Why They Should Stay

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IRAQ'S TROUBLES Sep 13th 2007

For all General Petraeus's spin, Iraq is still a violent mess. That is why America should not leave yet

POLITICS, said the late John Kenneth Galbraith, is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. The problem for America in Iraq is that it is agonisingly difficult to tell which is which.

General David Petraeus, America's senior commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, its ambassador, went to Capitol Hill this week to tell Congress that bringing the troops home too soon would result in disaster. The general took along a flipchart of tables purporting to show that the "surge" of recent months was beginning to work (see article[1]). The ambassador said he could not guarantee success but that if America gave up now the consequences would be massive human suffering, the intervention of regional states and gains for Iran and al-Qaeda.

MORE TUNNEL, LITTLE LIGHT This newspaper was not wowed by either man. The spin General Petraeus put on the military achievements of the surge exaggerated the gains. Mr Crocker's claim to see a spirit of sectarian reconciliation bubbling just beneath the surface of Iraq's stalemated politics was even less convincing. But on one point Mr Crocker was surely right. If America removes its forces while Iraq remains in its present condition, the Iraqi future is indeed likely to be disastrous. For that reason above any other, and despite misgivings about the possibility of even modest success any time soon, our own view is that America (and Britain) ought to stay in Iraq until conditions improve.

A vote for staying does not mean that the leavers have no case. They made a powerful one this week. Most Democrats and a growing band of Republicans say that America has lost its ability to shape the politics of Iraq. By keeping its army on, ostensibly to hold the ring, America merely saves Iraq's Shia majority from the need to come to terms and share power with the disaffected and disfranchised (or so they feel) Sunni minority. It is possible that Iraq will never come good. It may eventually split apart. By his insistence on staying and making only token troop reductions as his presidency counts down, George Bush just postpones the inevitable. Meanwhile, American soldiers die for no good cause.

It can also be argued that the disaster Mr Crocker says will befall Iraq if America leaves has happened already. America's military presence has not prevented massive human suffering. At least 100,000 civilians have already been killed in an orgy of sectarian killing. Several million have already been forced out of their homes. Regional states have already intervened by proxy. America's invasion has given al-Qaeda a new cause, battlefield and haven. And--irony of ironies--the best foreign friend of the Shia-led government that the American army props up in Baghdad is probably not the United States but Iran, America's great regional adversary.

Iraqis themselves are understandably disillusioned and hostile. As General Petraeus took his flipchart to Capitol Hill, the latest BBC/ABC News poll reported that the proportion of Iraqis who want America to leave at once had risen from 35% to 47% since February. More than two out of three think the surge has made things worse, 85% say they lack confidence in the American or British forces and 57% (93% of Sunnis) consider attacks on them acceptable.

On the security front, the best bit of news General Petraeus had for Congress is that local sheikhs in some mainly Sunni provinces such as Anbar, west of Baghdad, have stopped fighting alongside al-Qaeda and are now co-operating with American forces. But these Sunni tribesmen are at best fair-weather friends who do not trust and are not trusted by the government in Baghdad. Their decision to co-operate with America for the time being has had little impact on the sectarian killing and cleansing in mixed areas. General Petraeus says that by embedding American troops in violent neighbourhoods his surge has reduced sectarian killing by more than 45% since December. But even if his numbers are right that is just a kink in a graph of killing that has risen for most of the past four years.

If the case for staying depended on extrapolating from the modest gains the general claims for his surge, it would be a weak one. The strong case is that if America leaves, things will get even worse. This can only be a guess, but it is more plausible than the alternative guess that America's going will nudge Iraq in the right direction. In the past two years, violence has tended to decline where American troops are present and to rise in the places they leave. There is no doubt that some Shia militias want to rid Baghdad of its Sunnis and that American troops are for now the only thing stopping them. Contrary to what foreigners think, most Iraqis say they oppose partition: in the BBC/ABC poll, 62% said Iraq should have a unified government and 98% said it would be a bad thing for the country to separate on sectarian lines.

NOT A MUST, JUST AN OUGHT In the Senate this week, the Democrats' Joe Biden predicted that the American people would not support an indefinite war whose sole remaining purpose was to prevent the situation in Iraq from becoming even worse. He may be proved right. Asking Americans to squander more lives and money becomes harder and harder as the prospect of an Iraqi political settlement appears to recede. It is possible that within a year or 18 months a non-sectarian Iraqi army will be able to do much of the work the Americans do now. Or maybe the prospect of a new president in Washington in 2009 will concentrate the minds of the squabbling politicians in Baghdad. On the other hand, many previous hopes, such as those inspired by Iraq's first free elections of 2005, failed to bear fruit.

If America could choose again, it would not step into a civil war in Mesopotamia. But there are worse reasons than preventing a bloodbath for a superpower to put its soldiers at risk. Having invaded Iraq in its own interest--to remove mass-killing weapons that turned out not to exist--America owes something to Iraq's people, a slim majority of whom want it to stay. It is hard to know how Iraq can be mended. At some point it may become clear the country has sunk so low it is simply beyond saving. But it is not possible to be sure of that yet.

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[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=9804000

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=9804115

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