Outside the Beltway

Arbitrary Deadlines

James Joyner · Wednesday, April 7, 2004 · 2 comments

George Will makes a pretty strong case that turning control of Iraq over to, well, whoever it is we’re turning it over to, on June 30 is unwise.

Now Americans must steel themselves for administering the violence necessary to disarm or defeat Iraq’s urban militias, which replicate the problem of modern terrorism – violence that has slipped the leash of states.

For the near term, U.S. policy must flow from Napoleon’s axiom: “If you start to take Vienna – take Vienna.” We started to take Iraq 13 months ago. That mission is far from accomplished.

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Not much else having gone as planned since the fall of Baghdad, a delay in the transfer of sovereignty, scheduled for June 30, should not be unthinkable. A delay would trigger violence. But, then, the transfer on schedule probably would be preceded by an offensive by the insurgents.

The transfer is to be from the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose authority does not extend throughout the country. A U.S. official in Baghdad says Sadr will be arrested if he appears “any place that we control.”

The transfer is to be to an institutional apparatus that is still unformed. This is approaching at a moment when U.S. forces in Iraq, never adequate for postwar responsibilities, are fewer than they were.

U.S. forces in Iraq are insufficient for that mission; unless the civil war is quickly contained, no practicable U.S. deployment will suffice. U.S. forces worldwide cannot continue to cope with Iraq as it is, plus their other duties – peacekeeping, deterrence, training – without stresses that will manifest themselves in severe retention problems in the reserves and regular forces.

Since 9/11, Americans have been told that they are at war. They have not been told what sacrifices, material and emotional, they must make to sustain multiple regime changes and nation-building projects. Telling such truths is part of the job description of a war president.

While the evidence for the “severe retention problems” surprisingly points in the other direction, the point is well taken.

Robert Robb makes the countervailing case.

Were it not for the U.S. occupation, the two rebellious groups might very well be killing each other rather than Americans.

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Simply put, too many Iraqis still see this as a U.S. fight rather than their own.

You often hear, even from initial opponents of the war, that the United States cannot now “fail” in Iraq. But that’s not an attitude necessarily conducive to our long-term national interest.

There can be different opinions about the extent to which Saddam Hussein constituted a threat to the United States. But whatever the level of the threat, it is now gone.

Moreover, whatever emerges in the wake of Saddam is highly unlikely to poise anywhere near the threat that he did.

This is a classic Realist argument and one I might have been sympathetic to under different circumstances. Indeed, had our stated objective merely been regime change with no talk of creating a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, this may well have been the course to take–a relatively quick strike to take out the enemy and then move on to objectives elsewhere in the war on terrorists. That wasn’t the case, however, and leaving the place in chaos would be a collosal failure. It would also send a signal that democratization in the Middle East, something clearly in our interest–to say nothing of the interest of the citizenry–is unachievable.