where this so-called principle is being breached; in fact, it doesn't seem to apply anywhere except for a few places in the Middle East.

When it comes to states, it is bizarre that the US claims it is impossible for moral and political reasons to talk to Syria or Iran, but will happily chat away about nuclear issues with North Korea. Or think back a couple of decades: remember the Soviet Union? Should the US have withdrawn its Moscow ambassador to make a point about Good/Evil in international relations?

As for non-state actors, witness the moralizing brouhaha about isolating the Hamas government: there is not a single accusation that can be made against Hamas (terrorism, fundamentalism, antisemitism, non-recognition of Israel, etc), that does not also apply to the ex-SCIRI or the Mahdi army or whomever in Iraq -- but the US would not hesitate to sit down with them for talks if the need arises. Or take the "former insurgents" now acting contractor-militas in Sunni villages: they are doing that precisely because the US has been talking to them. In one theatre, drawing radicals into politics has been the guiding principle since day one; in another, the same policy team has decided to pretend the radicals do not exist and that the ship isn't sinking, and that any other conclusion would be an immoral concession to terrorism.

Maybe one can find a good reason to use different approaches in these different cases, but then that's politics. It's not morals, and the fake moral imperatives about refusing to talk to Evil People should be left out of the equation -- self-delusion is not to strategize from. The whole situation is maddening, as if US politics had moved into some virtual reality of its own, where long-term execution just doesn't matter anymore, and what does is to score cheap rhetorical points in the media. Worst on the right of the political spectrum, but Democrats seem just marginally better.