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Harlan Cleveland: Iraq ... What to Do Before Walking Away

[Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, a Princeton graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. In government he has been a high official of the Marshall Plan, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In academia he has served as dean of two graduate schools of public affairs (the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota) and as President of the University of Hawaii. He has authored 12 books and hundreds of articles in journals and magazines, mostly on executive leadership and international affairs.]

If the Baker-Hamilton Report was intended as a bombshell, it was one of the scatter-shot kind that spew shrapnel in all directions. Everyone who has commented seems to feel wounded by one or another piece of it, while praising the pieces that fly in other directions.

The military proposals focus on training the Iraqi army and police. Soon (by early in 2008, so as not to influence the US presidential election) we would withdraw U.S. combat troops not needed for protecting the trainers and chasing terrorists. This scenario is presented as one last effort. If the Iraqis don’t or can’t take control by then, the desired outcome isn’t clear. Presumably we could then walk away.


We haven’t trained anything like the number of trainers required for this scenario, so the one-year plan will come to look like a several-year commitment – and might look to the Iraqis like an indefinite extension of the occupation. Since we haven’t built a true coalition, it would continue to be essentially a U.S. occupation, which will degrade its acceptability in Iraq and reduce its political support in the U.S. to some fraction of zero.

The political scenario advanced in the report is a wager on a loose federal Iraq brought into being with the help of Iraq’s assorted and partisan neighbors. Who has the needed convening power? We’ve certainly lost ours. The UN is probably the only candidate; but most of the needed players will have little enthusiasm for bailing the U.S. out of its self-made trouble if the U.S. government is still trying to mastermind the enterprise – as it will while most of its usable military manpower is rotating in and out of Iraq.

Speaking of political scenarios, what’s strikingly absent from the national conversation so far is the secretary of state. Condoleezza Rice may have the best strategic mind of anyone now in office. But she seems unable to make her voice heard. Maybe that’s because if she says what she thinks it would seem disloyal to her President.

Inside Iraq, a complex bargain is required among Shi’a Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. The arrangement for sharing the benefits of oil production, announced a few days ago, is a sliver of light at the end of that tunnel. But the trickiest trick of all will be, while decentralizing most governance to the Kurdish, Shi’a, and Sunni regions, to endow the central government with enough power (a) to administer the areas like Baghdad where the mixture of ethnicities and faiths mandates pluralistic governance, and (b) to protect minorities in the three regions from being oppressed or pushed out elsewhere as refugees.

Meanwhile, the professional classes seem to be emigrating from Iraq in large numbers, which will make it even harder for Iraq to emerge as a healthily modernizing society....
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