CAP Study Agrees: We're Losing The Plot On Iraq

Yesterday, I wrote in They've Already Won The Iran Debate that the insistent focus on an imminent attack on Iran has taken the focus entirely off the failed mission in Iraq, endangering the ability to extract us from that catastrophe. Today both Ilan Goldenberg at Democracy Arsenal and a major report from the Center of American Progress both agree with that analysis, that progressives are guilty of "strategic drift" in Iraq, which will severely impact the effort to salvage any solution and get our troops out of the middle of civil war.

The CAP study, from John Podesta, Brian Katulis and Lawrence Korb, is really brilliant in its simplicity. It argues that the most important security concern facing the United States is in Iraq, not Iran, no matter how much the Bush Administration would like it to be otherwise. And allowing the national conversation to drift away from Iraq has wide-reaching impacts for the future.

Strategic drift moves us further away from the goal of a unified and stable Iraq. President Bush claims that the current strategy is having some success, but toward what end? The president argued that the surge would give the political breathing space needed to achieve a unified, peaceful Iraq. But this success, which Bush claims comes from a reduction of casualties in certain areas of Iraq, has been accompanied by massive sectarian cleansing. The surge has not achieved progress; it has impeded progress toward the stated strategic objective of national reconciliation [...]

Strategic drift weakens our security. Strategic drift poses the greatest threat to American national security. An open-ended commitment of U.S. troops in Iraq is weakening America’s security in four key ways:

It undermines the fight against global terrorists.
It continues to weaken U.S. military readiness.
It risks getting U.S. troops caught in the crossfire of Iraq’s civil wars.
It spends billions more on a strategy whose tactics do not add up to a realistic endgame.

The problem here is that the Bush Administration is (a) crazy enough to strike Iran without real cause, and (b) desirous of changing the conversation to anything other than Iraq. Since (b) is also a goal of Republican presidential candidates and politicians trying to hold on to what little power they have left, they have an incentive to keep drifing from Iraq. Same with the "serious foreign policy community" and DC elites who were wrong about the war in the beginning and want to bury their mistakes. But CAP argues that progressives are doing the same thing:

Progressives are frustrated because the president and his allies in Congress have obstructed their oversight of the administration’s Iraq policy. But they now risk drifting themselves into offering only a vague and muddled vision. Progressives must provide a clear alternative to counter the Bush policy of strategic drift—one that takes back control of America’s security interests [...] Progressives should start with a firm statement that America will undertake a strategic phased redeployment of its troops in a defined period of time. America’s interests, not Iraqi’s divided political leaders, will determine America’s timetable for redeployment.

This new approach should put key U.S. interests at the forefront—preserving Iraq’s unity as a functioning state that is not threatening to or threatened by its neighbors and does not have terrorist safe havens.

They cite three key elements for a solution: stop training and arming Iraqi forces for their coming civil war, call for an emergency political solution to the conflict through a surge of diplomacy, and engage regional players to ensure stability and stop the spread of the conflict. This can happen today, there's no need to wait for a new President, obviously through the funding mechanism.

The reason that we have lost control of the Iraq debate is that we have allowed our focus to drift. This is what Ilan Goldenberg highlights in his assessment of the CAP study.

Dems, progressives and the media have taken the bate (sic) on Iran. The reality is that we have 168,000 troops in Iraq not Iran. I think war with Iran is relatively unlikely. But if it were to happen it would be a catastrophe preciscly because we have 168,000 troops in Iraq and that is where the Iranians would inflict their damage. In the last two months the only big stories out of Iraq are Blackwater, Turkish border and Iran. People seem to forget that there has been no progress on the political front and there is still no articulation of what the "bottom up" strategy is. There is no plan for taking the various groups that the United States is now training and bringing them together instead of having them eventually just go at each other in a bloodier civil war.

There is a blueprint for effectiveness, but we have to maintain a laser-like focus on Iraq as the defining security problem facing the country. Talk of body counts and casualties, and specifically Iran, muddles the debate. Bush is engaged in tactics that cannot possibly meet his goals. He and the Republicans are using Iran threats and fearmongering as a cover to re-create a 2002-like national mood. If we don't offer a clear alternative, there will be brutal consequences all over the globe. In the end, this all goes back to standing up to Bush and making him defend his failed war in Iraq, instead of letting him drift off to Iran without accountability. We need to speak with one voice.

Progressives have drifted away from clear calls for redeployment and toward academic proposals and vague positions about what to do.

Last month’s Senate vote on a resolution suggesting a “soft partition” model of Iraq is yet another sign of muddle and drift. The “soft partition” plan envisions a decentralized Iraq built on three autonomous regions. It has been rejected by a majority of Iraqi leaders, opposed by a strong majority of the Iraqi people, and strongly criticized by powers neighboring Iraq because it is both impractical and academic and cannot be implemented without the support of Iraq’s leaders.

Other progressives have slipped toward advocating proposals that focus on tactical measures such as training Iraq’s security forces or addressing the spillover effects of Iraq’s internal conflicts on the region. None of these proposals cut to the heart of the national security threats posed by strategic drift—that the open-ended commitment of U.S. troops to Iraq is making Americans less safe and not resolving Iraq’s internal conflicts.

Pledging to continue training Iraq’s security forces without questioning whether our actions amount to essentially arming up different sides in Iraq’s internal conflicts risks further inflaming an already unstable Middle East. Talking vaguely about a political solution or accommodation among Iraq’s leaders without fully committing to a new strategy that helps Iraq’s leaders resolve their power-sharing disputes imperils tactical gains made in 2007.

I urge you to read the entire CAP report. For a while now they have been articulating the most sensible, least-bad option to the Iraq mess. They have not given in to the fearmongering about what might happen if we leave, or the false premises about Iraq being the central front in the war on terror. They have hones this argument smartly, and what they are advocating is right: return the focus to Iraq so that we can break through this failed policy before it's too late.