T-Minus One Month And Counting

Patrick Doherty

July 14, 2005

Over the last few weeks, I've been writing about the need for a progressive exit strategy for Iraq. Today, TomPaine.com presents two important pieces that are bookends around what that policy ought to be. Rami Khouri, editor of the Beirut Daily Star , challenges Blair to take the steps necessary to "drain the swamp," or, as Khouri puts it in in his article, Be Wiser Than Bush, "to respond to the legitimate needs, grievances and aspirations of the hundreds of millions of Arabs and Asians who are the enabling environment from which the terrorists emerge. "

The second piece comes from an old classmate, J. Alexander Thier, who served as an adviser to the constitutional process in Afghanistan. In his piece, Iraq's Rush To Failure, Thier makes it clear that not only is an attempt to make the August 15th logistically unlikely, any attempt to do so would exclude so many of the necessary stakeholders in Iraq that the resulting document would be worse than worthless. Indeed, pressing forward with such a short-sighted timeline and process could, "invite a conflagration that would make the insurgency look like a garden party."

The most pressing matter is to make sure that the constitutional process is not corrupted by the remnants of the neocon project in Iraq. On this, I have little faith that the U.S. Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, is capable of doing the right thing. His record from Afghanistan is littered with failure: failure to bring the warlords into the government, failure to extend Karzai's reach beyond Kabul, and failure to end that nation's massive drug trade. Needless to say, Afghanistan is a basket case.

The risk is that Bush may be more interested in securing any constitution, even a bad one. The revelation this week from Britain that the United States is planning to draw down troops before they could possibly have built up Iraqi forces or dealt with the insurgency makes no military sense. What does make sense is that Bush wants to have the constitution and a substantial withdrawal in hand going into the 2006 mid-term congressional elections. It is also clear from Karl Rove's actions that he is more than willing to sacrifice national security to achieve political gain. Faced with a choice of gaining a supermajority in Congress or a viable Iraqi endstate, it's not hard to imagine what Rove would prioritize.

The key, therefore, is to make sure that the Iraqi constitutional process is extended another six months. Just how that happens, we have a month to figure out.