Hearing A Faint Iraq Strategy

Robert Dreyfuss

September 16, 2005

Robert 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. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.

A glimmer of hope emerged yesterday on Capitol Hill that at least some lawmakers are thinking about how to end the war in Iraq. More than two dozen members of Congress—including one Republican, Walter Jones of North Carolina (representing Camp Lejeune)—took part in an extraordinary hearing organized by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D.-Calif., on ending the war, with testimony from a panel of experts that included former Sen. Max Cleland. "I have concluded that the best way to support the troops is with an exit strategy from Iraq," said Cleland, a gravely wounded veteran of the Vietnam conflict. "We need an exit strategy we choose or it will certainly be chosen for us." He added: "The key word in 'exit strategy' is not 'exit,' but 'strategy.'"

The hearing was held in a tiny corner room in a House office building, with barely enough room for members of Congress and half a dozen panelists to sit crammed in cheek by jowl, because Republicans wouldn't cede any meeting space for Woolsey's event. Still, the fact that so many Democrats showed up shows that, despite the GOP's fealty to the White House, the search for answers on the quagmire in Iraq is more and more getting the attention of members of Congress.

Perhaps the most interesting comment during the hearing came not from a panelist but from Rep. Jim McDermott, D.-Wash., who reported on discussions he had during a recent trip to Amman, Jordan, with some of the leading Iraqi exiles who've gathered in that Arab capital. McDermott said that he met with a former Iraqi minister of oil, a former ambassador to the United Nations, the Iraqi official who was supposed to have gone to Niger in search of the (phantom) uranium contract and others.

To a man, he said, they are convinced that the United States supports the partition of Iraq into three statelets in order to eliminate Iraq as an Arab country, and they believe that Iran (Persian-speaking and Shi'ite) will be the big winner over a shattered Iraq. Not surprisingly, these are the same beliefs reportedly held by much of the Iraqi resistance, at least by its military-Baathist majority wing which, as McDermott pointed out, was vastly strengthened when the U.S. occupiers dissolved the Iraqi armed forces and the Baath Party. McDermott raised the possibility of a summit conference in Amman to hammer out a negotiated solution to the conflict. And he proposed that a non-American political figure—perhaps former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan—could lead it.

David Mack, one of Woolsey's panelists and a former State Department official who twice served in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad during his long career, endorsed the idea. "There's a lot to be said for involving Jordan in this process," said Mack, who told me earlier that Jordan's King Abdullah might be searching for a plan that he could present to President Bush along similar lines.

What McDermott, Mack and others were circling around is the idea that the United States might open talks directly with the resistance groups in Iraq, though strangely no one raised the issue of U.S.-insurgent negotiations explicitly. It was a puzzling omission during the hearing, since every panelist stressed the importance of bringing Iraq's Sunni minority into the political process. (Such an idea, though paid lip service by some in the Bush administration, has not been carried out in practice by the White House or its rollicking Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in Baghdad, who has been content to praise the anti-Sunni constitution cobbled together by a totalitarian Shiite-Kurdish majority.)

Since the spring, various low-level Bush administration officials have been conducting sub rosa talks with the resistance, in the CIA, the military, and the State Department. In addition, several Iraqi political figures—including Aiham Al Sammarae, a former Iraqi minister, and the Iraqi monarchists allied to Jordan and Prince Hassan—have started a dialogue with as many as 11 resistance groups. So far, the Bush administration has shown no high-level interest in engaging in such talks.

Unfortunately, many of the panelists—and most of the members of Congress—endorsed, in one form or another, the idea that the United States can train and equip Iraqi forces to maintain security so that we can get out. No one seemed to understand that the United States is not in fact training an Iraqi army but a gaggle of mostly Shiite and Kurdish militiamen who want nothing more than to lord it over defeated Sunnis in towns like Tikrit, Baquba, Ramadi, Fallujah and Tall Afar. It was left to Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East expert at the Congressional Research Service, to point out that such a force cannot be sent to patrol Sunni cities and that a major priority is to bring Sunnis into the Iraqi security forces. Naturally, that is nearly impossible as long as the vast majority of Sunnis bitterly oppose the ersatz regime that Washington is propping up in Baghdad.

Another important point agreed upon by the panelists at Woolsey's hearing was that there is an urgent need for a credible international negotiator to take over the pursuit of peace talks in Iraq. Mentioned in testimony were people like Jimmy Carter, George Mitchell and former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi. It's clear to all that the United States needs to internationalize the solution in Iraq, and Sen. Cleland put it bluntly: "You need the international community to cover your rear end as you get out."

Overall, the members of Congress expressed limitless frustration with the obstructionism of the Republicans against any effort to examine Iraq policy, with the ineptness of U.S. efforts in Iraq, and with the inability of Congress to take on the executive branch. This administration, said an exasperated Rep. Maurice Hinchey, is "so bumbling, so stupid, so incompetent, so corrupt." Gen. Joseph Hoar, a retired Marine Corps officer who led the Central Command, called the war in Iraq "the wrong war, at the wrong time, waged with extraordinary incompetence by the civilian leadership." Sounds like Vietnam, doesn't it? And, as Max Cleland pointed out: "I've seen that movie before. I know how it ends."