January 30, 2007

Things Fall Apart

Dinmore:

Iraq is rapidly sliding into an all-out civil war that is likely to spill over into neighbouring countries, resulting in mass deaths and refugee flows, serious disruption of Gulf oil supplies and a drastic decline in US influence in the region.

This grim forecast is set out in Things Fall Apart (pdf.), a 130-page report released today by the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, which also recommends how the US might contain the disastrous consequences of "spillover".

The Washington think-tank distils what it says are the lessons learned from other civil wars, laying out the case histories of Afghanistan, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yugoslavia.

Kenneth Pollack, a former Clinton administration official and CIA analyst who co-authored the report with Daniel Byman, told the Financial Times they were looking for a "Goldilocks solution" - somewhere between "stay the course" and "getting all out".

"It was arrogance in the face of history that led us to blithely assume we could invade without preparing for an occupation, and we would do well to show greater humility when assimilating its lessons about what we fear will be the next step in Iraq's tragic history," the report says.

Brookings identifies six patterns from other civil wars that are already manifesting themselves in Iraq: large refugee flows, the breeding ground of new terrorist groups, radicalisation of neighbouring populations, the spread of secessionism, regional economic losses, and intervention by neighbours. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and Turkey are said to be "scrambling to catch up" with rival Iran.

Among the report's recommendations are "don't try to pick winners", as proxies often fail or turn against their masters; avoid active support for partition; "don't dump the problem on the United Nations"; pull back from Iraqi population centres despite the horrific consequences; bolster regional stability by revitalising the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; set up an international contact group including Syria and Iran; and consider setting up "safe havens" for refugees along Iraq's borders.

Brookings estimates that 50,000 to 150,000 Iraqis have died already since the US invasion in 2003 and cites United Nations figures of 1m Iraqis who have subsequently fled their country.

Mr Pollack, who previously was an outspoken proponent of the invasion, says the lessons of past full-blown civil wars reveal nearly all efforts by states to minimise or contain spillover have failed.

The report will be read with deep concern by the US administration, which is projecting an increasingly discordant picture of how it evaluates Iraq, even while speaking of the serious consequences of failure...

...Analysts outside Brookings say officials are working on "what next?" strategies in the event that the 21,500 troop reinforcements announced this month fail to halt the sectarian chaos.

Mr Bush has conceded that the US is not winning the war. In contrast, Dick Cheney, his vice-president, asserted last week that the US had achieved "enormous successes" in Iraq. Both reject assertions that Iraq is in a state of civil war.

Mr Cheney told Newsweek that by sending a second aircraft carrier group to the Gulf, the US demonstrated to its allies it would stay in the region and had the capabilities, working with international organisations, "to deal with the Iranian threat".

But Mr Pollack is concerned that the US is stoking a wider conflict and is "careening" into provoking a war with Iran. Even in his "best-case scenario" for Iraq, Mr Pollack fears hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I haven't had a chance to read the entire report yet, but I note (like the ISG) that Pollack comes out against Gelb-Biden:

Avoid active support for partition. . . for now. Eventually, after years of bloody civil war, Iraq may be ready for a stable partition. However, a major U.S. effort to enact secession or partition today would be likely to trigger even more massacres and ethnic cleansing. Other than the Kurds, few Iraqis want their country divided, nor do they want to leave their homes. While many are doing so out of necessity, and some are even moving pre-emptively, this is not diminishing the impetus towards warfare. For the most part it is doing the opposite: causing many of those fleeing their homes to join vicious sectarian militias like Muqtada as-Sadr’s Jaysh al- Mahdi (Army of the Mahdi) in hope of regaining their property or at least exacting revenge on whoever drove them out. Other than the Kurds, few of Iraq’s leaders favor partition, instead wanting to control as much (or all) of it as they can. Nor is it clear that a move to partition would result in a neat division of Iraq into three smaller states. As noted above, the Sunnis and the Shi’ah are badly fragmented among dozens of different militias of widely varying sizes, but none of them are large enough to quickly or easily unite their community. Thus far more likely than creating a new Sunni state and a new Shi’i state, Mesopotamian Iraq would splinter into chaotic warfare and warlordism. Partition would be practical only if there were a political agreement to do so that was then enforced by adequate numbers of foreign forces. This would likely require at least 450,000 troops, the same concentration as was needed to enforce the Dayton Accords in Bosnia. Moreover, the situation would be worse in the near term because the Iraqis will see the United States as imposing a highly unpopular partition on them, as opposed to Dayton where the key parties accepted the peace agreement. In short, trying to partition Iraq as a way of containing or ending a civil war is unlikely to succeed absent years of slaughter, a peace agreement among the parties, and a much greater American military commitment.

In the main body of the report (parts of which I've very rapidly skimmed) there is this related passage too:

Finally, the United States needs to keep in mind that any American actions in Iraq depend on the support of its neighbors. It is not just that the United States requires basing and logistical support from Turkey, Kuwait, Jordan, and even Saudi Arabia, but that any plan the United States tries to implement can be undermined by the active opposition of Iraq’s neighbors. None of Iraq’s neighbors support partition in any form. In late October 2006, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faysal announced that “Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited,” and he argued that partitioning Iraq would result in “ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.” Only a few days later, Turkish Foreign Minister declared that “There are those who think that dividing Iraq might be better, that this chaos might end. This is what we say: Don’t even think of such an alternative because that would lead Iraq toward new chaos.”

Frankly, I suspect the only neighbor that might welcome partition (albeit with various reservations) would perhaps be Iran, as large swaths of southern and central Iran would become unfettered Shi'a lebensraum. More on this and related topics soon.

Boy, I give a shit what Ken Pollack has to say about anything!

Posted by: Jim Henley at January 30, 2007 12:43 PM | Permalink to this comment

Boy, I give a shit what Ken Pollack has to say about anything!

geez, I was about to post the exact same sentiments....

Byman/Pollack is the ideological mirror image of Kagen/Keane --- a couple of bloviating idiots working under to imprimature of "respected" think tanks. But don't blame Greg for bringing their nonsense to our attention, because they are the people who define the parameters of acceptible (i.e. "serious") debate in the Beltway.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at January 30, 2007 01:44 PM | Permalink to this comment

Grim reading, indeed, although I agree with Jim above. One Pollacky moment occurs on p.32, right-hand column: "American and Iraqi sources report that there are several thousand Iranian agents of all kinds...". Declensions?

Secret (apparently not)
Double (triple, quadruple, etc.)
Free
Real Estate: (Lots of Sunny riverside property on the Tigris)
Insurance: (kidnap protection, IED alert service)
Press
Sales

More?

Posted by: Odradek at January 30, 2007 01:47 PM | Permalink to this comment

The report I am waiting for is the one that can tell us, with some confidence, what to expect from the Bush Administration for the next two years. Their probable actions and the likely consequences will determine what happens in the near term with Iraq. The President has already made it crystal clear for those with ears to hear that nothing short of impeachment will deflect his course one iota. Talk of fixes, solutions and re-evaluations is premature and probably futile at this stage. We are in a survival mode for the next 24 months and desperately need an accurate long-range weather report...

Posted by: jim in austin at January 30, 2007 02:03 PM | Permalink to this comment

I think Pollack is looking for synonyms for the words "gathering" and "storm" for his next book.... "The Increasing Maelstrom" or "The Accumulating Whirlwind" come to mind. Don't worry, they can pick out the country it refers to later.

Posted by: norbizness at January 30, 2007 02:04 PM | Permalink to this comment

To be a smidge less snarky than Pollack merits for just a moment, we find the fatal flaw here . . .

Kenneth Pollack, a former Clinton administration official and CIA analyst who co-authored the report with Daniel Byman, told the Financial Times they were looking for a "Goldilocks solution" - somewhere between "stay the course" and "getting all out".

In other words, start at the end and work backwards to the justification. A priori, any of "staying the course"; "getting all out" or "massively escalating" might be the most sensible response to actual existing circumstances in the region. But AECITR are only secondary considerations in Pollack's world. The primary consideration is positioning within the pecking order of semi-official Washington. The priority is to strike a pose. The subsidiary performance is to provide backstory for the pose.

Posted by: Jim Henley at January 30, 2007 02:58 PM | Permalink to this comment

I just read that the deliberately-delayed NIE is due out next week. Now THAT ought to make for fascinating reading....I've long since stopped listening to Pollack. Like Kristol/Kagan (both of them)/Keane and others, they were so deeply and utterly wrong that no amount of latter-day 'repenting' means anything.

Posted by: Diane at January 30, 2007 05:51 PM | Permalink to this comment

"Partition is no panacea, to say the least."

That may be true, but the real question is not whether the US military can or should impose a partition on Iraq - it's whether the US military can stop the Iraqis from imposing a partition on the country. Certainly it doesn't look like the Iraqi security forces give two whigs about stopping the violence or the neighborhood ethnic cleansing.

Posted by: J. at January 30, 2007 07:14 PM | Permalink to this comment

I have to give Pollack credit for his knowledge and understanding of the internal political dynamics of Iraq. He was wrong to expect a successful reconstruction, but he was spot-on in his description of what would happen when reconstruction failed:

' . . . a form of warlordism, whereby each of the power centers that emerged after Saddam's fall would move to consolidate its control over its home territory. Part of this effort would probably be the "cleansing" of other ethnic and religious groups from their territory and, in the Shi'ite south, large-scale reprisal killings against Sunnis . . . the Sunnis would no doubt attempt to reassert their prior dominance of the country and would be fiercely resisted by the Shi'ah and the Kurds.' (The Threatening Storm, pp. 390-391)

Are people so down on Pollack because they once found his arguments persuasive? I didn't in the strong sense of actually being persuaded by them. But surely he was the best, most convincing of the war's supporters. And, note that his arguments did not pretend that Iraq was part of the 'War on Terror'.

I think Pollack is looking for synonyms for the words "gathering" and "storm" for his next book . . .

I made the same error recently when I looked for the book at the library. I was surprised to find no entry for 'Gathering Storm', and had to do an author search to find the book.

Posted by: David Tomlin at January 30, 2007 10:50 PM | Permalink to this comment

Are people so down on Pollack because they once found his arguments persuasive?

Uh, no?

Posted by: Jim Henley at January 31, 2007 12:45 PM | Permalink to this comment