Where are Iraq’s leaders?

Today, former White House policy aide Rivkin and Katulis, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, debate the formation of a legitimate Iraqi government. Previously they discussed the apparent decline of Sunni Islamism in Iraq, troop withdrawal and the large drop in civilian and military deaths in Iraq. Tomorrow, they’ll propose strategies for the next year.

Take off the training wheels
By Brian Katulis

The so-called political surge has not happened because of two main reasons — structural flaws in Iraq’s political transition and institutions and the Bush administration’s unconditional and open-ended commitment of U.S. money and troops fostering moral hazard among Iraq’s leaders.

In 2003, President Bush and his conservative allies argued that the Iraq war would set into motion a democratic wave that would topple Middle East dictators and autocrats who were state sponsors of terror. More than four years later, it is clear that the exact opposite has happened — global terrorist attacks have escalated on Bush’s watch, and Middle East autocrats are more firmly entrenched in power. Bush’s strategy operated on the naive belief that democracy promotion, defined narrowly as elections, would defeat terrorism; tragically for U.S. interests, this approach has backfired, with elections actually empowering terrorist and extremist voices throughout the Middle East, most notably the radical terrorist group Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian elections.

This flawed strategy helps explain why Iraq’s political transition is deadlocked. Two elections and a constitutional referendum held in Iraq in 2005 did not produce institutions to help stabilize Iraq. Rather than creating a democracy, the political process pushed by the Bush administration in Iraq resulted in an ethnocracy in which most Iraqis voted their ethnic or sectarian identity. In the December 2005 elections, nine in 10 Iraqis voted for parties representing their ethnic or sectarian identity. The end result is an Iraqi leadership divided along ethnic and sectarian lines incapable of yielding to each others’ demands.

Rushing elections without helping build the institutions and basic foundations for a free society exacerbated these ethnic and sectarian tensions and opened the door to the rise of religious extremists in Iraq. In the end, today’s Iraq in many ways is the same vision that some conservatives push for the United States — there’s no government, everyone has a gun and extremist religion dominates Iraq’s politics.

So the main reason why Iraq’s so-called political surge has not moved forward is because of these structural flaws in Iraq’s political transition. Iraq’s current political system was set up in such a haphazard way that it failed to bridge growing divides among Iraq’s leaders. Some people have proposed getting rid of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, but this is beside the point — the system needs to change, not just the faces.

A second key reason why the political surge has not worked is the Bush administration’s open-ended commitment of U.S. money and troops to Iraq. Bush has offered Iraq’s leaders a blank check with no real conditionality to motivate them to settle their disputes peacefully. In essence, the Bush administration is fostering a dangerous and dysfunctional dependency — one that costs American taxpayers nearly $10 billion a month. The Bush strategy for Iraq of “standing down when Iraqis stand up” has put squabbling Iraqi leaders in control of our troops, which further endangers U.S. national security because the United States should never ask for a permission slip from anyone on where and when to use our troops.

So in addition to the structural flaws in Iraq’s political transition and institutions, the unconditional U.S. support for Iraq’s divided leaders helps explain why the political surge has not happened. The current policy provides no real incentive for Iraq’s leaders to move forward on their political transition. Iraq won’t have a government capable of imposing its will on the population until the United States makes decisions to break this cycle, stop coddling Iraq’s leaders and take the training wheels off. Iraq’s leaders will not have any incentive to settle their power-sharing disputes and take greater responsibility for their own affairs until the United States sends a clear signal that our support is not without limits and conditions.

Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for the American Progress, is the coauthor of the forthcoming book, “The Prosperity Agenda.”

No time to run away
By David B. Rivkin Jr.

Your musings about the absence of a “political surge” reveal two fundamental mistakes, widely shared among the administration’s critics: The first is a serious failure to appreciate why democracy-building in the Middle East, while a slow and painful process, is the only way to advance America’s long-term national security interests. In this respect, democracy promotion, particularly in a post-9/11 world, reflects both American idealism — a long-standing American tendency to advance morality as a foreign policy imperative — and raison d’etat, or pragmatic considerations. The second failure is an obsession, widely shared among the critics, with the alleged mistakes and ineptitude of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq.

You basically accuse the administration of a strategic failure of imagination, of failing to see how important — and how difficult — democracy promotion is. This is a straw-man argument. Claims that the administration naively equated democracy-building with holding elections do not stand up to the most cursory survey of the administration’s words and deeds. President Bush has always understood that democracy promotion is not only about free elections but about civil society and the rule of law, both of which will take time, but both of which American forces and advisors are working hard to develop and inculcate. The administration has also always understood that holding elections in societies that lack a democratic tradition always entails the risk of radical parties coming to power. Indeed, this realization doesn’t require any particular strategic prescience. It has been a problem in the past, for example, in Algeria, where Islamist electoral success cast the country into years of bloodshed, and under the Palestinian Authority, where Hamas’ rise to power threatens to undo years of slow progress toward peace.

What you and other critics miss, at bottom, is that there are no viable alternatives. The notion that you can somehow first build democratic institutions and civil society within the context of a totalitarian or authoritarian rule and then hold elections is absurd. I would challenge you to explain how one could do this, if, for example, Saddam Hussein or his repugnant sons continued to govern in Iraq, or even if he was replaced by another Baathist strongman. Fundamental social changes are never tidy.

Thus, the United States has two options: We can continue to coddle dictators. Or we can try to promote democracy all at once, warts and all, and take some risks in the process. The path of least resistance — preserving the status quo by supporting tyrants is not only immoral but flawed as a matter of realpolitik. History teaches us that Al Qaeda and other jihadist movements arose, at least in large part, as a response to the foreign-backed dictatorships that have too long dominated Middle Eastern societies. By forsaking democracy promotion in Iraq, we would be making sure that our efforts, and the sacrifices of U.S. troops, would be for naught. Another secular dictatorship imposed on Iraq would inevitably be overthrown and replaced with the worst kind of Iran-style theocracy.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the United States should blindly push for immediate elections everywhere, nor is that the administration’s policy. There are times to work with an authoritarian ruler already in place, such as Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf. Yet doing so requires an extremely difficult balancing act between short-to-intermediate-term needs and our overarching strategic vision, which should always be the spread of democracy, the only reliable formula for prosperity and peace in the region.

As to my second point, it’s important to recognize that the critics’ obsession with Bush’s supposed policy failures inevitably collapses into incoherence. Given your view that establishing democracy in Iraq is a fool’s errand, it should hardly matter how well or how poorly the administration allegedly promoted it. However, in your quest to kick the administration, you pile on a series of additional criticisms, all of which are superfluous if one really assumes that a democratic Iraq is impossible. The mantra that the United States enables sectarian conflict by keeping its forces in Iraq is particularly nonsensical. Do you really believe that a U.S. pullout would encourage Iraqi leaders to end their sectarian struggles? Do you believe that unrealistic deadlines will prompt reconciliation? Once the leaders of Iraq’s various ethnic and religious communities understood that the United States was heading for the door, they would lose all incentive to cooperate with each other. Iraq would descend into catastrophic bloodshed on an order of magnitude far greater than anything we have seen to date.

This is no time to run away. The surge has already transformed the political landscape of the Middle East in our favor. Until very recently, the United States faced a united terrorist front. Groups that would otherwise be opposed to each other — Sunnis, Shiites, fascists, Baathists — had all shared a common hatred and goal of attacking the United States and its allies (the cooperation between fundamentalist Sunni Hamas and fundamentalist Shiite Hezbollah is a case in point). Our now-demonstrated ability to work with Sunnis and Shiites, and with secular and religious Kurds, has broken this united front. That religious Sunnis and Shiites are now fighting side by side with American forces against Al Qaeda and other extremists represents the beginning of a fundamental strategic realignment, reminiscent of the Sino-Soviet split. Our new alliances against terrorism demonstrate to the Islamic world that jihadist propaganda painting America as the common enemy of all Muslims was a lie. The benefits of such an example vastly outweigh the supposed impact of the fact that we are fighting on Islamic soil.

David B. Rivkin Jr. is a partner in the Washington office of Baker Hostetler LLP. He served in a variety of legal and policy positions in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, including stints in the White House, at the Justice Department and at the Energy Department.