Sticking In Iraq

Writing in the LA Times, Barbara F. Walter of the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego tells us that a US withdrawal from Iraq may be premature:

Over the last 15 years, scholars have collected and analyzed data on the 125 or so civil wars that have taken place around the world since 1940. Two findings suggest that the outlook for Iraq is significantly more pessimistic than policymakers in the U.S. or Iraq would hope.

The first is what academics Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis call the conflict trap. A country that has experienced one civil war is much more likely to experience a second and third civil war.

That's partly because violence tends to exacerbate the political, economic and social problems that caused war to break out in the first place. But it is also because the first civil war often ends with no clear victor and no enforceable peace settlement. As soon as the combatants have rested and resupplied, strong incentives exist to try to recapture the state.

...The second finding is what I call the settlement dilemma. Combatants who end their civil war in a compromise settlement -- such as the agreement to share power in Iraq -- almost always return to war unless a third party is there to help them enforce the terms. That's because agreements leave combatants, especially weaker combatants, vulnerable to exploitation once they disarm, demobilize and prepare for peace. In the absence of third-party enforcement, the weaker side is better off trying to fight for full control of the state now, rather than accepting an agreement that would leave it open to abuse in the future.

Iraq today faces both of these problems. No one group has been able to win a decisive military victory, even though violence is down from the high of 2006. Shiite groups continue to compete for power and influence, conflict continues among the Kurds and various factions over valuable oil fields in the north, and Al Qaeda remains ready to realign with the Sunnis should the opportunity arise. American soldiers have kept a lid on internecine fighting. But the recent increase in violence in some of Iraq's cities reveals that different groups began jockeying for position as U.S. troops left the cities in the hands of Iraqi security forces in June and in anticipation of complete U.S. withdrawal.

Interesting - although posed as two problems, each amounts to citing the lack of a clear victory by one faction.  This takes us back to the discussion of the 80% Solution that preceded the surge - Dan Drezner explained back in November 2006 that civil wars end with a winner.  My Eerily Unprescient thoughts were here.

Back to Ms. Walter:

The U.S. needs to decide what outcome it is willing to live with in Iraq. It's likely that if the U.S. withdraws all of its troops on schedule, the strategic balance will dramatically shift in favor of the Shiites, and they will press for full control over the state. This, in turn, will probably goad the Sunnis and Kurds back to war, likely ending in a brutal Shiite victory and the establishment of an authoritarian state.

If the U.S. wants to avert this scenario, it will need to create real incentives for Maliki and the Shiites to offer a fair deal that transfers real political power to the Sunnis and Kurds by the 2011 deadline, and then it needs to help them enforce it over time. This would require that those 50,000 "support troops" remain in Iraq until the new political institutions are firmly established, something most experts believe will take an additional five to 10 years.

Comments

[narciso]

Iraq didn't go through a civil war, no matter what John Walton, Richard Engel and
Michael Ware say. Of course, their policies seem to be designed to bring about that outcome

[Original MikeS]

The obvious answer would be to redeploy our forces to a nearby country rather than to withdraw from the theater altogether. I suggest an adjacent country east of Iraq.

[Fresh Air]

God, for the last time, what happened in Iraq was not a civil war, at least not in the conventional sense. It was a diabolical plot to incite a civil war, orchestrated by Al Qaeda. TM, why don't you push back on this stuff instead of blindly repeating memes based upon false premises? More rubbish from foreign policy think-tank-types.

[cboldt]

That's because agreements leave combatants, especially weaker combatants, vulnerable to exploitation once they disarm, demobilize and prepare for peace.

Skip the "disarm" step, and the issue of exploitation become muted. If the putative victor needs to disarm his opposition, then war must go on.

[Sandy Daze]

Pah. The situation is well in hand with the Veep taking on Iraq as his special project at the behest of The Joker.

There is really no issue, except every Iraqi I talk with thinks Biden is a well, <. . .> (comments not fit for a family blog).

[matt]

Maliki is a very biased player. He is not looked upon as a good faith negotiator by the Kurds, Sunnis and other parties. He has a lot of the support that Sadr and the Shiite militias had/have.

We need to be the guarantor of the peace for some time to come until they can build trust and nonsectarian institutions.