Iraq: No Exit?

Robert Dreyfuss

September 15, 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.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., leads rump Democratic hearings today on the quagmire in Iraq and whether or not the United States can extricate itself. Testifying will be luminaries such as Gen. Joe Hoar, a former commander of the U.S. Central Command, which has responsibility for the region; David Mack, a retired U.S. ambassador with wide service in the Middle East and Iraq; ex-Senator Max Cleland; and others. Woolsey hopes that the hearings will help prompt the Bush administration to start thinking about how to get out of Iraq and to “discuss strategies to achieve military disengagement while still playing a constructive role in the rebuilding of Iraqi society.”

So far, surprisingly, very little concrete thinking has emerged from Washington, D.C., think tanks on anything related to getting out: not for a negotiated settlement of the war in Iraq, not for how to implement a unilateral withdrawal, not for how to set a date and get out—in other words, not for much. Calls to the august Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, and other establishment centers of what purports to be “realist” thinking reveal that lots of professional worry warts are blackly pessimistic about the future of Iraq, but literally no one at the main tanks—at least, that I can find—has put forward a credible strategy for ending the war.

And it isn’t because politicians aren’t getting antsy. They are. “We should start figuring out how we get out of there," Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said on ABC's This Week . "I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur." As I’ve reported in this space before, politicians on both sides of the aisle have expressed similar sentiments, and many others, behind the scenes, are in quiet agreement. But Congress isn’t a think tank, and we can’t look to that body to come up a detailed plan. Still, political pressure can develop in Congress: Woolsey’s hearings are a critical start, at least, to raising the issue to a higher profile on Capitol Hill, and Democrats and a few GOPers are expected at her hearings today.

So far, exit plans are coming from elsewhere, including TomPaine.com.

Tom Hayden, the longtime activist and former state senator in California, has been circulating a detailed plan, which he encapsulated for the Los Angeles Times last month. His plan has three basic steps: first, the United States should announce that it has no plans for U.S. bases in Iraq and announce a goal of rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Second, the United States should ask the United Nations to take the lead in overseeing disengagement and reconstruction. And third, President Bush should appoint a peace envoy for the region who could open peace talks with the groups in Iraq opposed to the U.S. occupation, including the resistance.

Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies, writing in Yes! magazine this week , provides a somewhat more detailed plan: end U.S. offensive operations, pass a congressional resolution affirming U.S. commitment to a withdrawal that clarifies that the United States has no interest in controlling Iraq oil nor stabling permanent bases, make reparations, hand over the reconstruction of Iraq to Iraqis, and start talks with the resistance to find a political-diplomatic solution to the violence.

An even more detailed roadmap is Gareth Porter's essay in the most recent issue of Middle East Policy . In “The Third Option in Iraq: A Responsible Exit Strategy,” Porter, a scholar and author, present a carefully reasoned argument for including the Sunnis in the political process, negotiating with the insurgents, beginning what he calls a “rolling mutual disengagement” in cities and provinces and halting the death spiral of decentralization. Earlier plans have been put forth by other organizations, including the Project on Defense Alternatives in Boston.

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who is a leader of the Democrats’ win-in-Iraq wing, may—just may—be starting to the light. In a Washington Post op-ed  Wednesday, Biden calls on Bush to “fundamentally change course inside Iraq.” The most important part of Biden’s piece—and something that might even be considered radical—is the fact that he says: “The Bush administration should support postponing the constitutional referendum until after elections.” So, Biden thinks that the whole constitution needs to be junked, to accommodate the Sunnis. It’s a small crack, admittedly, in the wall of Biden-Hillary-Lieberman-DLC support for victory in Iraq, but it’s a crack nonetheless. The awful constitution is a formula for civil war; junking it outright opens the door to talks with the Sunnis which, in the best of all possible worlds, could be expanded to include Iraqi insurgent groups, including Baathists.

Meanwhile, the bad news: At a forum Wednesday at the U.S. Institute for Peace, I asked a panel of Iraq-Iran experts about getting out of Iraq, and their response was as if I’d asked if they’d consider signing up for Al Qaeda. Not one on the panel thought that an exit from Iraq was a good idea. Ken Pollack, the former CIA officer whose book, The Gathering Storm , did more to convince Democrats and liberals to support Bush’s war in 2003 than any other single piece of writing, said: “If we pull up stakes, we’re going to have the civil war that we are all talking about. Walking away from the problem is not the right answer.” Geoffrey Kemp, another panelist, representing the Kissinger-realist crowd, said bluntly: “The United States won’t leave Iraq under this president. There will be no precipitate pullout before 2008.” And that was the pathetic and unoriginal consensus at the so-called Institute for Peace: Stay the course, but maybe do some things differently.