The Iraq Study Group Absurdity and Iran By Anthony H. Cordesman May 22, 2007 Not everything dies when it should, and the Iraq Study Group is a grim example. Even at the time it was issued, it was a remarkably vacuous and unrealistic report. Its key recommendations were hopelessly impractical, and the detailed report – while good on some aspects of historical diagnostics – ended in a long list of sometimes contradictory conceptual recommendations lacking any justifications, details, and operational plans. It was at best a warning of what overblown committees seeking a lowest common denominator could not accomplish. All the Wrong Recommendations Looking back, The Iraq Study Group Report emerges as even worse. Its key recommendations never made sense. For example, there was never any chance that the development of the Iraqi Army could be rushed forward in ways that would permit rapid US force reductions, and recent months have made it all too clear that the Iraqi Army needs more time, more aid, and more US embeds and support. The existing schedule for creating an Iraqi Army already was far too fast. The months that have followed have shown it takes time, patience, and resources to build an effective military force. It takes political conciliation to allow it to operate in ways that serve the nation. Without internal Iraqi political conciliation, the Army can end up either fracturing along sectarian and ethnic lines or become a Shi’ite dominated force with a separate Kurdish force in the Kurdish area. The ISG’s recommendations to speed development of the Iraq police force to serve the same purpose of enabling faster US withdrawals were truly absurd. Somehow, this was to be accomplished by completely reorganizing the US and MNF-I police aid and training effort, taking it out of the hands of MNSTC-I and putting it back into the same civilian hands that had failed so badly that the police effort had to be taken away from them and put into MNSTC-I hands in October 2005 – after more than two years of failure. It is all too clear that the effective development of the police is even more dependent on political conciliation than the development of the Army, will take several years at a minimum to accomplish, and will immediately come up against the realities of the need for some form of effective local government and a functioning court and criminal justice system. It is equally clear that for the police to function, it must find some way to deal with local security forces, the militias, and the prospect of federalism. The ISG effectively failed to deal with two of these issues, and created an impossible deadline for abolishing the militias with no explanation of how a weak and divided Iraqi government could do this, or what would happen when they were abolished long before the police could provide security. Conciliation by Threatening a Weak Central Government? The ISG never addressed the issue of Iraqi conciliation in any meaningful way, or the level of internal civil conflict. It did not explain how its implied time schedule could avoid pushing the country towards civil war or suggest any practical ways to heal the fractures inside Iraqi society. It offered no useful plans for new incentives, and implied that a weak national government without strong Sunni participation, with a steadily more divided Shi’ite majority, and a Kurdish faction interested in autonomy, could somehow be pressured into effective action by some form of US benchmarks and deadlines. “We’ll blame you as we leave,” has since become something of a mantra for the US Congress. Then as now, however, it does not explain what the US should be prepared to do to meet its strategic interests in Iraq or the region, or deal with the fact that the US failures to prepare for nation-building and stability operations are at least as much an explanation for why Iraq is broken as any Iraqi failures. Fixing Iraq from the Outside? As for its idea of a regional conference held under US auspices to solve the problems in Iraq, this was probably the most absurd recommendation of all. The US lacked the credibility to call such a conference, and it was never clear why bringing together neighboring powers with deeply diverse interests was going to produce any unity of outside efforts, much less unite Iraq. When the Iraqi government did try to hold a similar form of such a conference under its auspices, it produced a few gestures from already friendly states, no progress in aiding internal conciliation in Iraq, and no real progress in terms of changing the attitudes of outside powers. It is true that the Bush Administration seems to have finally learned that it needs to talk to Iran and Syria, rather than demonize them. It is all too clear, however, that such dialogue may produce very limited results. Syria may be willing to deal. Alawites (16% of the population) are not Shi’ites; Syria has a strong Sunni majority (74%). The Syrian Ba’ath is largely secular and has every reason to fear Islamist extremists – Sunni and Shi’ite. In practice, however, the US and Syria need time to deal with issues like Israel, the Golan, and Lebanon – if they can deal with them at all. The best deal they can hope for on Iraq is a trade where Syria quietly cracks down on Sunni Iraqi insurgent groups operating in Syria in exchange for the US backing off treating Syria as a Pariah and ceasing to push hard on the Hariri assassination. If this happens, it will be quiet and bilateral, not something for a major conference. The ISG focus on Iran and Syria also ignored Turkey and the Sunni Gulf states. The US, Iraq, the Kurds, and Turkey have issues to resolve that are already extremely difficult and will play out over years. Iraq's national unity is a key to avoiding a Kurdish-Turkish clash and Arab-Kurdish tensions are a major problem that the US must try to address. Both require focused US diplomacy and not regional meetings. There are good reasons that a figure like King Abdullah calls the US occupation of Iraq illegitimate. Arab Sunnis see the current surge strategy as empowering Arab Shi'ites and Iraqi separatism at the expense of Sunnis and Iraq's unity as an Arab nation. These views represent different values from the US, and underestimate just how hard the US is actually pushing for conciliation and unity. They do, however, need to be acknowledged and will be critical to the future US position in the Gulf -- whether or not the US is forced to withdraw. Once again, a regional conference is perhaps the worst possible way to address such sensitive issues. Real World Prospects with Iran As for talking to Iran, the US should make every effort to have an official dialogue. It isn’t going to change the regime, it has a host of issues that it should try to address, and the entire history of the Cold War indicates it is better to talk to hostile regimes and try to prepare the way for limited cooperation and a better future. Iran has made it clear, however, that there is not going to be any grand bargain, easy progress on the nuclear issue, cutback on Iranian missile development and asymmetric forces in the Gulf, or progress on Israel and the support of anti-Israeli extremists. US and Iranian envoys are to meet in Baghdad on May 28th. However, Iran’s position on meeting with the US to talk about Iraq is hardly reassuring. Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in Mashad on May 17th that Iran only agreed to “face- to-face” talks with the US so that it could, “remind the US of its responsibilities and duties regarding security,” and to “give them an ultimatum… The talks will only be about the responsibilities of the occupiers in Iraq... They think that the Islamic Republic has changed its firm, logical, and defendable policy in rejecting negotiation with the US. They are wrong… How is it possible to negotiate with the arrogant, bullying, expansionist, and colonialist government of the US.” Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said this Friday at the World Economic Forum in the Middle East in Jordan that the only way to deal with the issue is for the US to admit that its role in Iraq is illegitimate and withdraw from Iraq and the Gulf, leaving security to Iraq’s neighbors. "We believe that sooner or later they have to decide to withdraw their troops from Iraq because that is the cause for the continuation of terrorist activities.” He went on to say that Iraqi instability and the US occupation of Iraq were the two fundamental problems plaguing Iran's neighbors, and called for a "comprehensive solution" to address both issues that really meant pushing the US out of the region. These were not low profile remarks. He spoke while sharing a panel with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, Jordanian Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit, the Bahraini Crown Prince Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa and Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to the United States. Ali Larijani said at the same meeting that the Bush administration was trying to bring Baathists back to power to create political conditions where it could leave Iraq: "Unfortunately, the Americans are under some pressure to leave faster (from) Iraq. They want some elements in Iraq to take control and they discovered the Baathists could do the job.” Larijani went on to warn that efforts at conciliation would mean, "disaster for the Iraqi people, for the Iranians, for the Kuwaitis, (and) for the region." Whatever the US might have done in talking to Iran when it seemed to have won in Iraq, and while Iran was under Khatami, it almost certainly cannot do now.