Interesting Thinking about Iraq

I have left out much of the meat of this challenging opinion piece. Click on post title to read the rest. It is worth the effort.

Victory Is Not an Option
The Mission Can't Be Accomplished -- It's Time for a New Strategy

By William E. Odom
Sunday, February 11, 2007; B01, Washington Post

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating "nonbinding resolutions" that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of "who gets the blame" could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East.

....

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.

If Bush truly wanted to rescue something of his historical legacy, he would seize the initiative to implement this kind of strategy. He would eventually be held up as a leader capable of reversing direction by turning an imminent, tragic defeat into strategic recovery.

If he stays on his present course, he will leave Congress the opportunity to earn the credit for such a turnaround. It is already too late to wait for some presidential candidate for 2008 to retrieve the situation. If Congress cannot act, it, too, will live in infamy.

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan. He served on the National Security Council staff under Jimmy Carter. A West Point graduate with a PhD from Columbia, Odom teaches at Yale and is a fellow of the Hudson Institute.

Common Sense on Iraq

I worry about micro-management, but closer oversight by Congress certainly seems in order. The trick will be to find the right balance.


Anatomy of a Wrong Approach

By David S. Broder
Thursday, January 18, 2007; A23, Washington Post

The third or fourth time I heard Vice President Cheney tell Fox News's Chris Wallace on Sunday that al-Qaeda was gambling that the United States "doesn't have the stomach" to keep up the fight in Iraq, it crossed my mind that Cheney may be staring at the wrong part of the national anatomy.

The question, really, is not whether we have the stomach for the fight but the brains to figure out what to do in Iraq.

The vice president's effort to reduce it to a question of courage -- to suggest that those who want to expand the war are braver than those urging steps to limit it -- is a standard rhetorical trick. Whenever any Bush policy is questioned, someone from the administration almost automatically charges that its critics are soft on terrorism.

Iraq requires thought, not just gut instinct, because we are struggling with a situation we've never faced before. What does America really know about how to deal with a Shiite-Sunni civil war in a land devastated by years of dictatorship, damaged by invasion, infiltrated by terrorists and surrounded by countries with their own territorial ambitions? Not much, which is why it behooves us to move with caution.

The most serious thinking, inside and outside the administration, has concluded that it is fundamentally up to the government in Baghdad to curb the militias controlled by rival Sunni and Shiite clans. President Bush says the Iraqis can't do it alone, so he is sending more troops, 20,000 of them, to help Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his forces.

Trouble is, no one knows if those Iraqi forces will show up to fight or, if they do, whether they will target anyone other than their Sunni enemies.

The Iraq Study Group and a good many others urged Bush to demand action from Maliki before offering any further help. They said, let him show an effort to take control of the corrupt and sect-filled ministries, launch serious constitutional reform, divide up the oil revenue, start delivering services.

Bush instead bought Maliki's argument that none of that is possible until Baghdad is more secure, and securing Baghdad means sending more troops into its high-risk urban warfare.

Given the decision that Bush has made, is there anything Congress can do to protect American interests and save as many American lives as possible? Yes, there is. The lawmakers should hold Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates strictly to account for monitoring the action -- or inaction -- of the Maliki government.

There is a lot of talk now on Capitol Hill about nonbinding resolutions opposing the "surge" of troops, or some sort of measure to limit or cut off the funds for that deployment. No such action is likely to have any impact on the president. The deployment has begun, and Bush is adamant about his authority as commander in chief to continue it.

What Congress can demand is regular, frequent -- even weekly -- updates from the Pentagon, relayed from the able Gen. David Petraeus, the new commander in Iraq, about what the Iraqis are doing. The State Department should be delivering similar reports from the embassy in Baghdad on the operation of Maliki's government. Members of Congress ought to be traveling to Iraq themselves, checking out the reports with the troops who are bearing the brunt of the fighting.

The administration may complain about this intense monitoring and call it micromanagement. But after the blunders of the past three years, neither the president nor our allies in Baghdad have earned the right to operate with a free hand.

If Petraeus and his staff can provide specific measures of Iraqi military cooperation and progress, good. If the U.S. Embassy sees signs that the Maliki government is getting its act together, better yet. And if members of Congress can confirm these impressions on the ground in Baghdad, then take it to the bank.

If not, then Congress should call on the president to "show some stomach" and tell Maliki that the game is coming to an end.

Without a credible threat to walk away, there is every reason to believe that Maliki will attempt to use this expanded American force as a shield for the Shiite effort to drive the Sunni minority out of their homes and far from any share of power.

That is not a goal worth one American life. And if it turns out that's what all this amounts to, then we will have no choice.

Iraq: The Algerian Model

I don't generally like Maureen Dowd's sarcastic columns, but this one has some very important points in it. To read the rest of the column. click on the post title above.

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January 17, 2007, New York Times

Op-Ed Columnist

Aux Barricades!

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Being president can be really, really hard.

“Sometimes you’re the commander in chief,” W. explained to Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes.” “Sometimes you’re the educator in chief, and a lot of times you’re both when it comes to war.”

President Bush has been dutifully making the rounds of TV news shows, trying to make the case that victory in Iraq is “doable.” He thinks the public will support the Surge if he can simply illuminate a few things that we may have been too thick to understand. For instance, he says he needs to “explain to people that what happens in the Middle East will affect the future of this country.” Yes, Mr. President, we get it.

...

It’s unnerving to be tutored by an educator in chief who is himself being tutored. The president elucidating the Iraqi insurgency for us is learning about the Algerian insurgency from the man who failed to quell the Vietcong insurgency.

During his “60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Bush mentioned that he was reading Alistair Horne’s classic history, “A Savage War of Peace,” about why the French suffered a colonial disaster in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algiers from 1954 to 1962.

The book was recommended to W. by Henry Kissinger, who is working on an official biography of himself with Mr. Horne.

...

Maybe it was inevitable, once W. started reading Camus’s “L’Etranger,” set in Algeria, that he would move on to Mr. Horne. As The Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks wrote in November, the Horne book has been an underground best-seller among U.S. military officers for three years, and “Algeria” has become almost a code word among counterinsurgency specialists for the mess in Iraq. The Pentagon screened the 1966 movie “The Battle of Algiers” in 2003, but the commander in chief must have missed it.

I asked Mr. Horne, who was at his home in a small village outside Oxford, England, what the president could learn from his book.

“The depressing problem of getting entangled in the Muslim world,” he replied. “Algeria was a thoroughly bloodthirsty war that ended horribly and cost the lives of about 20,000 Frenchmen and a million Algerians. There was a terrible civil war. ...De Gaulle ended up giving literally everything away and left without his pants.”

President de Gaulle had all the same misconceptions as W., that his prestige could persuade the Muslims to accept his terms; that the guerrillas would recognize military defeat and accept sensible compromise; and that, as Mr. Horne writes, “time would wait while he found the correct formula and then imposed peace with it.”

Mr. Horne also sees sad parallels in the torture issue: “The French had experience under the Nazis in the occupation and practiced methods the Germans used in Algeria and extracted information that helped them win the Battle of Algiers. But in the long run it lost the war, because it caused such revulsion in France when the news came out, and there was huge opposition to the war from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

...

Iraq Political Cartoons

To see more cartoons on this topic from Slate Magazine, click on post title above.

Two Wars in Iraq

What follows is a particularly useful summary of the state of things in Iraq and President Bush's recent decision to "surge" (a.k.a., "escalate", or "double down"):

Bush refuses to confront the war that he is losing in Iraq

By Philip Stephens

Published: January 12 2007 02:00 | Last updated: January 12 2007 02:00, Financial Times

There have been two wars in Iraq.

The first has been the one in the mind of George W. Bush - in the brilliant phrase of the American scholar Mark Danner, a war of the imagination*. This designates Iraq as the cockpit of a Manichean struggle against Islamist terrorism. Victory is the only option if, in the president's words this week, the US is not to surrender the future to extremists.

The second war has been the one we watch nightly on our television screens - the insurgency-cum-sectarian bloodletting that has cost 3,000 American and countless times as many Iraqi lives. In this grindingly vicious, increasingly complex conflict the US has for some time been facing defeat.

Last November the two wars, the imagined and the real, might well have converged. The heavy losses suffered by the Republicans in the mid-term elections carried the message that America had lost faith in Mr Bush's war. The voters wanted the troops to come home. Even as they spoke, the Baker-Hamilton study group concluded with commendable candour that the real war was indeed being lost. Surely, the pretence would have to end

Those who thought so underestimated, if that is the right word, Mr Bush. The president, as we heard again this week, will not let go of the war of the imagination.

Iraq is fracturing along its sectarian and ethnic fault lines; the government of Nouri al-Maliki is propped up by Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, the nastiest of the Shia militias; the Sunni insurgency is undiminished; Iran and Syria are doing their best to stir further mischief. Mr Bush's answer is another 20,000 troops and a change in the rules of engagement.

This, it should be recalled, is not the first overhaul of Iraq policy. In November 2005, the White House published a National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. Much of what Mr Bush said this week echoes that document. Sceptics will recall that the latest escalation of American forces will do little more than restore them to the levels of 15 months ago.

In its own terms it makes sense,

as Mr Bush now proposes, to embark on a determined effort to pacify Baghdad as a building block for reconciliation and reconstruction. Few would quarrel, either, with the president's stern warning that

Mr Maliki must reach out to marginalised Sunnis and former Ba'athists. To have the slimmest chance of stabilising Iraq, the US must break the vicious circle that holds politics hostage to violence and security to political deadlock.

Mr Bush, though, has willed the ends without the means. Even if Iraq's Shia leadership is willing to tame its militias - a doubtful proposition - 20,000 additional US troops is woefully inadequate. Treble or quadruple that number, military strategists say, and a "clear and hold" strategy in Baghdad might just work. In any event, Mr Bush has announced that the so-called surge is strictly temporary, thus further diminishing its likely effectiveness.

Missing too is a political roadmap, for Iraq or for the region. Necessary though it is, admonishing Mr Maliki to engage the Sunnis is not of itself a strategy for political reconciliation. Reminding Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan that they have an important stake in Iraq's stability likewise does not substitute for engagement with Iran and Syria.

Here, Mr Bush has ignored the Baker-Hamilton insight that it will be impossible to stabilise Iraq without at least the tacit acceptance of its neighbours and above all of Iran. To the president's mind, talking to your enemies is an admission of defeat. The irony is that, in the context of Iraq, to refuse to engage with those enemies makes a certainty of defeat.

What we are left with, then, is a president still fighting the simple war he thought he had started in 2003. This owes nothing to the bloody tapestry created by myriad power struggles in Iraq. Instead, America is facing a finite number of Ba'athist and foreign diehards who, with resolve, can be beaten in battle.

Mr Bush, of course, has not been alone in his delusions during these past few years. It is not that long since Dick Cheney, the vice-president, was publicly declaring the insurgency to be in "its last throes". It will be for historians to judge when precisely the US lost the war. To my mind, though, there is a good case to pinpoint two moments almost at the outset. The first was Donald Rumsfeld's response to the rioting and looting in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. "Stuff happens," the then defence secretary breezed, even as he prepared to reduce US troop levels in the face of rising disorder. Soon after, the administration handed the enemy 350,000 recruits by disbanding the army and purging Ba'athists.

The sadness is that the descent into chaos was predicted as well as predictable. In 1999 the generals and policymakers in Washington carried out a series of planning exercises for the occupation of Iraq. The now unclassified conclusions have recently been published by the National Security Archive.

"A change in regime," the authors of the exercise code-named Desert Crossing noted, "does not guarantee stability . . . aggressive neighbours, fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines, and chaos created by rival forces bidding for power could adversely affect stability".

They calculated that a force of 400,000 and an occupation lasting perhaps a decade would be necessary to build stable self-government in Baghdad. Even then, the assumption was that retribution against the Ba'athists would be limited and the army would be kept intact.

The point these policymakers came back to again and again was a need to reach an accommodation with the regional powers, if necessary by ending the isolation of Iran. With what now seems like extraordinary prescience but at the time was seen as common sense, they cautioned: "More so than any other country in the region, mismanagement of Iran, with all its capabilities and possible intentions, could be disastrous for the United States and the coalition." And so it has proved.

One temptation now is to see Mr Bush's latest strategy as a cynical manoeuvre. It might be an effort to run down the clock of his presidency - leaving the Saigon moment to his successor. Alternatively, the president might be seeking political cover for retreat later in the year - the administration could at least say it had done its best. My own inclination is to believe the worst. Mr Bush is still fighting that other war.

An Interesting Analysis of President Bush's "New Way Forward"

I am skeptical about what President Bush announced last evening, for the reasons cited by David Brooks, as well as some others. I also agree that those opposed to what the President proposes owe us something concrete with which to compare the "New Way Forward".


January 11, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
The Fog Over Iraq
By DAVID BROOKS

If the Democrats don’t like the U.S. policy on Iraq over the next six months, they have themselves partly to blame. There were millions of disaffected Republicans and independents ready to coalesce around some alternative way forward, but the Democrats never came up with anything remotely serious.

The liberals who favor quick exit never grappled with the consequences of that policy, which the Baker-Hamilton commission terrifyingly described. The centrists who believe in gradual withdrawal never explained why that wouldn’t be like pulling a tooth slowly. Joe Biden, who has the most intellectually serious framework for dealing with Iraq, was busy yesterday, at the crucial decision-making moment, conducting preliminary fact-finding hearings, complete with forays into Iraqi history.

The Democrats have been fecund with criticisms of the war, but when it comes to alternative proposals, a common approach is social Darwinism on stilts: We failed them, now they’re on their own.

So we are stuck with the Bush proposal as the only serious plan on offer. The question is, what exactly did President Bush propose last night? The policy rollout has been befogged by so much spin and misdirection it’s nearly impossible to figure out what the president is proposing.

Nonetheless, here’s my reconstruction of how this policy evolved:

On Nov. 30, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented Bush with a new security plan for Baghdad. It called for U.S. troops to move out of Baghdad to the periphery, where they would chase down Sunni terrorists. Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish troops, meanwhile, would flood into the city to establish order, at least as they define it.

Maliki essentially wanted the American troops protecting his flank but out of his hair. He didn’t want U.S. soldiers embedded with his own. He didn’t want American generals hovering over his shoulder. His government didn’t want any restraints on Shiite might.

Over the next weeks, Bush rejected the plan and opted for the opposite approach. Instead of handing counterinsurgency over to the Iraqis/Shiites, he decided to throw roughly 20,000 U.S. troops — everything he had available — into Baghdad. He and his advisers negotiated new rules of engagement to make it easier to go after Shiites as well as Sunnis. He selected two aggressive counterinsurgency commanders, David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, to lead the effort. Odierno recently told John Burns of The Times that American forces would remain in cleared areas of Baghdad “24/7,” suggesting a heavy U.S. presence.

Then came the job of selling the plan. The administration could not go before the world and say that the president had decided to overrule the sovereign nation of Iraq. Officials could not tell wavering Republicans that the president was proposing a heavy, U.S.-led approach.

Thus, administration officials are saying that they have adopted the Maliki plan, just with a few minor tweaks. In briefings and in the president’s speech, officials claimed that this was an Iraqi-designed plan, that Iraqi troops would take on all the primary roles in clearing and holding neighborhoods, that Iraqis in mixed neighborhoods would scarcely see any additional Americans.

All of this is designed to soothe the wounded pride of the Maliki government, and to make the U.S. offensive seem less arduous at home. It’s the opposite of the truth.

Yesterday, administration officials were praising Maliki lavishly. He wants the same things we want, they claimed. He has resolved to lead a nonsectarian government. He is reworking his governing coalitions and marginalizing the extremists. “We’ve seen the nascent rise of a moderate political bloc,” one senior administration official said yesterday.

But the selling of the plan illustrates that this is not the whole story. The Iraqi government wants a unified non-sectarian solution in high-minded statements and in some distant, ideal world. But in the short term, and in the deepest reptilian folds of their brains, the Shiites are maneuvering amid the sectarian bloodbath all around.

This is not a function of the character of Maliki or this or that official. It’s a function of the core dynamic now afflicting Iraqi society.

The enemy in Iraq is not some discrete group of killers. It’s the maelstrom of violence and hatred that infects every institution, including the government and the military. Instead of facing up to this core reality, the Bush administration has papered it over with salesmanship and spin.

Cognitive Decision Theory Applied to International Relations

This is a most interesting article on cognitive decision theory applied to international relations. Well-worth reading. Click on post title to access article.

Why Hawks Win

By Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon Page 1 of 1

January/February 2007

Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. A look at why the tough guys win more than they should. Elizabeth Glassanos/FOREIGN POLICY Should Hawks Win? Matthew Continetti of the conservative Weekly Standard and Matthew Yglesias of the liberal American Prospect square off in an FP web exclusive debate. National leaders get all sorts of advice in times of tension and conflict. But often the competing counsel can be broken down into two basic categories. On one side are the hawks: They tend to favor coercive action, are more willing to use military force, and are more likely to doubt the value of offering concessions. When they look at adversaries overseas, they often see unremittingly hostile regimes who only understand the language of force. On the other side are the doves, skeptical about the usefulness of force and more inclined to contemplate political solutions. Where hawks see little in their adversaries but hostility, doves often point to subtle openings for dialogue. As the hawks and doves thrust and parry, one hopes that the decision makers will hear their arguments on the merits and weigh them judiciously before choosing a course of action. Don’t count on it. Modern psychology suggests that policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more than the doves. There are numerous reasons for the burden of persuasion that doves carry, and some of them have nothing to do with politics or strategy. In fact, a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind. Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example. In fact, when we constructed a list of the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we were startled by what we found: All the biases in our list favor hawks. These psychological impulses—only a few of which we discuss here—incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations. In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end....

Military Concerns about Baker-Hamilton

Apparently, John McCain still thinks that more troups are needed in Iraq before the rest of the Baker-Hamilton recommendations can be implement. Frankly, as much as I dislike the idea in principle, I suspect that he may be right. See the article following this blurb for more on the matter.

Many in Congress have praised the group's report, which was eight months in the making. But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Hamilton and Baker that he does not believe their approach will work. The panel called for a phase-out of the U.S. combat role by 2008 and rejected the idea of a short-term increase in the number of combat troops in Iraq.McCain took issue with that approach, saying he did not agree with the Baker-Hamilton group's conclusion that the U.S. military does not have enough forces available to sustain a troop boost in Iraq."There's only one thing worse than an over-stressed Army and Marine Corps, and that's a defeated Army and Marine Corps," said McCain, a Vietnam veteran and a 2008 Republican presidential hopeful. "I believe this is a recipe that will lead to our defeat sooner or later in Iraq."

December 7, 2006, New York Times

Military Analysis

Will Iraq Study Group’s Plan Work on the Battlefield?

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history and run counter to assessments made by some of its own military advisers.

Ever since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States has struggled in vain to tamp down the violence in Iraq and to build up the capacity of Iraq’s security forces. Now the study group is positing that the United States can accomplish in little more than one year what it has failed to carry out in three.

In essence, the study group is projecting that a rapid infusion of American military trainers will so improve the Iraqi security forces that virtually all of the American combat brigades may be withdrawn by the early part of 2008.

“By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq,” the study group says.

Jack Keane, the retired acting Army chief of staff who served on the group’s panel of military advisers, described that goal as entirely impractical. “Based on where we are now we can’t get there,” General Keane said in an interview, adding that the report’s conclusions say more about “the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq.”

The experience of American commanders shows the difficulties in rapidly handing over security responsibilities to Iraq. In June, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, developed a plan that called for gradually drawing down the number of American brigade combat teams by December 2007, to just 5 or 6 from the 14 combat brigades that were deployed at the time. In keeping with this approach, American troops in Baghdad began to cut back on their patrols in the capital, calculating that Iraqi security forces would pick up the slack.

But no sooner did General Casey present his plan in Washington than it had to be deferred. With sectarian violence soaring in Baghdad, the United States reinforced its troops there. More American soldiers are now involved in security operations in Baghdad than Iraqi troops.

Now, the Iraq Study Group is essentially taking General Casey’s plan off the shelf and carrying it further. The group’s final military recommendations were not discussed with the retired officers who serve on the group’s Military Senior Adviser Panel before publication, several of those officers said.

Military experts say there are several difficulties with the panel’s recommendation. First, it underestimates the challenge of building a capable Iraqi security force. After several years of desultory efforts, the United States has taken steps to upgrade and better prepare the teams of American advisers who are assigned to Iraqi units. But training the Iraqi Army is more than a matter of teaching combat skills. It requires transforming the character of the force.

“The new Iraqi Army will need years to become equal to the challenge posed by a persistent insurgency and terrorist threat,” Lt. Col. Carl D. Grunow, a former military adviser, wrote in a recent issue of Military Review, a journal published by the United States Army.

One big problem, Colonel Grunow notes, is that the Iraqi military is not proficient in counterinsurgency operations or sufficiently sensitive to the risk of civilian casualties.

“They are still fighting their last war, the high-intensity Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a war with clear battle lines fought with mass military formations, and one in which civilians on the battlefield were a nuisance, and not a center of gravity,” he wrote. The Iraqi military, he added, “must learn to fight using strategies and tactics far different than those used in the past.”

Even if the number of American advisers is increased, it is highly unlikely that the Iraqi forces would be capable of assuming the entire responsibility for security throughout the country in little more than a year. It took four years, from 1969 to 1973, for the Nixon administration to make South Vietnamese forces strong enough to hold their own and withdraw American combat forces from Vietnam. Even so, when Congress withheld authority for American airstrikes in support of those forces in 1975, the North Vietnamese quickly defeated the South and reunified the country under Communist rule.

The rapid withdrawal of American combat forces would also deprive the Iraqi military of the opportunity to work as partners with the Americans in combined operations. “There is no meaningful plan for creating a mix of effective Iraqi military forces, police forces, governance and criminal justice system at any point in the near future, much less by 2008,” noted Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, referring to the group’s study.

Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star general, said in an interview that the overall concept of withdrawing American forces as the Iraqis built up their military capability was sound. But he argued that the specific recommendations by the panel raised a second problem: if American combat brigades were withdrawn from Iraq, the thousands of American advisers who remained might find themselves dangerously exposed, particularly if the fighting in Iraq grew into a full-scale civil war. The advisers could be killed or taken hostage.

“They came up with a political thought but then got to tinkering with tactical ideas that in my view don’t make any sense,” General McCaffrey said. “This is a recipe for national humiliation.”

A last issue is that given the deterioration of security in Iraq, it may take the combined efforts of American combat units and Iraqi security forces to try to arrest the spiraling violence. In the end, that task may not be achievable. But since it is American forces that have often worked to curb the sectarian killings — and since many of the Iraqi forces have been infiltrated by sectarian militias — there is reason to believe that the civil strife will grow if the American combat forces soon begin to leave.

A preface to the report by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, the group’s chairmen, said that one aim of the report was “to move our country toward consensus.” The study contains all the ingredients of a Washington compromise. What is less apparent is a detailed and convincing military strategy that is likely to work in Iraq.

More Reasoned Columnists (Washington Post) Re. Baker-Hamilton Report

A Report Overtaken by Reality

By George F. Will
Thursday, December 7, 2006; A31

The Iraq Study Group, like the policy it was created to critique, was overtaken by the unexpectedly rapid crumbling of the U.S. position in Iraq since the ISG was formed in March. The deterioration was manifested in last week's misbegotten summit between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which made brutally clear how difficult it will be to apply even the ISG's temperate recommendations to the deteriorating reality.

Summits usually do, and generally should, resemble American political conventions -- they should not be deliberative events but should ratify decisions made earlier. The ISG's recommendations must be read in light of these facts from the week during which the recommendations were being written:

Calling Iraq's prime minister "the right guy" for Iraq, Bush met him in Jordan, presumably because Iraq is too dangerous a venue for discussing how to, in Bush's words, "complete" the job. The job is to stabilize Iraq, which cannot be done without breaking the Mahdi Army, which cannot be done without bringing down Maliki, who is beholden to Moqtada al-Sadr, the cleric who more or less controls the Mahdi Army, which probably is larger and more capable than Iraq's army.

Also in the week before the ISG's report, the leaked Donald Rumsfeld memo urged policy to "go minimalist." That is generally good advice to government, but much of the rest of the memo, with its 21 "illustrative new courses of action" -- a large number, and evidence that none is especially promising -- echoed the 1960s Great Society confidence in government-engineered behavior modification: jobs programs for unemployed young Iraqis, reallocation of reconstruction funds to "stop rewarding bad behavior" and "start rewarding good behavior," and bribery ("provide money to key political and religious leaders").

It is beyond dispiriting that after 45 months of war an American official can think that this semi-genocidal conflict over the survival of groups divided about the meaning of God's will can now be dampened by clever economics. By what the ISG did not recommend -- e.g., many more troops and much more money -- it recognized that the deterioration is beyond much remediation.

When the ISG made a four-day visit to Iraq in August, its members were taken to the Green Zone, in a city so dangerous that only one ISG member -- former senator Chuck Robb, a Marine veteran of Vietnam combat -- left it, to visit Marines in the turbulent Anbar province. But, then, long before the ISG came to study it, Iraq seemed impervious to America's plans for ameliorating its dysfunctions.

The ISG's central conclusion, important to say with the group's imprimatur even though the conclusion is obvious, is that the problem with Iraq is the Iraqis, a semi-nation of peoples who are very difficult to help. The ISG's report will help accomplish what it recommends -- increase pressure on Iraq's "government" in the hope of turning it into a government by June, when Maliki says Iraq will be able to cope with its security needs.

How likely is that? Look back two years. In June 2004, at the time the Coalition Provisional Authority was to transfer sovereignty to what it thought would be an Iraqi government, Americans were toiling to finish their work of occupation: "A lawyer who had once clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was poring over a draft edict requiring Iraqi political parties to engage in American-style financial disclosure." Such surreal vignettes abound in "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," by The Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The book, which should be read along with the ISG report, would be hilarious were it not horrifying that so much valor and suffering have been expended in this context:

Halliburton, writes Chandrasekaran, hired Pakistanis and Indians, but no Iraqis, for kitchen work. "Nobody ever explained why, but everyone knew. They could poison the food." Of the CPA staff, "More than half, according to one estimate, had gotten their first passport in order to travel to Iraq." Two CPA staffers said that before they were hired, they were asked if they supported Roe v. Wade. The traffic code the CPA wrote for Iraq stipulated that "the driver shall hold the steering wheel with both hands" and "rest should be taken for five minutes for every one hour of driving." But Chandrasekaran's driver, who like other Iraqis had obeyed the laws under Saddam's police state, began disregarding all traffic laws. "When I asked him what he was doing, he turned to me, smiled, and said, 'Mr. Rajiv, democracy is wonderful. Now we can do whatever we want.' "

Not exactly.

georgewill@washpost.com

Baker-Hamilton Does Its Job

By David Ignatius
Thursday, December 7, 2006; A31

DUBAI -- The Iraq Study Group's report achieved the goal of any blue-ribbon commission: It stated the obvious, emphatically.

"The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." Of various proposals for fixing Iraq, "all have flaws." A "precipitate" withdrawal would be a mistake, but so would a big increase in U.S. troops. America should set "milestones" for the Iraqi government to control all provinces by next September. The U.S. military should shift to a training and advising mission so that most American troops can leave by early 2008. But there is no "magic formula," and even if this approach fails, the United States "should not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq."

A cynic might argue that this laundry list is precisely what the Bush administration was moving toward in its own internal review of policy. But I think that's the point about the bipartisan commission headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and ex-representative Lee H. Hamilton. They have stamped an interwoven "D" and "R" on recommendations that seem so familiar you wonder why they haven't been official policy all along. (Some of them have been, though you wouldn't have known it from President Bush's bluff and bluster.)

What's new in the Baker-Hamilton approach is the part that's least likely to be successful -- the call for an International Support Group that, in theory, would include the regional bad boys, Iran and Syria, along with foot-draggers such as Russia, China and France. And while they're at it, Baker and Hamilton propose a crash effort to resolve the Palestinian conflict, make peace between Israel and Syria and resolve the mess in Lebanon.

I like this "New Diplomatic Offensive" precisely because it is so ambitious. It would put the United States back in the business of trying to solve the Arab-Israeli problem, which has been driving the Middle East crazy for nearly 40 years. As for Iran and Syria, the great advantage of asking them to join a global effort to stabilize Iraq is that if they say no, it's blood on their hands. As the report notes, "An Iranian refusal to do so would demonstrate to Iraq and the rest of the world Iran's rejectionist attitude and approach, which could lead to its isolation."

And what is America's leverage for bringing Iran and Syria to the table (other than the implicit threat to walk away and let them worry about the Iraqi civil war)? The report includes this delicious Bakeresque ploy: "Saudi Arabia's agreement not to intervene with assistance to Sunni Arab Iraqis could be an essential quid pro quo for similar forbearance on the part of other neighbors, especially Iran."

Aha! So that explains the unusual op-ed by quasi-official Saudi analyst Nawaf Obaid in The Post on Nov. 29 threatening that Saudi troops would be sent into Iraq if America should leave. It was a bargaining chip.

Another laudable aspect of the Baker-Hamilton report (especially in comparison with Bush's rhetoric) is that it doesn't mince words about how bad things are in Iraq. The Iraqi army has made only "fitful progress toward becoming a reliable and disciplined fighting force." The Iraqi police are "substantially worse" than the army. The results of the latest effort to pacify Baghdad have been "disheartening." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki means well, but he "has taken little meaningful action" against militias. Sunni Arabs haven't yet "made the strategic decision to abandon violent insurgency." No reconciliation will be possible without an unpalatable amnesty for Iraqis who fought against U.S. forces. At least we are beginning to tell the truth here.

The final reason to embrace the Baker-Hamilton report is that its combination of cut-your-losses pragmatism and earnest do-gooderism will reassure the world that America has turned a page on Iraq. The level of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East these days is genuinely frightening. It has become the organizing principle of political life, even in once-friendly countries such as Lebanon. This is the real national security threat to America -- this sense in the rest of the world that Iraq symbolizes America's fatal new combination of arrogance and incompetence.

This report asks the world to help us find our way back home. Even if its proposals don't succeed, Baker-Hamilton can still accomplish its purpose, to "enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly."

A Wall Street Journal Editorial about the Baker-Hamilton Report

The following guest editorial from the Wall Street Journal seems to represent the editorial board's view. Before reading the editorial, here is some background on its author, a well-known neo-con:

Eliot Cohen, called by one observer “the most influential neocon in academe,” is a well-known scholar of military affairs based at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), which has served as a base for a number of prominent neoconservatives, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Cohen heads SAIS's Center for Strategic Studies, a program founded in 2003 with a generous grant from Philip Merrill, a minor media mogul who heads the U.S. Ex-Im Bank and serves as an adviser to the hawkish Center for Security Policy. Cohen is famous for his thesis that the war on terror constitutes World War IV, and that the Cold War should really be considered World War III. (5)

Cohen has been affiliated with a number of hawkish advocacy groups, including the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and the Project for the New American Century. He also serves on the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank, which has been heavily criticized for members’ conflicts of interests and for its stilted ideological profile. (Nearly a third of the board members come from the staunchly conservative Hoover Institution.)

Cohen is the author of Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, 2002, which George W. Bush reportedly read in preparation for the invasion of Iraq; Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War, 1990; and Citizens and Soldiers, 1985.

No Way to Win a War

By ELIOT COHEN
December 7, 2006; Page A18

The theory of the thing is very peculiar indeed. You are in the middle of a war -- a hard war, a war that is going badly. If the government has bogged down, if the people inside have gone stale, you would say that the sound thing, the Churchillian or Lincolnian or Rooseveltian thing, would be, first, to fire a bunch of officials (generals as well as top civilians), promote or bring in fresh talent, and put together a small group of people to take a new and unillusioned look. Those people would report back in secrecy to the president and his most senior advisers and aides.

They would consist of experienced soldiers and civilians in whom the president (who, after all, has to make the strategic decisions, and is the accountable executive) has trust. There would not be many of them, a half dozen or so, and they would have to be hardy enough to visit the war zone for several weeks, talking not just to politicians and generals but to captains and sergeants. They would go see things for themselves. They would visit a forward operating base near Tikrit; they would spend some time with Iraqi soldiers in Taji; they would take their chances in a convoy to al Asad, or even a patrol in Tal Afar.

They -- not their staff of a few soldiers and secretaries -- would do the probing, digging, thinking, discussing and, above all, the writing. The chairman of the group would insist that they air their disagreements candidly and thoroughly in front of the president, engaging in a debate that might last a day, perhaps longer. The rest of us would not find out about the panel until months, or even years, after it reported back; maybe not until the war was over.

* * *

The administration's congressional critics (including those of its own party) came up with a different solution: the Iraq Study Group (ISG), which has now produced a document that consists of 50 pages of recommendations, preceded by a 40-page thumbnail sketch of the current situation in Iraq and 50 pages of maps, lists of people, and full-length biographies of the commissioners. This is a group composed, for the most part, of retired eminent public officials, most with limited or no expertise in the waging or study of war. It consists of individuals carefully selected with an eye to diverse partisan and other irrelevant personal characteristics. These worthies, with not one chairman but two (for balance, of course), turned to several score experts known to disagree vehemently with one another about the best course of action to be pursued in Iraq.

Some of the commission members and their advisers cordially detest the president and his administration and opposed him and his war from the outset; others were equally passionate in their defense of both the man and the conflict. And yet this diverse group had an overwhelming mandate, from the beginning, to produce a consensus document. The commission members spent four days in Iraq, and with the exception of a one-day foray by former Marine Chuck Robb, they stayed in the Green Zone, that bubble of palaces and residences that has little to do with the real Iraq of Basra, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Baquba and Mosul. At the end, they had breakfast with the president and a few hours later posted their conclusions on the Internet for all the world to ponder. There is something of farce in all this, an invocation of wisdom from a cohesive Washington elite that does not exist, a desperate wish to believe in the gravitas and the statecraft of grave men (and women) who can sort out the mess in which the country finds itself.

A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results. "Iraq's neighbors are not doing enough to help Iraq achieve stability" -- a statement only somewhat ameliorated by the admission that some are even "undercutting stability," which sounds as though Syria and Iran were being downright rude, rather than providing indispensable assistance to those who have filled the burn wards of Walter Reed, the morgue in Baghdad, and the cemetery at Arlington. The selected remedy is, first and foremost, rather like the ISG's credo for its own functioning, consensus. "The United States should immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region," as if our chief failure with Bashar Assad or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lies with the hitherto unnoticed laziness or rhetorical ineptitude of our diplomats, or as though Europe, Saudi Arabia and Israel have not yet figured out that stability in Iraq is a good thing. "Syria should control its border" and "Iran should respect Iraq's sovereignty."

No kidding -- but who is going to make them? That perennial solution, "resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict," makes its appearance, including direct negotiations between Israel and Palestinians, but only with "those who accept Israel's right to exist." The report conveniently forgets that the elected leaders of Palestine do not, in fact, accept Israel's right to exist. And it also neglects the grim reality that one of the most terrible things about Gaza, and possibly the West Bank as well, is that no one, not even Hamas, is really in charge.

Part of Iran's price for easing up on us in Iraq is pretty clearly taking the heat off its nuclear program; the ISG recommends that that issue "should continue to be dealt with by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany." Well, what deal should the U.S. be willing to cut on Iranian nuclear weapons? Do we think the Iranians would deliver? And what are the long-term consequences?

War, and warlike statecraft, is a hard business, and though this is supposed to be a report dominated by "realists," there is nothing realistic in failing to spell out the bloody deeds, grim probabilities and dismal consequences associated with even the best course of action. Indeed, some parts of the report read as sheer fantasy -- Recommendation 15, for example, which provides that part of the American deal with Syria should include the latter's full cooperation in investigating the Hariri assassination, verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah, and its support for persuading Hamas to recognize Israel.

The prescriptions for internal processes in Iraq are only somewhat better. The ISG argues that American forces should shift to developing Iraqi security forces and backing them up, which is more or less the course we are on now. It talks of milestones for Iraqi performance, as if Iraqi benchmarking were more a problem than Iraqi will, and Iraqi will more the problem than Iraqi capability. It suggests announcing our own planned redeployments without considering the most obvious consequence, which is that Iraqis of many political hues will decide that the Americans are leaving, and the time has come to cut deals with Jaish al Mahdi, or the Badr organization, or al Qaeda in Iraq, or any of the other cutthroat outfits infesting that bleeding country.

Quite apart from the psychological impact of our actions, there is the sober fact that the Iraqi army is small, 138,000-strong (and that number probably overstated), and that building effective security forces takes time. The 188,000-man police forces are corrupt, riddled with militia influence, and in need of a thorough overhaul. We cannot build the Iraqi security forces without a substantial combat presence. Nor is the problem merely one of training, as Iraqi corporals driving around in pickup trucks without functional radios might have sourly pointed out, had they had the chance to talk to a Study Group member.

At least the ISG has given considerable thought to preparing us for future conflict. Consider Recommendations 47 and 48. Congress, they declare, should allocate money to repair the clapped-out equipment the Army and Marines will bring back from Iraq. This is no doubt better than, say, heaving Bradley infantry fighting vehicles overboard on the way back to American ports in order to provide a home for new coral reefs. "As [American] redeployment proceeds, military leaders should emphasize training and education of forces that have returned to the United States in order to restore the force to full combat capability." Pentagon planners would do well to pursue this plan rather than give the troops six months of leave and then having them paint the sorely neglected rocks outside the sergeant major's office.

The great war leaders, in their private deliberations, shied away from vagueness. Haziness about ends and means, about what to do and how to do it, is a mark of strategic ineptitude; in war it gets people killed. But a Churchill could only call the flattening of German cities "terror bombing" in private.

Thus, unsurprisingly, in a public document of this kind, euphemism and imprecision abound. The U.S. needs to give "disincentives" to Syria and Iran: But the real question has always been whether we are willing to use a variety of overt and covert means -- from bombing insurgent safe houses to sabotaging refineries, from mining harbors to supporting their own insurgents -- to do so. And, in fact, the report mentions no means for squeezing either country.

True, as James Baker irritably noted at the press conference releasing the report, the U.S. talked to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But as the U.S. did so it also bankrupted the U.S.S.R. in an arms race, undermined its client governments in Eastern Europe by supporting Polish labor unions, and killed its soldiers by providing surface-to-air missiles to Afghan guerrillas. Real pain, and not merely tough talk sweetened by a bucket of goodies, paves the way for successful negotiations with brutal opponents.

* * *

What we need in Iraq is not a New Diplomatic Offensive (capitals in the original) so much as energy and competence in fighting the fight. From the outset of the Iraq war much of our difficulty has stemmed not so much from failures to find the right strategy, as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made.

This inability has come from things as personal as picking the wrong people for key positions, in the apparent belief that generals are interchangeable cogs in a counterinsurgency machine. It has come from an unwillingness or inability to grab the bureaucracy by the throat and make it act -- which is why, three years after the insurgency began, we still send soldiers out to risk roadside bomb attacks in overweight Humvees when there are half a dozen commercially available armored vehicles designed to minimize the effects of such blasts. It is why -- although the government has declared long before the ISG issued its report that training the Iraqis is Job One -- we still embed fewer than a dozen American advisers in an Iraqi battalion when the right number is three to five times that many.

We have not come up to the brink of failure because we did not know how important it is to employ young Iraqi men or to keep detained insurgents out of circulation or to prevent militia penetration of the security forces by vetting the commanders of those forces. We have known these things -- but we have not done these things.

The creation of the Iraq Study Group reflects the vain hope that well-meaning, senior, former public officials can find ideas that have not already occurred to people inside government; that those new ideas can redeem incompetent execution and insufficient resources; that salvation can come from a Washington establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since the 1960s; that a public commission can do the work of oversight that Congress has shirked for five years in the misguided belief that it would thus support an administration struggling to do its best in a difficult situation. This is no way to run a war, and most definitely, no way to win it.

Mr. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116545762987142981.html

Iraq Study Group Recommendations

I found this "laundry list" fascinating. One assumes that the recommendations are prioritized by the order in which they are presented. Even so, the combination of the general with the specific may run the risk of allowing the administration of claiming that it is responding to the recommendations by focusing on specifics without realling addressing the fundamentals. Time will tell.

December 6, 2006 11:32 a.m. EST

DOW JONES REPRINTS This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit: www.djreprints.com. • See a sample reprint in PDF format. • Order a reprint of this article now. Iraq Study Group's Recommendations December 6, 2006 11:32 a.m. The 79 specific recommendations from the Iraq Study Group: RECOMMENDATION 1: The United States, working with the Iraqi government, should launch the comprehensive New Diplomatic Offensive to deal with the problems of Iraq and of the region. This new diplomatic offensive should be launched before December 31, 2006. RECOMMENDATION 2: The goals of the diplomatic offensive as it relates to regional players should be to: i. Support the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq. ii. Stop destabilizing interventions and actions by Iraq's neighbors. iii. Secure Iraq's borders, including the use of joint patrols with neighboring countries. iv. Prevent the expansion of the instability and conflict beyond Iraq's borders. v. Promote economic assistance, commerce, trade, political support, and, if possible, military assistance for the Iraqi government from non-neighboring Muslim nations. vi. Energize countries to support national political reconciliation in Iraq. vii. Validate Iraq's legitimacy by resuming diplomatic relations, where appropriate, and reestablishing embassies in Baghdad. viii. Assist Iraq in establishing active working embassies in key capitals in the region (for example, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia). ix. Help Iraq reach a mutually acceptable agreement on Kirkuk. x. Assist the Iraqi government in achieving certain security, political, and economic milestones, including better performance on issues such as national reconciliation, equitable distribution of oil revenues, and the dismantling of militias. RECOMMENDATION 3: As a complement to the diplomatic offensive, and in addition to the Support Group discussed below, the United States and the Iraqi government should support the holding of a conference or meeting in Baghdad of the Organization of the Islamic Conference or the Arab League both to assist the Iraqi government in promoting national reconciliation in Iraq and to reestablish their diplomatic presence in Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 4: As an instrument of the New Diplomatic Offensive, an Iraq International Support Group should be organized immediately following the launch of the New Diplomatic Offensive. RECOMMENDATION 5: The Support Group should consist of Iraq and all the states bordering Iraq, including Iran and Syria; the key regional states, including Egypt and the Gulf States; the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council; the European Union; and, of course, Iraq itself. Other countries—for instance, Germany, Japan and South Korea—that might be willing to contribute to resolving political, diplomatic, and security problems affecting Iraq could also become members. RECOMMENDATION 6: The New Diplomatic Offensive and the work of the Support Group should be carried out with urgency, and should be conducted by and organized at the level of foreign minister or above. The Secretary of State, if not the President, should lead the U.S. effort. That effort should be both bilateral and multilateral, as circumstances require. RECOMMENDATION 7: The Support Group should call on the participation of the office of the United Nations Secretary- General in its work. The United Nations Secretary-General should designate a Special Envoy as his representative. RECOMMENDATION 8: The Support Group, as part of the New Diplomatic Offensive, should develop specific approaches to neighboring countries that take into account the interests, perspectives, and potential contributions as suggested above. RECOMMENDATION 9: Under the aegis of the New Diplomatic Offensive and the Support Group, the United States should engage directly with Iran and Syria in order to try to obtain their commitment to constructive policies toward Iraq and other regional issues. In engaging Syria and Iran, the United States should consider incentives, as well as disincentives, in seeking constructive results. RECOMMENDATION 10: The issue of Iran's nuclear programs should continue to be dealt with by the United Nations Security Council and its five permanent members (i.e., the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) plus Germany. RECOMMENDATION 11: Diplomatic efforts within the Support Group should seek to persuade Iran that it should take specific steps to improve the situation in Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 12: The United States and the Support Group should encourage and persuade Syria of the merit of such contributions as the following: • Syria can control its border with Iraq to the maximum extent possible and work together with Iraqis on joint patrols on the border. Doing so will help stem the flow of funding, insurgents, and terrorists in and out of Iraq. • Syria can establish hotlines to exchange information with the Iraqis. • Syria can increase its political and economic cooperation with Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 13: There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon and Syria, and President Bush's June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. RECOMMENDATION 14: This effort should include—as soon as possible—the unconditional calling and holding of meetings, under the auspices of the United States or the Quartet (i.e., the United States, Russia, European Union, and the United Nations), between Israel and Lebanon and Syria on the one hand, and Israel and Palestinians (who acknowledge Israel's right to exist) on the other. The purpose of these meetings would be to negotiate peace as was done at the Madrid Conference in 1991, and on two separate tracks— one Syrian/Lebanese, and the other Palestinian. RECOMMENDATION 15: Concerning Syria, some elements of that negotiated peace should be: • Syria's full adherence to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006, which provides the framework for Lebanon to regain sovereign control over its territory. • Syria's full cooperation with all investigations into political assassinations in Lebanon, especially those of Rafik Hariri and Pierre Gemayel. • A verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah and the use of Syrian territory for transshipment of Iranian weapons and aid to Hezbollah. (This step would do much to solve Israel's problem with Hezbollah.) • Syria's use of its influence with Hamas and Hezbollah for the release of the captured Israeli Defense Force soldiers. • A verifiable cessation of Syrian efforts to undermine the democratically elected government of Lebanon. • A verifiable cessation of arms shipments from or transiting through Syria for Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups. • A Syrian commitment to help obtain from Hamas an acknowledgment of Israel's right to exist. Greater Syrian efforts to seal its border with Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 16: In exchange for these actions and in the context of a full and secure peace agreement, the Israelis should return the Golan Heights, with a U.S. security guarantee for Israel that could include an international force on the border, including U.S. troops if requested by both parties. RECOMMENDATION 17: Concerning the Palestinian issue, elements of that negotiated peace should include: • Adherence to UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and to the principle of land for peace, which are the only bases for achieving peace. • Strong support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to take the lead in preparing the way for negotiations with Israel. • A major effort to move from the current hostilities by consolidating the cease-fire reached between the Palestinians and the Israelis in November 2006. • Support for a Palestinian national unity government. • Sustainable negotiations leading to a final peace settlement along the lines of President Bush's two-state solution, which would address the key final status issues of borders, settlements, Jerusalem, the right of return, and the end of conflict. RECOMMENDATION 18: It is critical for the United States to provide additional political, economic, and military support for Afghanistan, including resources that might become available as combat forces are moved from Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 19: The President and the leadership of his national security team should remain in close and frequent contact with the Iraqi leadership. These contacts must convey a clear message: there must be action by the Iraqi government to make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones. In public diplomacy, the President should convey as much detail as possible about the substance of these exchanges in order to keep the American people, the Iraqi people, and the countries in the region well informed. RECOMMENDATION 20: If the Iraqi government demonstrates political will and makes substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should make clear its willingness to continue training, assistance, and support for Iraq's security forces, and to continue political, military, and economic support for the Iraqi government. As Iraq becomes more capable of governing, defending, and sustaining itself, the U.S. military and civilian presence in Iraq can be reduced. RECOMMENDATION 21: If the Iraqi government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government. RECOMMENDATION 22: The President should state that the United States does not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. If the Iraqi government were to request a temporary base or bases, then the U.S. government could consider that request as it would in the case of any other government. RECOMMENDATION 23: The President should restate that the United States does not seek to control Iraq's oil. RECOMMENDATION 24: The contemplated completion dates of the end of 2006 or early 2007 for some milestones may not be realistic. These should be completed by the first quarter of 2007. RECOMMENDATION 25: These milestones are a good start. The United States should consult closely with the Iraqi government and develop additional milestones in three areas: national reconciliation, security, and improving government services affecting the daily lives of Iraqis. As with the current milestones, these additional milestones should be tied to calendar dates to the fullest extent possible. RECOMMENDATION 26: Constitution review. Review of the constitution is essential to national reconciliation and should be pursued on an urgent basis. The United Nations has expertise in this field, and should play a role in this process. RECOMMENDATION 27: De-Baathification. Political reconciliation requires the reintegration of Baathists and Arab nationalists into national life, with the leading figures of Saddam Hussein's regime excluded. The United States should encourage the return of qualified Iraqi professionals—Sunni or Shia, nationalist or ex-Baathist, Kurd or Turkmen or Christian or Arab—into the government. RECOMMENDATION 28: Oil revenue sharing. Oil revenues should accrue to the central government and be shared on the basis of population. No formula that gives control over revenues from future fields to the regions or gives control of oil fields to the regions is compatible with national reconciliation. RECOMMENDATION 29: Provincial elections. Provincial elections should be held at the earliest possible date. Under the constitution, new provincial elections should have been held already. They are necessary to restore representative government. RECOMMENDATION 30: Kirkuk. Given the very dangerous situation in Kirkuk, international arbitration is necessary to avert communal violence. Kirkuk's mix of Kurdish, Arab, and Turkmen populations could make it a powder keg. A referendum on the future of Kirkuk (as required by the Iraqi Constitution before the end of 2007) would be explosive and should be delayed. This issue should be placed on the agenda of the International Iraq Support Group as part of the New Diplomatic Offensive. RECOMMENDATION 31: Amnesty. Amnesty proposals must be far-reaching. Any successful effort at national reconciliation must involve those in the government finding ways and means to reconcile with former bitter enemies. RECOMMENDATION 32: Minorities. The rights of women and the rights of all minority communities in Iraq, including Turkmen, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Yazidis, Sabeans, and Armenians, must be protected. RECOMMENDATION 33: Civil society. The Iraqi government should stop using the process of registering nongovernmental organizations as a tool for politicizing or stopping their activities. Registration should be solely an administrative act, not an occasion for government censorship and interference. RECOMMENDATION 34: The question of the future U.S. force presence must be on the table for discussion as the national reconciliation dialogue takes place. Its inclusion will increase the likelihood of participation by insurgents and militia leaders, and thereby increase the possibilities for success. RECOMMENDATION 35: The United States must make active efforts to engage all parties in Iraq, with the exception of al Qaeda. The United States must find a way to talk to Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Moqtada al-Sadr, and militia and insurgent leaders. RECOMMENDATION 36: The United States should encourage dialogue between sectarian communities, as outlined in the New Diplomatic Offensive above. It should press religious leaders inside and outside Iraq to speak out on behalf of peace and reconciliation. RECOMMENDATION 37: Iraqi amnesty proposals must not be undercut in Washington by either the executive or the legislative branch. RECOMMENDATION 38: The United States should support the presence of neutral international experts as advisors to the Iraqi government on the processes of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. RECOMMENDATION 39: The United States should provide financial and technical support and establish a single office in Iraq to coordinate assistance to the Iraqi government and its expert advisors to aid a program to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate militia members. RECOMMENDATION 40: The United States should not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 41: The United States must make it clear to the Iraqi government that the United States could carry out its plans, including planned redeployments, even if Iraq does not implement its planned changes. America's other security needs and the future of our military cannot be made hostage to the actions or inactions of the Iraqi government. RECOMMENDATION 42: We should seek to complete the training and equipping mission by the first quarter of 2008, as stated by General George Casey on October 24, 2006. RECOMMENDATION 43: Military priorities in Iraq must change, with the highest priority given to the training, equipping, advising, and support mission and to counterterrorism operations. RECOMMENDATION 44: The most highly qualified U.S. officers and military personnel should be assigned to the imbedded teams, and American teams should be present with Iraqi units down to the company level. The U.S. military should establish suitable career-enhancing incentives for these officers and personnel. RECOMMENDATION 45: The United States should support more and better equipment for the Iraqi Army by encouraging the Iraqi government to accelerate its Foreign Military Sales requests and, as American combat brigades move out of Iraq, by leaving behind some American equipment for Iraqi forces. RECOMMENDATION 46: The new Secretary of Defense should make every effort to build healthy civil-military relations, by creating an environment in which the senior military feel free to offer independent advice not only to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon but also to the President and the National Security Council, as envisioned in the Goldwater- Nichols legislation. RECOMMENDATION 47: As redeployment proceeds, the Pentagon leadership should emphasize training and education programs for the forces that have returned to the continental United States in order to "reset" the force and restore the U.S. military to a high level of readiness for global contingencies. RECOMMENDATION 48: As equipment returns to the United States, Congress should appropriate sufficient funds to restore the equipment to full functionality over the next five years. RECOMMENDATION 49: The administration, in full consultation with the relevant committees of Congress, should assess the full future budgetary impact of the war in Iraq and its potential impact on the future readiness of the force, the ability to recruit and retain high-quality personnel, needed investments in procurement and in research and development, and the budgets of other U.S. government agencies involved in the stability and reconstruction effort. RECOMMENDATION 50: The entire Iraqi National Police should be transferred to the Ministry of Defense, where the police commando units will become part of the new Iraqi Army. RECOMMENDATION 51: The entire Iraqi Border Police should be transferred to the Ministry of Defense, which would have total responsibility for border control and external security. RECOMMENDATION 52: The Iraqi Police Service should be given greater responsibility to conduct criminal investigations and should expand its cooperation with other elements in the Iraqi judicial system in order to better control crime and protect Iraqi civilians. RECOMMENDATION 53: The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior should undergo a process of organizational transformation, including efforts to expand the capability and reach of the current major crime unit (or Criminal Investigation Division) and to exert more authority over local police forces. The sole authority to pay police salaries and disburse financial support to local police should be transferred to the Ministry of the Interior. RECOMMENDATION 54: The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior should proceed with current efforts to identify, register, and control the Facilities Protection Service. RECOMMENDATION 55: The U.S. Department of Defense should continue its mission to train the Iraqi National Police and the Iraqi Border Police, which should be placed within the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. RECOMMENDATION 56: The U.S. Department of Justice should direct the training mission of the police forces remaining under the Ministry of the Interior. RECOMMENDATION 57: Just as U.S. military training teams are imbedded within Iraqi Army units, the current practice of imbedding U.S. police trainers should be expanded and the numbers of civilian training officers increased so that teams can cover all levels of the Iraqi Police Service, including local police stations. These trainers should be obtained from among experienced civilian police executives and supervisors from around the world. These officers would replace the military police personnel currently assigned to training teams. RECOMMENDATION 58: The FBI should expand its investigative and forensic training and facilities within Iraq, to include coverage of terrorism as well as criminal activity. RECOMMENDATION 59: The Iraqi government should provide funds to expand and upgrade communications equipment and motor vehicles for the Iraqi Police Service. RECOMMENDATION 60: The U.S. Department of Justice should lead the work of organizational transformation in the Ministry of the Interior. This approach must involve Iraqi officials, starting at senior levels and moving down, to create a strategic plan and work out standard administrative procedures, codes of conduct, and operational measures that Iraqis will accept and use. These plans must be drawn up in partnership. RECOMMENDATION 61: Programs led by the U.S. Department of Justice to establish courts; to train judges, prosecutors, and investigators; and to create institutions and practices to fight corruption must be strongly supported and funded. New and refurbished courthouses with improved physical security, secure housing for judges and judicial staff, witness protection facilities, and a new Iraqi Marshals Service are essential parts of a secure and functioning system of justice. RECOMMENDATION 62: • As soon as possible, the U.S. government should provide technical assistance to the Iraqi government to prepare a draft oil law that defines the rights of regional and local governments and creates a fiscal and legal framework for investment. Legal clarity is essential to attract investment. • The U.S. government should encourage the Iraqi government to accelerate contracting for the comprehensive well work-overs in the southern fields needed to increase production, but the United States should no longer fund such infrastructure projects. • The U.S. military should work with the Iraqi military and with private security forces to protect oil infrastructure and contractors. Protective measures could include a program to improve pipeline security by paying local tribes solely on the basis of throughput (rather than fixed amounts). • Metering should be implemented at both ends of the supply line. This step would immediately improve accountability in the oil sector. • In conjunction with the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. government should press Iraq to continue reducing subsidies in the energy sector, instead of providing grant assistance. Until Iraqis pay market prices for oil products, drastic fuel shortages will remain. RECOMMENDATION 63: • The United States should encourage investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies. • The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise, in order to enhance efficiency, transparency, and accountability. • To combat corruption, the U.S. government should urge the Iraqi government to post all oil contracts, volumes, and prices on the Web so that Iraqis and outside observers can track exports and export revenues. • The United States should support the World Bank's efforts to ensure that best practices are used in contracting. This support involves providing Iraqi officials with contracting templates and training them in contracting, auditing, and reviewing audits. • The United States should provide technical assistance to the Ministry of Oil for enhancing maintenance, improving the payments process, managing cash flows, contracting and auditing, and updating professional training programs for management and technical personnel. RECOMMENDATION 64: U.S. economic assistance should be increased to a level of $5 billion per year rather than being permitted to decline. The President needs to ask for the necessary resources and must work hard to win the support of Congress. Capacity building and job creation, including reliance on the Commander's Emergency Response Program, should be U.S. priorities. Economic assistance should be provided on a nonsectarian basis. RECOMMENDATION 65: An essential part of reconstruction efforts in Iraq should be greater involvement by and with international partners, who should do more than just contribute money. They should also actively participate in the design and construction of projects. RECOMMENDATION 66: The United States should take the lead in funding assistance requests from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and other humanitarian agencies. RECOMMENDATION 67: The President should create a Senior Advisor for Economic Reconstruction in Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 68: The Chief of Mission in Iraq should have the authority to spend significant funds through a program structured along the lines of the Commander's Emergency Response Program, and should have the authority to rescind funding from programs and projects in which the government of Iraq is not demonstrating effective partnership. RECOMMENDATION 69: The authority of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction should be renewed for the duration of assistance programs in Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 70: A more flexible security assistance program for Iraq, breaking down the barriers to effective interagency cooperation, should be authorized and implemented. RECOMMENDATION 71: Authority to merge U.S. funds with those from international donors and Iraqi participants on behalf of assistance projects should be provided. RECOMMENDATION 72: Costs for the war in Iraq should be included in the President's annual budget request, starting in FY 2008: the war is in its fourth year, and the normal budget process should not be circumvented. Funding requests for the war in Iraq should be presented clearly to Congress and the American people. Congress must carry out its constitutional responsibility to review budget requests for the war in Iraq carefully and to conduct oversight. RECOMMENDATION 73: The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence should accord the highest possible priority to professional language proficiency and cultural training, in general and specifically for U.S. officers and personnel about to be assigned to Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 74: In the short term, if not enough civilians volunteer to fill key positions in Iraq, civilian agencies must fill those positions with directed assignments. Steps should be taken to mitigate familial or financial hardships posed by directed assignments, including tax exclusions similar to those authorized for U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 75: For the longer term, the United States government needs to improve how its constituent agencies—Defense, State, Agency for International Development, Treasury, Justice, the intelligence community, and others— respond to a complex stability operation like that represented by this decade's Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the previous decade's operations in the Balkans. They need to train for, and conduct, joint operations across agency boundaries, following the Goldwater-Nichols model that has proved so successful in the U.S. armed services. RECOMMENDATION 76: The State Department should train personnel to carry out civilian tasks associated with a complex stability operation outside of the traditional embassy setting. It should establish a Foreign Service Reserve Corps with personnel and expertise to provide surge capacity for such an operation. Other key civilian agencies, including Treasury, Justice, and Agriculture, need to create similar technical assistance capabilities. RECOMMENDATION 77: The Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense should devote significantly greater analytic resources to the task of understanding the threats and sources of violence in Iraq. RECOMMENDATION 78: The Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense should also institute immediate changes in the collection of data about violence and the sources of violence in Iraq to provide a more accurate picture of events on the ground. RECOMMENDATION 79: The CIA should provide additional personnel in Iraq to develop and train an effective intelligence service and to build a counterterrorism intelligence center that will facilitate intelligence-led counterterrorism efforts. URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116542162866142360.html

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