The Bush Legacy: National Security

In looking back at national security policies during the Bush Years, the Council for a Livable World provides “the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

The Good

* For eight years, Congress stopped Bush proposals for a new generation of nuclear weapons, including small nuclear weapons, the Nuclear Bunker Buster (Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator) and the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

*The Bush Administration did not resume nuclear testing and did not withdraw the U.S. signature from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The U.S. has not conducted a nuclear explosive test since 1992.

* Congress made some reductions in missile defense money and placed severe restrictions on the third missile defense site in Europe.

* After six years of refusing to talk with North Koreans and that country testing a nuclear device, the Administration has negotiated for the past two years and achieved some progress.

* In 2008, in one of the few instances in which we were able to cooperate with the Bush Administration, our community worked with the Administration to ensure funding was included in a Supplemental Appropriations Bill to help North Korea proceed with its end of the bargain. Congress approved $53 million for energy assistance to the Pyongyang regime and authorized another $10 million for dismantlement work.

* The four horsemen, Kissinger, Schultz, Perry and Nunn, have created the space for moving towards a world free of nuclear weapons that both Obama and McCain endorsed during the 2008 campaign.

* There was no war with Iran.

* Congress refused to fund the administration's plan to build a new facility to produce annually 125 to 200 plutonium "triggers" or pits for nuclear weapons; at one time, the Administration planned to produce 450 plutonium pits per year. Congress drastically cut funding for reprocessing U.S. and foreign nuclear waste as part of a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program.

* Congress rejected a Pentagon request to put conventional warheads on Trident nuclear-powered submarines.

The Bad

* The Bush Administration refused to request Congress approve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

* The U.S.-India nuclear deal was approved and undermined anti-proliferation efforts.

* The Administration abrogated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and began deployment of National Missile Defense in Alaska and California despite insufficient testing and no evidence that the system would work in realistic situations.

* The Administration undermined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by walking back from key promises the United States made in 1995 and 2000.

* The war in Iraq has continued for six years, and Congress was unable to end it.

* There were virtually no negotiations with Iran.

* There were eight years of unilateralism.

* The military budget has skyrocketed by 86% since 2001.

* Arms sales have dramatically increased. The United States’ share of the world arms trade has risen from 40 percent of arms deliveries in 2000 to nearly 52 percent in 2006. U.S. weapons exports rose about 45 percent to $33.7 billion in FY08, the highest total since 1993.

* The U.S. has failed to pay all its dues to the United Nations. In March 2008, the U.S. was $1.6 billion behind in its treaty obligations to the United Nations. The U.S.’s failure to pay its bills on time and in full could have a negative impact on key UN operations, including jeopardizing the 19 peacekeeping missions around the world.

* Congress continues to fund Cold War-era weapons systems, such as the F-22 Raptor, Virginia-class submarine and the V-22 Osprey, that have little purpose in the current security environment.

* The Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review expanded the possible use of nuclear weapons to counter terrorists and chemical and biological weapons attacks, and walked back from promises not to threaten to attack non-nuclear weapon states with nuclear weapons.

The Ugly

* The Treaty of Moscow (SORT) produced inadequate reductions in Russian and American nuclear weapons with no verification and excess weapons on storage.

* The was some progress made helping the former Soviet states dismantle nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery systems and safeguard their nuclear materials, but the Administration tried to cut funding for the program more than once. Congress added funding during several years and removed some bureaucratic restrictions that had hampered the program.

* Congress launched two reevaluations of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, but the Perry-Schlesinger commission may be too divided to produce any productive conclusions.

* The Bush administration has used the supplemental funding process to an alarming degree to fund ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that sets a dangerous precedent for the future and threatens to further weaken the already-flawed federal budgeting process.

* The weak Proliferation Security Initiative only established a framework, which can be built upon, to stop the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies and fissile material, specifically when these items are being transported.

The Bush Legacy: Lessons

In the Post, Bob Woodward, author of four books on President Bush -- "Bush at War," "Plan of Attack," "State of Denial" and "The War Within," provides 10 lessons that Obama and his team should take away from the Bush experience.

1. Presidents set the tone. Don't be passive or tolerate virulent divisions.

Instead of a team of rivals, Bush wound up with a team of back-stabbers with long-running, poisonous disagreements about foreign policy fundamentals.

2. The president must insist that everyone speak out loud in front of the others, even -- or especially -- when there are vehement disagreements.

Powell was right that to conclude that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden did not work together. But Cheney and Powell did not have this crucial debate in front of the president -- even though such a discussion might have undermined one key reason for war. Cheney provided private advice to the president, but he was rarely asked to argue with others and test his case… This sort of derision undermined the administration's unity of purpose -- and suggests the nasty tone that can emerge when open debate is stifled by long-running feuds and personal hostility.

3. A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.

The president should not micromanage, but understanding the ramifications of his positions cannot be outsourced to anyone.

4. Presidents need to draw people out and make sure bad news makes it to the Oval Office.

Bush sometimes assumed he knew his aides' private views without asking them one-on-one. He made probably the most important decision of his presidency -- whether to invade Iraq -- without directly asking Powell, Rumsfeld or CIA Director George J. Tenet for their bottom-line recommendation. (Instead of consulting his own father, former president George H.W. Bush, who had gone to war in 1991 to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, the younger Bush told me that he had appealed to a "higher father" for strength.)

5. Presidents need to foster a culture of skepticism and doubt.

Presidents and generals don't have to live on doubt. But they should learn to love it. "You should not be the parrot on the secretary's shoulder," said Marine Gen. James Jones, Obama's incoming national security adviser, to his old friend Gen. Peter Pace, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- a group Jones thought had been "systematically emasculated by Rumsfeld." Doubt is not the enemy of good policy; it can help leaders evaluate alternatives, handle big decisions and later make course corrections if necessary.

6. Presidents get contradictory data, and they need a rigorous way to sort it out.

In 2004-06, the CIA was reporting that Iraq was getting more violent and less stable. By mid-2006, Bush's own NSC deputy for Iraq, Meghan O'Sullivan, had a blunt assessment of conditions in Baghdad: "It's hell, Mr. President." But the Pentagon remained optimistic and reported that a strategy of drawing down U.S. troops and turning security over to the Iraqis would end in "self-reliance" in 2009. As best I could discover, the president never insisted that the contradiction between "hell" and "self-reliance" be resolved.

7. Presidents must tell the hard truth to the public, even if that means delivering very bad news.

For years after the Iraq invasion, Bush consistently offered upbeat public assessments. That went well beyond the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner that he admitted last Monday had been a mistake. "Absolutely, we're winning," the president said during an October 2006 news conference. "We're winning." His confident remarks came during one of the lowest points of the war, at a time when anyone with a TV screen knew that the war was going badly. On Feb. 5, 2005, as he was moving up from his first-term role as Rice's deputy to become national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley had offered a private, confidential assessment of the problems of Bush's Iraq-dominated first term. "I give us a B-minus for policy development," he said, "and a D-minus for policy execution." The president later told me that he knew that the Iraq "strategy wasn't working." So how could the United States be winning a war with a failing strategy?

8. Righteous motives are not enough for effective policy.

"I believe we have a duty to free people," Bush told me in late 2003. I believe he truly wanted to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. In preparing his second inaugural address in 2005, for example, Bush told his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, "The future of America and the security of America depends on the spread of liberty." That got the idealistic Gerson so pumped that he set out to produce the foreign policy equivalent to Albert Einstein's unified field theory of the universe -- a 17-minute inaugural address in which the president said his goal was nothing less than "the ending of tyranny in our world."

But this high purpose often blinded Bush and his aides to the consequences of this mad dash to democracy. In 2005, for example, Bush and his war cabinet spent much of their time promoting free elections in Iraq -- which wound up highlighting the isolation of the minority Sunnis and setting the stage for the raging sectarian violence of 2006.

9. Presidents must insist on strategic thinking.

Only the president (and perhaps the national security adviser) can prod a reactive bureaucracy to think about where the administration should be in one, two or four years. Then detailed, step-by-step tactical plans must be devised to try to get there. It's easy for an administration to become consumed with putting out brush fires, which often requires presidential involvement. (Ask Obama how much time he's been spending on the Gaza war.) But a president will probably be judged by the success of his long-range plans, not his daily crisis management.

10. The president should embrace transparency. Some version of the behind-the-scenes story of what happened in his White House will always make it out to the public -- and everyone will be better off if that version is as accurate as possible.

On March 8, 2008, Hadley made an extraordinary remark about how difficult it has proven to understand the real way Bush made decisions. "He will talk with great authority and assertiveness," Hadley said. " 'This is what we're going to do.' And he won't mean it. Because he will not have gone through the considered process where he finally is prepared to say, 'I've decided.' And if you write all those things down and historians get them, [they] say, 'Well, he decided on this day to do such and such.' It's not true. It's not history. It's a fact, but it's a misleading fact."

Presidents should beware of such "misleading facts." They should run an internal, candid process of debate and discussion with key advisers that will make sense when it surfaces later. This sort of inside account will be told, at least in part, during the presidency. But the best obtainable version will emerge more slowly, over time, and become history.

The Top Ten Good News Stories in the Muslim World in 2008

On Informed Comment, Juan Cole points out the “Top Ten Good News Stories in the Muslim World in 2008 (That Nobody Noticed).”

1. The Pakistani public, led by its attorneys, judges and civilian politicians, conducted a peaceful, constitutional overthrow of the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in 2008. Last February, the Pakistani public gave the largest number of seats in parliament to the left of center, secular Pakistan People's Party. The fundamentalist religious parties took a bath at the polls. In August, the elected parliament initiated impeachment proceedings against Musharraf, who resigned. A civilian president, Asaf Ali Zardari, was elected.

George W. Bush is reported to have been the last man in Washington to relinquish support for Musharraf, who had rampaged around sacking supreme court justices, censoring the press, and imprisoning political enemies on a whim. Pakistan faces an insurgency in the northwestern tribal areas, and problems of terrorism rooted in past military training of guerrillas to fight India in Kashmir. But the civilian parties have a much better chance of curbing such military excesses than does a leader dependent solely on the military for support. True, the new political leadership is widely viewed as corrupt, but South Korean politics was corrupt and that country nevertheless made progress. Besides, after Madoff/Blagojevich, who are we to talk? The triumph of parliamentary democracy over military dictatorship in Pakistan during the past year is good news that Washington-centered US media seldom could appreciate because of Bush's narrative about military dictatorship equalling stability and a reliable ally in the war on terror. In reality? Not so much.

2. The Iraqi government succeeded in imposing on the Bush administration a military withdrawal from Iraq by 2011. The hard negotiations showed a new confidence on the part of the Iraqi political class that they can stand on their own feet militarily. The relative success of PM Nuri al-Maliki's Basra campaign last spring was part of the mix here. But so too was the absolute insistence by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani that any Status of Forces Agreement not infringe on Iraqi sovereignty. The Sadr Movement resorted to street politics, aiming to thwart any agreement at all,
thus providing cover to al-Maliki as he pushed back against Bush's imperial demands. The Iraqi success in getting a withdrawal agreement has paved the way for President-elect Obama to fulfill his pledge to withdraw from Iraq on a short timetable.

3. Syria has secretly been conducting peace negotiations with Israel, using the Turkish Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan as the intermediary. There are few more fraught relationships between countries in the world than the Israel-Syrian divide, but obviously Bashar al-Asad and Ehud Olmert felt that there were things they could fruitfully talk about. Ironically, the clueless George W. Bush went to Israel last spring and condemned talking to the enemy as a form of appeasement. While he got polite applause, the Israeli mainstream is far more realistic than the silly Neocons who write Bush's speeches, and Olmert went on talking to al-Asad. Unfortunately, the Israeli attack on Gaza has caused Syria to call off the talks for now. It should be a high priority of the Obama administration to start them back up.

4. There has been a "near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia." "Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" conducted numerous bombings and shootings in the period 2003-2006, during which the Saudi authorities got serious about taking it on. Saudi Arabia produces on the order of 11 percent of the world's petroleum, and instability there threatens the whole world. The dramatic subsiding of terrorism there in 2008 is good news for every one. Opinion polls show support for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia plummeting, and determination to fight terrorism is overwhelming. In polling, a solid majority of Saudis say they want better relations with the United States. Yes. The Wahhabis are saying that. And their number one prerequisite for better relations? A US withdrawal from Iraq. (See above).

5. The crisis of state in Lebanon was patched up late last spring by the Doha agreement. Qatar's King Hamad Al-Thani showed himself a canny negotiator. Hizbullah came into the government and received support as a national guard for the south as long as it pledged not to drag the country into any more wars unilaterally. Lebanese politics is always fragile, but this is the best things have been for years. Lebanese economic conservatism allowed its banks and real estate to avoid the global crash, and hotel occupancy rates are up 25% over 2007, with a 2008 economic growth rate of 6%. The new president, Michel Suleiman, has also pursued responsible diplomacy with Syria, and the two countries are normalizing relations after years of bitterness. For all the potential dangers ahead, 2008 was a success story of major proportions in Lebanon.

6. Indonesia's transition to democracy that began in 1998 has been 'consolidated' and it has regained its economic health, paying back $43 billion in loans to the International Monetary Fund. Indonesia is the world fourth most populous country and the world's largest Muslim country, comprising something like 16 percent or more of all Muslims. It faces many challenges, as do all young democracies, but when 245 million Muslims have kept democracy going for 10 years, the thesis that Islam is somehow incompatible with democracy is clearly fallacious.

7. Turkey avoided a major constitutional crisis in 2008 when the constitutional court declined to find the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) guilty of undermining the official ideology of secularism. AKP is mildly Muslim in orientation, in contrast to the militantly secular military. The verdict gave Turks an opportunity to work on bridging the secular-religious divide. Turkey, a country of 70 million the size of Texas, is a linchpin of stability in the Middle East, and it survived a crisis here.

8. Major Arab pop singers jointly performed an anti-war opera that called for co-existence among the region's Christians, Muslims and Jews and an end to the senseless slaughter. It ran on 15 Arab satellite channels,and one satellite channel ran it nonstop for days. It was the Woodstock of this generation in the Arab world and it got no international press at all.

9. King Abdullah II of Jordan pledged an end to press censorship in Jordan. Tim Sebastian reports: 'The man at the center of this event was King Abdullah of Jordan, who last month gathered together the chief editors of Jordan's main newspapers and told them that from now on there would be big changes in the country's media environment. Specifically, no more jailing of reporters for writing the wrong thing and a new mechanism would be created to protect the rights of journalists, including their access to information. "Detention of journalists is prohibited," he said. "I do not see a reason for detaining a journalist because he/she wrote something or for expressing a view."'

It is legitimate to take all this with a grain of salt, to be skeptical, to wait and see. But Sebastian is right that if the king means it, it is big news for Jordan and the Middle East, and the court in Amman should be pressured to stand by the new procedures.

10. The United Arab Emirates is creating the first carbon-free city, "Masdar," as a demonstration project. That the Oil Gulf, a major source of the fossil fuels that, when burned, are causing climate change and rising sea levels, has become concerned about these problems, it is a very good sign.

False Logic

On a recent Hardball, Chris Matthews, Mother Jones' David Corn, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Gaffney engage in an interesting and sometimes heated discussion about the lead-up to the war in Iraq and Dick Cheney's recent admission that the U.S. would have invaded Iraq even without the pretense of WMD.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A Wartime Transition

The NY Times recently solicited op-ed contributions from a number of national security experts. They provide interesting perspectives on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the many challenges and opportunities awaiting President-elect Obama.

Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discusses the two-front war confronting the Obama Presidency.

He has less than two months to go from broad rhetoric to concrete day-to-day action. On Jan. 20, he will take over at a pivotal point in negotiating Iraq’s status of force agreement with the United States, in the middle of a winter military campaign in Afghanistan, and during a political, security and economic crisis in Pakistan. None of these issues will wait for America to deal with its financial problems. And no one involved believes that the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s northern territories can be fully won, or even transferred to Afghan and Pakistani hands, by even the end of President Obama’s first term. For at least the next two to three years, the war will intensify, and virtually all of the additional burden will be borne by the United States.
Leaks of a new National Intelligence Estimate have shown that we are now losing the war for several reasons: a lack of Afghan competence; a half-hearted Pakistani commitment to the fight; a shortage of American, NATO and International Security Assistance Force troops; too few aid workers; and nation-building programs that were designed for peacetime and are rife with inefficiency and fraud. This is why Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan, and other military leaders have called for 20,000 to 25,000 more troops and warned that even those reinforcements may not be adequate.

Even with a potential drawdown in Iraq, the military is being stretched ever thinner. The Army already extends the deployment of troops beyond their commitments, and it and the Marine Corps may well find it impossible to meet their goals for shortening deployment cycles. As things stand, it will almost certainly take until 2011 to bring enough military advisers into Afghanistan to train its army and police forces to the level where locals can replace international troops. And with increasing terrorist attacks on non-governmental groups, many aid workers are being forced to leave the country.

…Even if the United States fully withdraws from Iraq in 2011, as Mr. Obama and the Iraqi government say they would like, we will remain on something very like a war footing there throughout the next presidency. While the combat burden on our forces will decline, withdrawal will be as costly as fighting. It will take large amounts of luck (and patient American prodding) for the Iraqi government to move toward real political accommodation while avoiding new explosions of ethnic and sectarian violence.

Even with progress on those fronts, we will have to withdraw while still helping to win a war, contain internal violence, limit Iranian influence and counter its nuclear program, create effective Iraqi security forces, and help Iraq improve its governance. Not a full war perhaps, but at least a quarter war in terms of continuing strains on our military and budget. ...In spite of recent progress under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Mr. Rumsfeld’s inability to manage any key aspect of defense modernization has left the Obama administration a legacy of unfunded and expensive new trade-offs between replacing combat-worn equipment, repairing and rehabilitating huge amounts of weapons and equipment, and supplying our forces with new, improved equipment.

At best, President Obama will have to conduct the equivalent of one-and-a-quarter wars throughout his first term. At worst? The outside chance of war with Iran as well.

Fred Kagan, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, insists that we must capitalize on the common interests we share with Iraq vis-à-vis Iran.

Iraqis want to remain independent of Tehran, as they have now demonstrated by signing the agreement with the United States over Iran’s vigorous objections. They want to avoid military conflict with Iran, and so does America. Iraqis share our fear that Iran may acquire nuclear weapons, which would threaten their independence. And they resent Iran’s efforts to maintain insurgent and terrorist cells that undermine their government. Of course, the Iraqis recognize, as we do, that Iraq and Iran are natural trading partners and have a religious bond as majority Shiite. This may be to our benefit: the millions of Iranian pilgrims who will visit Iraqi holy sites at Najaf and Karbala over the coming years will take home a vision of a flourishing, peaceful, secular, religiously tolerant and democratic Muslim state.

The reintegration of Iraq into the Arab world is also under way. Many Arab states have already begun to open embassies in Baghdad. We should keep in mind that Iraq also shares interests with America regarding Saudi Arabia and Syria. Increasingly, Iraqi leaders speak quietly of replacing the Saudi kingdom as the dominant Arab state. Iraq also knows that Syria has allowed Al Qaeda fighters free passage across their common border for years, and has served as a staging base for Iranian support to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Washington and Baghdad have a common interest in persuading the Syrian regime to abandon its support of terror groups.

America will withdraw its forces from patrolling in Iraq and will significantly reduce the number of soldiers there over the coming years — that is not and never has been in question. The timing and nature of that withdrawal, however, is extremely delicate. It is vital that we help see Iraq through during its year of elections, and avoid the temptation to “front-load” the withdrawal in 2009. It is equally vital that we develop a broader strategic relationship with Iraq using all elements of our national power in tandem with Iraq’s to pursue our common interests. President Obama has the chance to do more in Iraq than win the war. He can win the peace.

Peter Mansoor, former executive officer to General David Petraeus, discusses an appropriate American withdrawal from Iraq that will leave that country intact.

Barack Obama has the opportunity to recast American policy toward Iraq in a meaningful way, by providing much-needed support to its political center. His administration should view the new status of forces agreement between Washington and Baghdad as a means to shape the withdrawal of our combat forces while maintaining enough leverage to guide Iraq toward a more stable future.

…The key now is to sustain the momentum toward reconciliation, even while combat forces are withdrawn — a delicate balancing act. Although insurgent attacks have been appreciably reduced and Al Qaeda in Iraq is devastated, considerable distrust remains among various ethnic factions and religious sects and within the Iraqi government. As honest brokers, American forces keep the peace in key areas. Yet it is possible that we can complete their departure over three years, as envisioned in the status of forces agreement, assuming that the Iraqi Army has matured enough to take on added responsibilities.

Up to four brigades and their associated support — 20,000 to 25,000 troops — could be withdrawn in 2009, which would provide reinforcements for the war in Afghanistan. Withdrawals should then accelerate, as the division of power and resources is cemented locally across Iraq, with half the remaining combat forces and their associated support withdrawn in each of the following two years. By the end of 2011 — subject to Iraqi concurrence, of course — some 20,000 to 40,000 troops would remain for an extended period. These would be mainly military advisers, counterterrorist units, combat aircraft crews and support, and intelligence and logistical personnel.

Much of the stability in Iraq stems from a patchwork of agreements across the country between local leaders and the American military or the Iraqi government. To make sure that these agreements endure, the Iraqi government needs to prove to its people that it represents their interests in these ways: by ensuring adequate representation in political life of all sects and ethnicities in the political life; by incorporating a significant number of the Sons of Iraq (Sunnis who have supported the counterinsurgency) into the police forces and other government jobs; by providing tangible incentives for the return of Iraqi refugees from abroad; and by equitably distributing government funds and services to all areas of Iraq.

…Even as we pull troops out, the United States is not without significant leverage. We provide the Iraqi armed forces needed assets, from intelligence and logistics to air support and advisers; our civilian advisers are helping to improve the efficiency of the Iraqi government; our global diplomatic leverage can help Iraq in a number of ways; and Washington can encourage business investment in Iraq, particularly in its dilapidated oil industry.

To nudge the Iraqi government in the right direction, the new administration must let it know, quietly but firmly, that the blank check given by the Bush administration is no longer in force. It should make clear that we, too, want to see the expeditious withdrawal of American combat forces, but only in a manner that ensures Iraq will not again dissolve into chaos and civil war. Long-term American diplomatic, economic and military support should be contingent on a comprehensive political solution with a fair division of power. The alternative — a sectarian Shiite government that marginalizes other sects and ethnicities and is perhaps aligned with Iran as well — is
unacceptable.

The Americans Left

On the NY Times Baghdad Bureau Blog, Mohammed Hussein, an Iraqi employee of The Times in Baghdad, discusses the American troop withdrawal as seen from the Iraqi streets. The name of his neighborhood has obviously been withheld because he fears for his safety as an Iraqi journalist.

“The Americans left.” Those were the first words I heard from my wife when I passed through the front door of my house. It was like a shock, I can describe it as somebody showering me with chilled water. They have not gone from my country, but they have gone from my neighborhood. Over the last week, they began transporting their equipment and appliances and they finished this week.

No-one can deny that their presence during the past 11 months has brought peace again to my neighborhood. Even my neighbors and friends who do not want the Americans in Iraq agree with this concept. Before, it was like a jungle filled with Al Qaeda and Mahdi Army, each fighting the other. You can say it was a battlefield for everyone who wanted to take revenge or to inflame sectarian feelings. I remember that day in winter of 2006 when I was driving back home I saw a white car parked in the middle of the main street of my neighborhood, the doors of that car were open and the glass smashed, riddled by bullets over each inch of its body.

Near the car there were two bodies on the ground. When I approached closer I found the bodies of two professional tennis players, I had interviewed them weeks earlier. Just the luckiest people survived those black days. Anyone was a potential target. At that time we were trying not to come out of our houses, just in urgent cases. Our deadline to return back home was before sunset, otherwise you would disappear for ever. Even the front gate of your house would not open at night.

I still remember that day in the winter of 2006 when my neighbor phoned me to ask for a syringe to inject his son with antibiotics. I spent 30 minutes thinking ‘how I can deliver that syringe?’ despite the short distance between my home and the other house. Then I tied the syringe to a brick and I threw it, to land in garden of my neighbor.

As an observer I admit the situation is fragile and I assume many others agree with me. Until this moment the situation is not clear enough in Iraq because U.S. forces are showing up in Baghdad’s neighborhoods. What would happen if they would not show up any more? Here in Iraq some Iraqis think that Americans should stand with Iraqis to find a solution for such a tangle, a dilemma. To get more guarantees from the government in case they leave.

Most of the Iraqi government thinks that the Americans have done enough, and their mission is accomplished; they are fully convinced this is the best time to regain their complete authority, forgetting that it was the Americans who removed the former regime. By American hands. Maybe Americans will look at this in a different way from me, as they are paying with their sons’ blood, and wealth.

As an Iraqi I can understand that is most painful for a nation which has spent billions and more than 4,000 lives for an unseen target, those weapons of mass destruction which they were looking for.

A Benevolent Saddam?

The LA Times reports on the emerging reality that Nouri Maliki is accumulating more and more power in the Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office, yielding a growing influence over both Iraqi security forces and the largely defunct central government bureaucracy in Baghdad.

An increasingly bold Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has sanctioned politically charged arrests of prominent Sunnis, personally supervised military operations and moved to sideline rivals in recent months, actions that have evoked memories of the country's authoritarian past. Now the Shiite leader, once considered weak and ineffectual, is on the cusp of greater powers with the likely approval this week of a security agreement with the U.S. that would anoint him as the man who brought an end to the American troop presence in Iraq.

That has left Sunni Arab, Kurdish and even some Shiite parties nervous about their future after the Americans are gone. Maliki's defenders say the prime minister, who comes from a fiercely nationalist background, is trying to prevent the breakup of Iraq by establishing a strong central government. Detractors, including several Iraqi politicians and at least one Western official, suspect him of having ambitions to become "a benevolent Shiite Saddam."

By increasingly exerting authority, Maliki has broken from the model of a severely constrained central government championed by the Americans since they ousted longtime President Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. Under the U.S.-promoted model, Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds were to share power in Baghdad, and Iraqi regions dominated by each of the groups were to be guaranteed clear protections.

"In some ways, we are seeing a return to traditional Iraqi political culture, where authority is centralized in the person of the leader in Baghdad," said a U.S. official, who asked not to be identified because of the subject's sensitivity. "That is the way Iraq has been run for decades prior to the American intervention in 2003. "It's too early to say if a democratic state can emerge out of all this. It's messy and it's not going to get better any time soon, at least. It may become more violent."

…Such measures have many Iraqi and Western officials debating Maliki's true intentions. They describe a man of contradictions -- incredibly modest, solicitous to friends, but deeply suspicious of the Americans, and given to rants about the Sunni-dominated Baath Party leaders that ruled under Hussein. Maliki, steeped in the ferment of the revolutionary Shiite Islamic groups that shaped him, feels an intense need to defend Iraq's Shiite majority and preserve its newfound power, they say.

Maliki has firmly rebutted the idea that a strong prime minister equals a return to Hussein's time. This month, Maliki defended his government's assertive role. Otherwise, he said, "things would have slipped away." He went on to warn that if too much power was ceded to regional governments, as envisioned by the Kurds and his party's competitor within the Shiite bloc, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the country could end up "with multiple central governments and dictatorships." The prime minister urged instead that the constitution be revised to strengthen the national government.

A Decentralized Iraq

Peter Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, recently sat down with Robert Siegel for an interesting interview with NPR's All Things Considered about the decentralization of Iraq (a concept long-advocated by Joe Biden).

SIEGEL: Well, our guest today has written in support of the partition of Iraq, the idea of splitting the country up into three countries, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. Peter Galbraith is a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and now senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. And Peter Galbraith, partition, still a good idea?

Mr. PETER GALBRAITH: Well, I don't actually advocate partition. My point is that the country has already broken up, and the United States should not be in the business of putting it back together. We have, in the north, Kurdistan, which is, in all regards, an independent country except it doesn't have international recognition with its own army, its own government.

And now between the Shiites and the Sunnis, there are two separate armies. There's a Shiite army. It's the Iraqi army, but it's dominated by the Shiites. And in the Sunni areas, there's now the Awakening, a hundred-thousand-man-strong militia. And it is because of the Awakening, and not so much the surge of U.S. troops, that there's been this enormous decline in attacks by al-Qaeda. But they remain very hostile to the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi government sees them as a bigger threat than al-Qaeda.

SIEGEL: Are you satisfied by the degree to which the incoming Obama administration - what has been the Obama campaign - sees as the reality of Iraqi politics? Is it close enough to what you see as the reality of Iraqi politics?

Mr. GALBRAITH: Yes. Of course, it's very encouraging to me that Joe Biden is the incoming vice president. He has been the prime proponent of a decentralized Iraq. And although in the campaign Senator McCain described his plan as, I think, a cockamamie idea, it is in fact what the Bush administration has done in part. The Bush administration, in 2007, decided to finance a Sunni army, which is the Awakening. And that's why we've had success. Biden would only take this a next step and encourage the Sunnis to form their own region, which would control that army just as the Kurdistan region controls the Peshmerga, which is the Kurdistan army.

SIEGEL: Iraq has prickly relations with - certainly with two of its neighbors. Turkey is distressed at the possibility of a de facto or truly independent Kurdistan on its border. And the Iranians have, it seems, have been intervening in a variety of ways. Is a decentralized, loosely federalized, some would say partitioned, Iraq, is it capable of actually defending its own interests against bigger neighbors?

Mr. GALBRAITH: Well, Iraq is not, today, defending its interests. The Iranians wield enormous influence because the United States actually paved the way for Iran's allies to become the government of Iraq. With regard to the Kurds, actually there's been a change in attitude on the part of Turkey. There was a time when they thought the idea of an independent Kurdistan, or a de facto independent Kurdistan, was an almost existential threat to Turkey. But increasingly Turks recognize, first, that this is an accomplished fact. It's already happened. And second that there are opportunities. After all, they share in common they're secular, they're pro-Western like the Turks, aspire to be democratic, and they're not Arabs.

SIEGEL: Should the Obama administration, once it takes over, should it have a new diplomatic initiative in Iraq? And is there an occasion for some Iraqi version of the Dayton peace conference that addressed the war in the Balkans some years ago?

Mr. GALBRAITH: Yes. There are two things that the United States can do that would enhance stability in Iraq as it leaves. First, to try and solve the territorial dispute over Kirkuk and other disputed areas between the Kurds and the Arabs, and secondly to work out a modus vivendi between the Iraqi government and the Shiite-led army and the Sunni Awakening as to who will control what territory. And a Dayton-style process, with a tough negotiator like Richard Holbrooke, if he doesn't end up being secretary of state, I think that's exactly what the Obama administration should look at doing.

SIEGEL: So, in that argument, it's not, let's try to do away with this conflict between Shia and Sunni and armed groups, but rather, let's try to negotiate a better, more equitable deal and more stable deal between the two groups that will continue to exist for the near future.

Mr. GALBRAITH: Precisely. And if we can minimize the things that Sunnis and Shiites are going to fight over, it may be, over time, that they will find it in their interest to have much greater cooperation and that voluntarily they'll build a stronger Iraqi state. I think it's unlikely the Kurds would ever join that, but I think it's quite possible as between the Sunnis and Shiites.

SIEGEL: Well, Peter Galbraith, thank you very much for talking with us today.

Mr. GALBRAITH: Well, thank you.

[Galbraith is the author of a new book -- "Unintended Consequences: How War In Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies."]

The "Straight Talk Express" Has Derailed

This is damning to a candidate who allegedly provides the American people with nothing but "straight talk."

Breaking Down the Obama-McCain Debate

Nick Kristof elaborates on the “Impulsive, Impetuous, Impatient” McCain that quickly became evident during the debate.

As Mr. McCain demonstrated in Friday evening’s debate, he is a serious foreign policy thinker who has traveled widely, and he certainly showed vision and bipartisanship in helping to repair relations with Vietnam. But it’s equally clear that in recent years Mr. McCain has become impish cubed — impulsive, impetuous and impatient — and those are perilous qualities in a commander in chief.

Although he is frantically trying to distance himself from President Bush, Mr. McCain, by his own accounting, would be more Bushian in foreign policy than even Mr. Bush is now. While Mr. Bush has been forced to accept more sensible policies in his second term, Mr. McCain has become steadily more of a neocon in the cowboy role that Mr. Bush played in his first term, prone to solving problems with stealth bombers rather than United Nations resolutions.

Judging from Mr. McCain’s own positions, he might well revive a cold war with Russia and could start a hot war with Iran or North Korea. In those three hot spots, Mr. McCain could constitute a dangerous gamble for this country:

Iran seems determined to continue its uranium enrichment and will be vexing for any president. But Mr. Bush, under the influence of Bob Gates and Condoleezza Rice, has realized that the best hope is diplomacy and negotiation. In contrast, Mr. McCain denounces Barack Obama’s call for direct talks with Iranian leaders and speaks openly about the possibility of bombing Iranian nuclear sites.

“There’s only one thing worse than military action against Iran, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran,” Mr. McCain has told me and others, repeating the line regularly. That’s a nice sound bite, but it suggests that if Iran continues to enrich uranium he would feel obliged to launch airstrikes. And while Mr. McCain understands the lack of any effective military solution (we don’t even know exactly what to hit), he can sound cavalier about a new war. When a South Carolina man asked him about Iran, he responded by singing to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”: “Bomb, bomb,
bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

So if Iran continues its policies as most expect, we might well find ourselves under a McCain presidency headed toward our third war with a Muslim country. The result would be an Iranian nationalist backlash that would cement ayatollahs in place, as well as $200-a-barrel oil, open season on Americans in Iraq, and global fury at American unilateralism.

North Korea is one of the Bush administration’s greatest failures, and Mr. McCain seems intent on making it worse. For eight full years, the Clinton administration kept North Korea from obtaining plutonium to make a single nuclear weapon; on Mr. Bush’s watch, North Korea has obtained enough for a half dozen weapons and has conducted a nuclear test.

Even President Bush recognized the failure of his first term’s hard-line policy and abandoned it, instead pursuing negotiations and diplomatic solutions with North Korea. Mr. McCain fumes that this is accommodation and seems to prefer the first-term fist-waving that was emotionally satisfying but failed catastrophically.

A McCain administration would thus apparently mean no more diplomatic track with North Korea. The upshot would be North Korea’s restarting its nuclear weapon assembly line. In similar circumstances in 1994, Mr. McCain raised the prospect of military strikes on North Korea and suggested that war might be inevitable
(instead, President Clinton stopped plutonium production with a negotiated deal).

Russia underscores Mr. McCain’s penchant for risk-taking, theatrics and fulmination. Most striking, he wants to kick Russia out of the Group of 8. Mr. McCain’s lead-with-the-chin approach to Russia reflects the same pugnacity that resulted in obscenity-laced dust-ups with fellow Republican senators, but it’s less endearing when the risk is nuclear war. Do we really want to risk an exchange of nuclear warheads over Abkhazia or South Ossetia? The Spanish prime minister, José Zapatero, told me a few days ago that what he fears most under a McCain administration is a revival of the cold war with Russia.

In Friday’s debate, Mr. McCain was on his best behavior. But he did reiterate his suspicion of diplomacy with our enemies, and he has often shown that his instinct in a confrontation (whether with a colleague or a country) is the opposite of John Kennedy’s in the Cuban missile crisis; Mr. McCain responds to challenges by seeking to escalate, to fight.

All in all, it’s astonishing that Mr. McCain seems determined to return to Mr. Bush’s first-term policies that have been utterly discredited even within the administration. Judging from Mr. McCain’s own positions, on foreign policy he could well end up more Bush than Bush.

Meanwhile, EJ Dionne points out McCain’s missed opportunities during the debate, the only one with a focus on foreign affairs (his alleged turf):

September began as John McCain's month and ended as Barack Obama's. McCain's high-risk wagers aimed at shaking up the campaign turned into very bad investments. And Friday's debate eliminated McCain's best chance to deliver a knockout blow to an opponent whose most important asset may be his capacity for self-correction.

McCain is supposed to own the foreign policy issue -- and he should have owned Friday's debate. During their respective primary battles, McCain was a better debater than Obama, who could be hesitant, wordy and thrown off his stride.

But the Obama who showed up at Ole Miss was sharper and more concise than the man who frequently lost debates against his Democratic foes. He was also resolutely calm in standing his ground against McCain, whose condescension became a major talking point after the debate. If Al Gore suffered from his sighs during the 2000 debates, McCain will be remembered for his supercilious repetition of seven variations on "Senator Obama doesn't understand."

This gave special power to Obama's peroration about McCain's "wrong" judgments on going to war in Iraq. McCain's dismissal of Obama brought back memories of how advocates of the war arrogantly dismissed those who insisted (rightly, as it turned out) that the conflict would be far more difficult and costly than its architects suggested.

McCain's derisive approach may help explain why the instant polls gave Obama an edge in a debate that many pundits rated a tie -- and why women seemed especially inclined toward Obama. CNN's survey found that 59 percent of women rated Obama as having done better, with just 31 percent saying that of McCain.

An Obama adviser who was watching a "dial group" -- in which viewers turn a device to express their feelings about a debate's every moment -- said that whenever McCain lectured or attacked Obama, the Republican's ratings would drop, and the fall was especially steep among women. But if the debate was indeed a tie -- and McCain certainly looked informed and engaged once the discussion moved from economics to foreign affairs -- this would count as a net gain for Obama. A foreign policy discussion afforded McCain his best opportunity to aggravate doubts about his foe. That opportunity is now gone.

As for the first 40 minutes devoted to the economic crisis, Obama was more forceful in addressing public anxieties. He used the occasion to tout his middle-class tax cut that a large share of the electorate doesn't even know he's proposing. Obama's campaign quickly went on the air with an ad noting that McCain did not once mention the words "middle class" during the discussion.

Thus ends a month that began with such promise for McCain. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate at the end of August created a fortnight of excitement among Republican loyalists who were less than enthusiastic about McCain. Some said Palin would also enhance his appeal to female voters and help him recast his candidacy as a maverick's crusade.

But it was a reckless choice. Palin has proved herself to be spectacularly unprepared for a national campaign and embarrassingly inarticulate and unreflective. She is held in protective custody by a campaign that trusts her less and less. A few conservatives have suggested she should be dropped from the ticket.

Then came McCain's abrupt foray into Washington's negotiations over a Wall Street bailout bill. His showy call for postponing Friday's debate was serenely rebuffed by Obama, and McCain was forced to retreat. The candidate with 26 years of congressional experience lost a test of wills to an opponent with just four years on the national stage.

And when McCain intervened in the rescue package discussions, his position on the matter was muddy. This champion of bipartisanship briefly stood up for a House Republican minority that was battling against a bipartisan accord largely accepted by his Senate Republican colleagues, and then he pulled back. The McCain who had once allied with such liberals as Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold was suddenly flirting with an approach to the economic rescue that was recommended by Newt Gingrich. The
post-Labor Day period has thus brought the campaign to an unexpected point.

McCain, once the candidate of tested experience, must now battle the perception that he has become the riskier choice, a man too given to rash moves under pressure. Obama, whose very newness promised change but also raised doubts, has emerged as the cool and unruffled candidate who moves calmly but steadily forward. However one judges the first debate, it did nothing to block Obama's progress.

McCain: Wrong on Iraq

An Exit Strategy

In a recent post in the Times, John Nagl, a former Army lieutenant colonel, Colin Kahl, an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown, and Shawn Brimley, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, lay out a strategy for moving forward in Iraq.

With the Bush administration now working out an agreement on having American troops out by 2012, understanding how this withdrawal will proceed is vital. Basra is as an example of what an exit strategy might look like — and of the dangers of getting it wrong.

After the 2003 invasion, control over southern Iraq was handed over to British forces. Without adequate troops to protect the population, security in Basra deteriorated, the British withdrew and Shiite militias took control. In late March of this year, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki launched an offensive in Basra to clear the city of militias, but the Iraqi Army quickly got bogged down. American special operations forces and combat advisers reinforced Iraqi units, providing crucial air and fire support and detailed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. As a result, Iraqi security forces turned the tide and now control the city.

The lesson of Basra is clear: a rapid withdrawal risks a resurgence of violence, but a responsible drawdown and a reorientation of the mission away from combat and toward advising Iraqi forces stand a good chance of advancing our interests in Iraq at acceptable cost.

Under this model, embedded military advisers would provide just enough help to give Iraqis what they need on the battlefield, but not so much that it stymies their development and perpetuates a view of Western occupation. Yet this transition is risky. Security gains could come undone if Iraqis fail to strike political deals on elections, oil revenues and disputed territories. Sectarian conflict could also reignite if the Shiite-dominated government fails to accommodate the predominantly Sunni
“Sons of Iraq,” the 100,000 security volunteers, many former insurgents, who have taken up arms against Al Qaeda.

The biggest challenge America will face is our rapidly diminishing leverage. Iraq’s
government is increasingly asserting sovereignty, demanding a new bilateral security relationship with the United States with more constraints on how American forces operate — and limits on how long they can stay. Mr. Maliki and his advisers have inflated confidence in the ability of the Iraqi forces to maintain security that has reduced our influence. This is apparent in the negotiations over a United States-Iraq security framework. The draft pact agreed to last month seems likely to establish a timeline for withdrawing American forces and moving from a lead combat role to a support role, but it asks little of Iraqis in return for continued assistance through 2011 and beyond.

In this context, they offer two things we must do and one thing we must not do.

First, we must adopt a policy of strategic conditionality at the presidential level. For two years, the perception of an American blank check has been reinforced by regular video conferences in which President Bush has assured Mr. Maliki of his unwavering support. This has to change. The next president must make it clear that we do not endorse a particular set of Iraqi leaders, but rather the system as a whole, and thus our financial and military support is contingent upon progress toward political accommodation and improved governance. Most Iraqi leaders want continued security assurances, technical support for Iraqi ministries and help in renegotiating
debt obligations and other financial liabilities. This support should be tied directly toward governmental progress.

Second, we must exploit our still-significant leverage over Iraq’s security forces. While Mr. Maliki and others may be overconfident, the truth is that recent Iraqi operations in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul would not have succeeded without American military support. Underneath their rhetoric, most Iraqi leaders — civilian
and military — understand they are not able to provide domestic order, combat terrorism or deter external foes without some continued American support. There are disturbing reports that the Iraqi government has been cracking down on the Sons of Iraq and stalling their integration into the Iraqi security forces. If Mr. Maliki persists in pursuing this sectarian agenda, our support — including technical advice and weapons sales — should be limited accordingly.

Last, it is vital that the next president not send a signal that he hopes to establish an enduring Korea-style presence in Iraq. Most Iraqi leaders want continued American military support for several years, but do not want a permanent presence beyond the minimum advisory effort. If the next administration tries to lay the groundwork for an indefinite footprint, it will be forced to give in to all sorts of Iraqi demands.

The Dangers of Unconditional Support

In the LA Times, Shawn Brimley and Colin Kahl discuss the "gathering storm" that has been the Maliki government's inexplicable crack-down of the Sunni "Awakening" or "Sons of Iraq" groups that have been so instrumental in recent security gains and decreased levels of violence in Iraq. Led by a group Sunni tribal leaders who became more and more outraged by the indiscriminate and brutal tactics of al-Qaeda in late 2006, these groups joined sides with coalition forces to expel the terrorists from Anbar in hopes of bringing some sense of stability and security back to their neighborhoods. It was a major turning-point in the war as one of our biggest foes - the Sunni insurgency - flipped sides to help fight another.

Throughout 2007, U.S. commanders capitalized on this Sunni movement, the so-called Awakening, to create an expanding network of alliances with Sunni tribes and former insurgents that helped turn the tide and drive Al Qaeda in Iraq to near extinction. There are now about 100,000 armed Sons of Iraq, each paid $300 a month by U.S. forces to provide security in local neighborhoods throughout the country. In recognition of the key role the Awakening played in security improvements, President Bush met with several Sunni tribal leaders during his trip to Anbar last September, and Petraeus, who cites the program as a critical factor explaining the decline in violence, has promised to "not walk away from them."

But Iraq's predominantly Shiite central government seems intent on doing precisely that. Maliki and his advisers never really accepted the Sunni Awakening, and they remain convinced that the movement is simply a way for Sunni insurgents to buy time to restart a campaign of violence or to infiltrate the state's security apparatus. In 2007, with Iraq's government weak and its military not yet ready to take the lead in operations, the Maliki government acquiesced to the U.S.-led initiative and grudgingly agreed to integrate 20% of the Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi security forces. Now, a newly confident Maliki government is edging away from this commitment.

It was always a tenuous partnership and the integration of these groups into the Iraqi Security Forces has been one of the key benchmarks crucial to long-term Iraqi stability and reconciliation. After all, these groups could not remain on the U.S. payroll and outside the apparatus of the Iraqi government forever. Regardless, the Maliki government, which has even been reluctant to provide much-needed reconstruction dollars to predominantly Sunni communities, has fought integration every step of the way - justifying its blatant sectarianism by claiming the "Sons of Iraq" are nothing more than armed militias or criminal gangs. In a tribal society, that may be true to a great extent (as we've also seen by the infiltration of Shia militias into the Iraqi Security Forces) but until the Shia-dominated government begins taking steps toward inclusion - toward true reconciliation between the various sectarian groups - long-term stability can never be achieved. Instead, it will be a perpetual cycle of violence between various sects, fighting desperately to gain the upper hand over their rivals. There is no U.S.-role in that civil war.

Plans to integrate these Sunni fighters into Iraq's security forces or provide them with civilian employment have been consistently "slow rolled." While Maliki has committed to incorporate 20% of the 100,000 Sons of Iraq members under U.S. contract into Iraq's army or police forces by the end of this year, only a small fraction have actually been hired. When asked if the Iraqi government had created stumbling blocks to integrating the Sons of Iraq, Petraeus said in a recent interview, "That certainly has been the case."

It gets worse. Over the last several weeks, Iraqi army units and special operations forces (which report directly to Maliki) have arrested Sons of Iraq leaders, dismantled checkpoints and otherwise harassed local security volunteers in Diyala province and greater Baghdad. There are reportedly plans to detain hundreds of Sons of Iraq members in the coming weeks. "These people are like cancer, and we must remove them," an Iraqi army general in Abu Ghraib, a Baghdad suburb, told a reporter last week. Another Iraqi commander in Baghdad confided, "We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," before telling that reporter of plans to instigate a major crackdown as early as November.

As Brimley and Khan point out, the underlying driver of this recklessness is the growing hubris of the Maliki government - which is fueled by the unconditional support of its benefactor, the Bush Administration. Until the President says enough is enough, and no longer allows a corrupt and incompetent foreign government to hold hostage our national security interests and the well-being of our armed forces, it will be more of the same. The continued deployment of U.S. troops must be conditioned upon Iraqi political progress. Barack Obama understands this. John McCain offers nothing but a blank check of American blood and treasure.

It is obvious where this road might end. The last time tens of thousands of armed Sunni men were humiliated in Iraq - by disbanding the Baath Party and Iraqi army in May 2003 - an insurgency began, costing thousands of U.S. lives and throwing Iraq into chaos. Yet Maliki and his advisers risk provoking Iraq's Sunni community into another round of violence. The rising tensions in Iraq reveal a weakness in U.S. strategy and the Bush administration's approach to the war: the unconditional nature of our support to Maliki's government.

The "surge" strategy in Iraq, as described by President Bush in January 2007, rested on the belief that tamping down violence would provide a window of opportunity that Iraq's leaders would use to pursue political reconciliation. But this has not occurred, despite the dramatic security improvements. Indeed, if the problem in 2006 and 2007 was Maliki's weakness and inability to pursue reconciliation in the midst of a civil war, the issue in 2008 is his overconfidence and unwillingness to entertain any real accommodation with his political adversaries. America's blank check to the Iraqi government feeds this hubris.

U.S. strategy must be reengineered to exploit our diminished but still significant leverage. Despite recent military successes, the Iraqi security forces remain critically dependent on U.S. air power, logistical support, intelligence and training. The United States must make continued security assistance conditional on Maliki carrying through on his commitments to integrate and gainfully employ the Sons of Iraq.

The Surge

In the USA Today, Joe Biden explores John McCain’s tunnel vision on Iraq and his assertion that the surge accomplished absolutely everything we could have dreamed.

Recent events have demonstrated clearly that Barack Obama's judgment on Iraq is right. Now, it's time to heed that judgment so that we can successfully end the war while refocusing on the fight in Afghanistan. Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that there have been significant gains in lowering the levels of violence in Iraq. These gains have come from the heroic sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, as well as the success of the Sunni tribes in fighting al-Qaeda, and the cease-fire that has been respected by Shiite militias.

But the stated purpose of the surge was to help bring about the political progress and economic development necessary for long-term stability in Iraq. That progress still lags. That is why we must welcome the growing consensus in both the USA and Iraq for a timeline that will allow the responsible redeployment of our combat brigades out of Iraq. I agree with Sen. Obama and the prime minister of Iraq that we can safely redeploy all our combat brigades out of Iraq in 2010, with a residual force to fight terrorists, train Iraqis and protect our personnel.

This redeployment is absolutely necessary if we hope to restore our military strength and finish the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas. This is the central front in the war on terror. This is where the 9/11 attacks were planned and where terrorists could be plotting against America today.

With the Taliban and al-Qaeda on the rise and violence more severe than at any time since the beginning of the war, we must free up more resources in order to succeed. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledges, we can do so only if we redeploy our forces from Iraq. Success in Iraq must not be defined by staying in Iraq indefinitely; success is leaving Iraq to an Iraqi government that is reconciling its differences and taking responsibility for its future.

It's time to encourage the Iraqi government to stand up on its own while we refocus on the war in Afghanistan and the broad range of national security challenges we face. Barack Obama is profoundly right that the next president must be more than Commander in chief for Iraq - he must meet challenges to America's security around the world.

The Iraq Debate

As debate over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin to take center stage in the election, the differences between the two strategies championed by each candidate become more and more obvious. The centerpiece of the McCain strategy is a rigid adherence to the Bush doctrine. The centerpiece of the Obama strategy (who has sought to clarify his policies prior to his upcoming trip to Europe and the Middle East) is to draw down troops in Iraq and take the fight back to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Obama: "By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe. As should have been apparent to President Bush and Sen. McCain, the central front in the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was. Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq. I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win."

As we've seen and will undoubtedly continue to see throughout the course of this campaign, the McCain response to any foreign policy challenge will be 1) to tout his military service as the trump card that makes him an unquestioned expert on military strategy, and 2) to remind the world that Barack Obama is a weak defeatist who would rather surrender than fight the tough war that needs to be fought.

McCain: "Sen. Obama will tell you we can't win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq. In fact, he has it exactly backward. It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan. I know how to win wars. And if I'm elected president, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory.”

While we should be encouraged that McCain even acknowledged the challenges that confront us in Afghanistan, most of his comments don’t carry much water. “Obama will tell you we can’t win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq?” What is McCain’s definition of winning and losing? Apparently winning consists of being bogged down in an open-ended war that is costing us thousands of lives and billions from our treasury and not is making us safer. In fact, it’s making us less safe because it’s degrading our military to almost unprecedented levels and preventing us from focusing on our true threats. Meanwhile, to McCain, losing apparently consists of confronting our true enemies and doing what is in the best security interests of our nation.

“The success of the surge in Iraq shows us the way to succeed in Iraq.” Actually, the surge in Iraq shows us why we’re losing in Afghanistan. Despite having al-Qaeda on the ropes, U.S. Commanders in Afghanistan have always played second fiddle to their counterparts in Iraq in respect to the focus and the resources required to accomplish their mission. And McCain is always quick to cite the tremendous success of the surge in Iraq but fails to mention the events beyond our patrol that significantly contributed to the decline in violence as well as the fact that the underlying goal of the surge – long-term political reconciliation by Iraqi leaders – has never been achieved.

In stark contrast to the Bush-McCain stubbornness and recklessness, Obama laid out his plan for Iraq earlier this week:

The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.

The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.

It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.