Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.
Smack in the midst of a knock-down, drag-out political brawl in Washington over Iraq, some important news is coming out of Baghdad. It’s too early to say what it means, and I’m skeptical. On the surface, at least, it looks like good news: The new Iraqi government and elements of the Iraqi resistance—including its armed wing—are talking about a deal.
This comes at a moment of high drama in Washington. Led by Karl Rove, the White House has launched an all-out political offensive to portray the war in Iraq as something akin to the Battle of Armageddon, a titanic good-versus-evil struggle on which the fate of the universe depends. With some trepidation, the Republicans in the House and Senate have nearly unanimously opted to sign on to Rove’s Holy War, and they’ve lined up at Capitol Hill podiums to declare their fealty to Bush’s stay-the-course strategy.
Meanwhile, the Democrats—trying, but utterly failing, to present themselves as unified—have splintered into at least three pieces.
The largest piece is the Hillary-led centrist bloc, which casts itself as critical of Bush but which refuses to commit to an alternative policy, and thus finds itself meekly echoing Bush’s refrain that the United States will leave Iraq if and only if the country is stabilized. A smaller Democratic bloc, but one that is closer to American public opinion, is the group around Senators John Kerry and Russ Feingold and Representative John Murtha, who want to get out as soon as possible and propose a definite timetable for a U.S. pullout. (According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, fully 66 percent of Democrats agree with the idea of setting a date, and the public as a whole is nearly split evenly, 47-51, in favor of a timetable.) And then there are the Liebermensheviks, the right-wing Democrats, Dixiecrats, and Blue Dogs—led by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and by the 42 House Democrats who supported the Republican war resolution two weeks ago—who’ve decided overtly to support Bush.
The Democrats went into high dudgeon over weekend, after The New York Times reported that the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General George W. Casey, privately told Pentagon officials and President Bush last week about a plan to start withdrawing troops from Iraq. According to the Times, Casey said that up to 7,000 U.S. combat troops might be pulled out of Iraq this fall, just weeks before the November congressional elections, and that far deeper cuts could occur in 2007. Having been lambasted by Rove and by Senate and House Republicans for advocating what the GOP attack machine described as a cowardly, cut-and-run mentality, the Democrats seized on Casey’s contingency plan for a drawdown of U.S. forces as a vindication of their own views. Despite the Democrats’ reaction, Casey’s plan for Iraq is decidedly different from the plan withdrawal-minded Democrats are proposing.
U.S. politics aside, is there a chance that Iraq’s U.S.-installed regime will cut a deal with the Iraqi resistance and end the war? Or will hardliners in the Bush administration torpedo what might be the last chance for peace in Iraq? For the past 18 months I’ve been writing in this space (“The Cairo Peace Process”), in The American Prospect (“Talk to the Enemy”) and elsewhere that one way to end the carnage in Iraq is for the United States to negotiate a deal with the Iraqi resistance to end the fighting. That deal would involve a ceasefire by the insurgents in exchange for a fair share of power in Iraq and a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal.
According to reports from Iraq over the past few days, a number of organizations that claim to be part of the insurgency have stepped forward to say that they’re willing to talk with the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki, the U.S.-installed prime minister. Several Iraqi officials have announced that “some armed groups [want] to sit at the negotiating table,” and one Iraqi official named seven organizations, all Sunni-led, who’ve engaged in on-again, off-again talks with Maliki, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and representatives of the U.S. military in Iraq since 2005. The signs of interest in negotiations from the insurgents is tied directly to Prime Minister Maliki’s widely touted “national reconciliation” plan, cooked up last week and presented to the Iraqi parliament on Sunday.
There are many reasons to take the news about government-insurgency talks in Iraq with a grain of salt, however.
First, it isn’t clear who makes up the seven organizations that have come forward. As usual, the resistance in Iraq is shadowy and hard to penetrate. The headline on the Associated Press dispatch, which first reported the alleged breakthrough, was: “Seven Lesser Iraq Insurgent Groups Seek Truce.” One Iraqi official, a spokesman for the prime minister, told reporters the names of six of the seven groups, which included the Army of Mohammed, the Heroes of Iraq, the 1920 Revolution Brigades and others. But the New York Times reported that the same official later recanted, “When asked later about those names, [the official] said he had never mentioned them.” Meanwhile, the London Sunday Times reported that 11 other Iraqi resistance groups announced that they had rejected Maliki’s reconciliation plan and would keep fighting “because they did not recognize the legitimacy of the government.”
More worrying is the fact that Maliki was widely expected to have offered an amnesty to the resistance, an offer that disappeared when the plan was revealed on Sunday. Early news reports on Maliki’s plan were even more expansive, claiming that besides amnesty Maliki was planning to call for a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal. Over the weekend, Newsweek reported:
A timetable for withdrawal of occupation troops in Iraq. Amnesty for all insurgents who attacked U.S. and Iraqi military targets. Release of security detainees from U.S. and Iraqi prisons. … Those sound like demands of some of the insurgents themselves, and in fact they are. But they’re also key clauses of a national reconciliation plan drafted by the new Iraqi prime minister.
The magazine said it had “obtained a draft copy” of Maliki’s plan. But when the plan was revealed, it included neither a timetable nor an amnesty. The plan also didn’t include any incentive to Iraq’s Baathists. What happened? According to various reports, including the New York Times, the Maliki plan went through several drafts, and it was pummeled by both the Shiite religious hardliners and by the U.S. embassy. Maliki’s “decision appeared to have been influenced by religious Shiites who form his base and by the American military command,” added the Times.
The issue of a U.S. withdrawal is a deal-breaker for most of the resistance. What drives the resistance in Iraq is the occupation itself. According to resistance leaders I have spoken with, the insurgents are willing to declare a truce in order to allow U.S. forces to carry out an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, but they aren’t willing to make a deal that tolerates the continuation of the occupation. So, by excluding a timetable, Maliki makes it next to impossible for the main body of the resistance to sign a deal.
Equally worrying is that fact that the main proponents of the supposed deal between Maliki and the resistance is the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), a Sunni religious party linked to the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood that has joined every U.S.-assembled government in Iraq since 2003. The IIP is widely discredited and seen as part of the U.S.-installed puppet government by many Iraqis, and so its endorsement of a deal between Maliki and the resistance doesn’t carry much weight. As a result, there is a strong possibility that any Sunni leaders who accept Maliki’s malformed reconciliation plan will be similarly viewed by Sunnis as having caved in to the U.S. occupation. And that doesn’t bode well for hopes that the resistance will end.
Time will tell if the reported entente between Maliki’s government and the insurgents takes hold. In the meantime, General Casey’s leaked forecast for a series of drawdowns of U.S. forces ought not to be seen as the beginning of the end of the U.S. occupation. Far from it. What Casey is saying is that neither the U.S. Army nor the Marines can sustain an occupation of Iraq at the level of 127,000 troops for the indefinite future. Clearly, Casey’s suggestion that up to 7,000 U.S. troops could leave Iraq in September was purely political, designed to give the Republicans a boost in advance of the elections this fall. But the larger pullout, supposedly to involve as many as 50,000 to 70,000 more troops by late 2007, is designed to create a U.S. occupation force in the range of 50,000 to 75,000 soldiers and Marines that can stay in Iraq permanently. The Washington Post said so explicitlyin its reporting on Casey, noting that a force of 50,000 to 75,000 “could be maintained almost indefinitely by the Army and Marines.”
Rather than citing Casey as an ally, the Democrats have to decide: Are they willing to join with the Bush administration in a bipartisan consensus to leave a force of 50,000 to 75,000 U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely? Or will they insist on a complete U.S. withdrawal, and soon? Are they willing to insist that Maliki offer the resistance a timetable for a U.S. pullout and full amnesty, or will they stick with the administration’s apparent intransigence? Are they willing to take on Karl Rove?
