U.S. options in Iraq worsen as unrest grows
By Steven Komarow, USA TODAY
Iraq's intensified religious battles could undermine the Bush administration plan for cutting the number of U.S. troops there, experts say, especially if negotiations in Baghdad fail to produce a national unity government.
Police frisk people in Baghdad during a curfew imposed as part of emergency measures.
By Khalid Mohammed, AP
"This throws a monkey wrench in the administration's strategy of standing down (U.S. troops) as the Iraqis stand up, because it suggests that many Iraqis are standing up to fight other Iraqis," says James Phillips, a defense scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The bombing of a major Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra on Wednesday triggered a wave of sectarian violence. Shiite militias attacked and occupied Sunni mosques, and Sunnis fought back.
The intense new fighting came while politicians were still struggling to form a government more than two months after Iraq's Dec. 15 elections. Negotiations continued through the weekend, but there was no sign of agreement on a government acceptable to Shiites, Sunnis and other groups — a government the Bush administration hopes will help end the violence. Meanwhile, U.S. troops faced a series of bad options as they struggled not to get caught in the middle or be seen as taking sides.
"It's time for the administration to do a fundamental reassessment of what it is that we are willing to do in order to stabilize Iraq," says Loren Thompson, a military expert at the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Virginia that focuses on defense issues. "The United States needs to draw a line in terms of how deep it is willing to be drawn into Iraqi domestic politics."
U.S. commanders in Iraq say Iraqi government forces have performed well in responding to the outbreak of revenge bombings and gunfights. "We've deferred to the Iraqi government and the Iraqi security force, and they have the lead," says Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. He says U.S. forces are ready to respond "if they say, 'Hey, we need some help securing this shrine' ... but we haven't got those requests."
If fighting escalates, the United States could risk being seen as taking sides if it backs the Iraqi military, which is Shiite-dominated.
The options are all difficult:
•More force. The U.S.-led coalition could in theory respond with a peacekeeping force big enough to shut down rival militias and impose order throughout the country. Some war supporters such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have long argued that more U.S. troops would help stabilize the nation. But that could require a substantial increase in the current U.S. troop strength of about 138,000, a move that has been consistently rejected by the Bush administration.
•Withdrawal. At the other end of the spectrum would be to quickly withdraw U.S. troops. That option could make Iraq dangerously unstable, Phillips says. The past week is evidence that "the U.S. presence is one of the chief barriers to starting a civil war," he says.
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., says there's no denying that Iraq is already in a state of civil war, only masked by the U.S. military operations. He renewed his call for the administration to set a timetable for withdrawing the troops. That, he says, would force the Iraqis to come to terms with one another.
"Our troops are caught in between," Murtha says. "The only alternative ... is to redeploy."
•Diplomacy and peacemaking. Bush, in a speech Friday, said the surge of violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims presents Iraqis with a "moment of choosing" between unity and civil war. On Saturday, he telephoned leaders of Iraq's major political factions, urging them to choose the former.
Bush "encouraged them to continue to work together to thwart the efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord among Iraq's communities," says Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council.
Thompson says that U.S. influence in Iraq is limited when it comes to policing sectarian violence. Intentions are good, but "if we're ever going to get out of the country, we have to draw a line" and stand back, he says. "This is not a situation we want to be in."
•Stay, but stay out. Retired Army colonel Patrick Lang, former Middle East chief for the Defense Intelligence Agency, says he believes Iraq already is in a state of civil war. "We don't have any options," he says. "For us to involve ourselves in the middle of this will risk one side or the other (identifying) us with the other side."
Lang notes that after the bombing of the shrine Wednesday, the Iraqi Interior Ministry and some Shiite leaders blamed the United States for the tragedy, because it was pressuring the Shiites to control their militias. Later, Sunni leaders complained that U.S. troops weren't doing enough to protect them from revenge attacks.
"We would be well advised ... to stay out of this" and encourage everyone to calm down, which is indeed the response so far, he says. The troops should "stay in their garrisons (when possible) and ... don't become involuntarily involved in something."
Phillips says a true civil war in Iraq would be many times more bloody than the few hundred deaths recorded since Wednesday. It also would be very hard to stop, compared with other civil wars, because the country in many areas isn't neatly divided between sects and ethnic groups.
In the current tensions, "U.S. forces must walk a tightrope," Phillips says. "They must restrain the violence while letting the Iraqi government forces take the lead, yet on the other hand they don't want to clash with any of the (legitimate) factions."
However, the violence encourages the growth of the very militias the United States is trying to discourage. And it will be harder to pull out U.S. troops if there's a suspicion that the sects and their militias, rather than a neutral national army, will hold sway. "The U.S. wants to turn responsibility over to truly national forces, not subnational sectarian militias," Phillips says.
Ken Allard, a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer recently back from Iraq, says the building of democracy has "actually been going pretty well," but it's up against the longstanding ethnic, religious and "even tribal cleavages which rend that society."
The Samarra bombing was a setback, and its aftermath is "the essential gut-check" for the political process in Iraq, he says.
usatoday.com |
