Meanwhile In Iraq

With less than 60 days to the election, it's easy to get caught up in the back and forth of politics. But the very serious developments in Iraq require some scrutiny.

First of all, the President made his big announcement - 8,000 troops will leave Iraq after he's out of office, with a few thousand re-routed to Afghanistan. He's calling this "return on success" but it's really just kick the can. Bush's advisors seem to understand that the need for a strategic redeployment out of Iraq is palpable, but he can't bring himself to pull the trigger. So the next President has to work out the mess he created, which was really the plan all along.

Let's be clear where we are in Iraq. Violence is down but not out; just today brought news of a pretty horrific car bombing in Dujail. The political factions are still at an impasse, with tensions growing, and Nouri al-Maliki is trying to rub out his rivals and use the leverage of the US troop presence to make it easier. The troop drawdown is so minimal because, under the current strategy, the security gains are fragile because the political reconciliation has not been managed hardly at all. But that's only because the strategy is deeply wrong, concerned only with keeping a lid on violence for political purposes. Barack Obama gets this right.

"His plan comes up short — it is not enough troops, not enough resources, with not enough urgency," Obama said. "The next president will inherit a status quo that is still unstable."

We have, to an extent, coddled the Iraqi government, which says in public that the occupiers must be driven out but says in private that the troops must stay. There are still major political gaps that we're filling in with military force, which is simply untenable.

1. Centralizers vs. de-centralizers. Some Iraqi factions want to see more power placed in the hands of the national government, while others continue to push for more power to be vested in local and provincial governments.

2. State power holders vs. popular challengers. Certain factions have disproportionately benefited from the national government’s spoils, such as Dawa, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, and the Kurdish factions who are part of national government. Some factions that have not benefited from the national government’s increased oil wealth and military power have stronger support in key areas of Iraq such as the Sons of Iraq in central and western Iraq and the Sadrists in central and southern Iraq.

3. Sunni vs. Shia. Sectarian conflicts are much reduced since high levels of violence in 2006, but the Sunni-Shia sectarian strain endures.

4. Arab vs. Kurds. The Arab-Kurd division is coming to a head in the unresolved crisis over the status of Kirkuk and other disputed territories.

5. Religious factions vs. secular factions. Latent tensions remain between Iraqis who are concerned by the religious nature of Iraqi politics versus those who see politics as one facet of advancing enduring religious principles of either Sunni or Shia Islam. Religious minorities such as Christians and Yazidis have suffered from persecution at the hands of other groups in Iraq since 2003.

These are major conflicts that have yet to be resolved, and they won't be with a purely military solution. Iraqis have simply not been responsible for their own sovereignty when they are "under the umbrella" of a US occupation. Only the Iraqis can make these decisions, and our presence makes that decision-making process remote. This is a key point:

The U.S. military presence in Iraq is not politically neutral. It creates a distinct set of incentives for political actors that directly work against the reconciliation that U.S. diplomats try to promote. U.S. military dominance and support absolves the major political actors from having to make the tough decisions necessary to achieve a power-sharing equilibrium.

In the months ahead in Iraq, the United States will have to distinguish between those outcomes that are truly catastrophic and those that are simply suboptimal given the limits on U.S. leverage over Iraqi actors—leverage that declines each day as the Iraqi government becomes financially self-sufficient and more assertive. Iraq’s leaders over the next year will increasingly demand greater control over their own affairs. The United States needs to rebalance its overall national security approach by stepping outside of the trenches of intra-Iraqi disputes over power and putting the focus back on its core national security interests.

General Petraeus says that he cannot declare victory, but this just serves to put our eventual withdrawal at a constant arm's length. Before declaring it, he and his Republican cheerleaders ought to define it:

WARE: Winning, however, is a matter of definition. Now, if by winning, you mean strengthening a member of what President Bush called the axis of evil, Iran, the very thing Senator Obama -- Senator McCain says that they prevented, Iran is stronger because of this war.

If you mean by dividing a community with blast barriers, if you mean by having to build an American militia, if you mean by destabilizing the entire region, then, sure, that's winning, that's victory. But I'm not sure that's why people went in there.

BROWN: It doesn't sound like you think that's winning.

WARE: Well, at this point, a win may just be getting out while minimizing the damage.

We aren't facing the facts in Iraq. We praise the fine work of our soldiers and point to charts of body counts and think that stability will just spontaneously sprout. It's damaging the long-term success of the region. A careful withdrawal along with a surge in diplomacy is the only solution.