The Bush administration famously based its argument for invading Iraq on best-case assumptions: that the US would be greeted as liberators; that a capable democratic government would quickly emerge; that our military presence would be modest and temporary; and that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for everything. All these assumptions, of course, turned out to be wrong.
Now many of the same people who pushed for the invasion are arguing for escalating US military involvement based on a worst-case assumption: that if America leaves quickly, the apocalypse will follow. "How," asked Robert Kagan and William Kristol in the Weekly Standard, "would [advocates of withdrawal] respond to the eruption of full-blown civil war in Iraq and the massive ethnic cleansing it would produce? How would they respond to the intervention of Iraq's neighbours, including Iran, Syria, and Turkey? Most important, what would they propose to do if, as a result of our withdrawal and the collapse of Iraq, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups managed to establish a safe haven from which to launch attacks against the west?"
Similar rhetoric has been a staple of President Bush's recent speeches. This kind of thinking is also accepted by a wide range of liberal hawks and conservative realists who, whether or not they originally supported the invasion, now argue that the US must stay.
But if it was foolish to accept the best-case assumptions that led us to invade Iraq, it is also foolish not to question the worst-case assumptions that support arguments for staying. Is it possible that a quick withdrawal of US forces will lead to a dramatic worsening of the situation? Of course it is. But it is also worth considering the possibility that the worst may not happen.
The idea that al Qaeda might take over Iraq is nonsensical. Numerous estimates show that the group called "al Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) comprises only 5 to 10 per cent of the Sunni insurgents' forces. Most Sunni insurgents are simply what Wayne White—who led the state department's intelligence effort on Iraq until 2005—calls POIs, or "pissed-off Iraqis," who are fighting because "they don't like the occupation." But the foreign terrorist threat is frequently advanced by the Bush administration, often with an even more alarming variant—that al Qaeda will use Iraq as a headquarters for the establishment of a global caliphate. The reality is far different. Even if AQI came to dominate the Sunni resistance, it would be incapable of seizing Baghdad against the combined muscle of the Kurds and the Shias, who make up four fifths of the country.
Nor is it likely that AQI would ever be allowed to use the Sunni areas of Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks on foreign targets. In Afghanistan, al Qaeda had a fully fledged partnership with the Taliban, and helped to finance the state. In Iraq, the secular Baathists and former Iraqi officers who lead the main force of the resistance despise AQI, and many of the Sunni tribes in western Iraq are tied to Saudi Arabia's royal family, which is bitterly opposed to al Qaeda. AQI has, at best, a marriage of convenience with the rest of the Sunni-led resistance. Over the past two years, al Qaeda-linked forces in Iraq have often waged pitched battles with the mainstream Iraqi resistance and Sunni tribal forces. Were US troops to leave Iraq today, the Baathists, the military and the tribal leaders would probably join forces to crush AQI.
The doomsayers' second great fear is that the Sunni-Shia sectarian civil war could escalate, reaching near-genocidal levels and sucking in Iraq's neighbours. But let's look at the countervailing factors—and there are many. First, the US is doing little, if anything, to restrain ethnic cleansing, either in Baghdad neighbourhoods or Sunni and Shia enclaves surrounding the capital. Indeed, under its current policy, the US is arming and training one side in a civil war by bolstering the Shia-controlled army and police.
Baghdad is roughly divided into Shia east Baghdad on one side of the Tigris river and Sunni west Baghdad on the other side. But in isolated neighbourhoods such as Adhamiya, a Sunni part of east Baghdad, and Kadhimiya, a Shia enclave in west Baghdad, ugly ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The same is true along a necklace of Sunni towns south of the capital, in an area that is predominantly Shia. In these areas, US troops are not restraining the death squads on either side. And it would be impossible for them to do so, even with a much greater increase in numbers.
Second, although battle lines are hardening and militias on both sides are becoming self-sustaining, the civil war is limited by physical constraints. Neither the Sunnis nor the Shias have much in the way of armour or heavy weapons—tanks, major artillery, helicopters and the like. Without heavy weaponry, neither side can take the war deep into the other's territory. Shias may have numbers on their side. But because the Sunnis have most of Iraq's former army officers, and their resistance militia boasts thousands of highly trained soldiers, they're unlikely to be overrun by the Shia majority. Equally, the minority Sunnis won't be able to seize Shia parts of Baghdad or major Shia cities in the south. Presuming neither side gets its hands on heavy weapons, once you take US forces out of the equation, the Sunnis and Shias would ultimately reach an impasse.
Even if post-occupation efforts to create a new political compact among Iraqis fail, the most likely outcome is, again, a bloody Sunni-Shia stalemate, accompanied by continued ethnic cleansing in mixed areas. But that, of course, is no worse than the path Iraq is already on.
A third countervailing factor is that neither Shia Iran nor the Sunni Arab countries would want to risk a regional conflagration by providing their Iraqi proxies with the heavy weapons that would enable them to wage offensive operations. The only power that could worsen Iraq's sectarian civil war is the US. Washington continues to arm and train the Shias, although so far it has resisted pleas to provide Iraq's Shia-led army and police with heavy weapons, armour and an air force. Only if that policy changed, and the US began to create a true Shia army in Iraq, would the Sunni Arab states feel compelled to build up Iraq's Sunni paramilitary militias into something resembling a traditional army.
Thus even if we assume that Iraq's parties cannot achieve some sort of reconciliation as the US withdraws, an American pullout is hardly guaranteed to unleash chaos. On the contrary, each year since 2003 that American troops have remained in Iraq, the violence has escalated steadily.
The third great fear about a post-occupation Iraq—although it gets less attention than it deserves—is the possibility of a crisis triggered by a Kurdish power grab in Kirkuk, the city at the heart of Iraq's northern oil fields. Since 2003, the Kurds have been systematically ethnic cleansing, packing Kirkuk with Kurds, kidnapping or driving out Arab residents (many of them settled there by Saddam), and stacking the city council with Kurdish partisans.
Though Kurdish Iraq is mostly quiet and relatively prosperous under the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) that controls three northeastern provinces, the Kurds may be tempted to expand their territory and secede from Iraq. Under the occupation-imposed constitution, the Kurds have the right to hold a referendum in Kirkuk later this year that will probably put that oil-rich area under the control of the KRG. Alternatively, the Kurds may opt to take advantage of the Sunni-Shia civil war to seize Kirkuk by force. Either way, most Kurds know that a Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk is a precondition for their independence from Iraq.
It's hard to exaggerate the dangers inherent in a Kurdish grab for Kirkuk. Such a move would inflame Iraq's Arab population (Sunnis and Shias), impinge on other minorities (including Turkmen and Christians) and provoke an outburst of ethnic cleansing in the city. Iraq's two-sided civil war would become three-sided.
But although this scenario sounds alarming, the reality is that in the event of a US withdrawal, the Kurds would find it difficult either to take Kirkuk or to declare independence. An independent Kurdistan would be landlocked and surrounded by hostile nations, with a weak paramilitary army incapable of matching Iran, Arab Iraq or Turkey. And if Kurdistan were to secede without gaining Kirkuk's oil, it would not be economically viable. Even with the oil, the Kurds would depend on pipelines through Iraq and Turkey to export any significant amount. Nor would Turkey, with its large Kurdish minority, stand for a breakaway Kurdish state, and the Kurds know that the Turkish armed forces would overwhelm them.
Conversely, under the US occupation the Kurds apparently feel emboldened to press their advantage in Kirkuk. And if the US were to adopt the idea floated by some in Washington of building permanent bases in Kurdistan, it would embolden the Kurds further. (The threat of a Turkish invasion is the chief deterrent to any move by the Kurds against Kirkuk, but as long as the US maintains a presence in Kurdistan, the Turks will be reluctant to check the Kurds, for fear of running into US troops.)
Not only is the worst-case scenario far from a sure thing in the event of an American withdrawal, but there is also a best-case scenario. Precisely because the idea of all-out civil war and a regional blow-up involving Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are so horrifying, the political forces inside and outside Iraq have many incentives not to go there.
And though things have gone horrendously awry since the 2003 invasion, there are many factors that could provide the glue to put Humpty back together again. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, Iraq is not a make-believe state cobbled together after the first world war, but a nation united by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, just as the Nile unites Egypt. Historically, the vast majority of Iraqis have not primarily identified themselves as Sunnis or Shias. Of course, as the civil war escalates, more Iraqis are identifying by sect. But it is not too late to resurrect some of the comity that once existed. The war is not a conflict between all Sunnis and all Shias, but a violent clash of extremist paramilitary armies. Most Iraqis do not support the extremists on either side. According to a poll conducted in June 2006 by the International Republican Institute, "78 per cent of Iraqis, including a majority of Shias, opposed the division of Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines."
What most Iraqis do seem to want, according to numerous polls, is for American forces to leave. Even within the current, skewed Iraqi political system, a majority of Iraq's parliament supports a US withdrawal. If we add to the mix the powerful Sunni-led resistance, including former Baathists, Sunni nationalists and tribes, an overwhelming majority wants to end the occupation.
This shared desire could be another crucial force in helping maintain the integrity of Iraq. The catch-22 of Iraqi politics is that any Iraqi government created or supported by the US is instantly suspect in Iraqi eyes. By the same token, a nationalist government that succeeds in ushering US forces out of Iraq would have overwhelming support from most Iraqis on most sides of the conflict. With that support, such a government might be able to make the difficult compromises—like amending the constitution to give minority protections to Sunnis—that the current government has been unable or unwilling to make, but that most observers believe are crucial to any lasting political settlement.
Edited from an article that first appeared in the "Washington Monthly" (March 2007)
