Which way to the front?

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

Don’t avoid the tough questions
By David B. Rivkin Jr.

Brian, according to your recent article in the Washington Post, and as you will undoubtedly argue in your reply, we are in the middle of “strategic drift” in Iraq. You call for a full-throated reaffirmation of the importance of getting U.S. troops out of what you call an Iraqi “quagmire.” Like other critics, you seek to singularize the war in Iraq, to decouple it from the broader war against jihadist entities and to suggest that it is unwinnable. In my view, all of these arguments are advanced to conceal a basic aversion to any difficult and protracted U.S. military engagement overseas.

This effort to make Iraq sui generis and not a part of the broader war against terrorist entities and their state sponsors is myopic. For example, you point out that one reason to leave Iraq is so that we can better prosecute other contingencies or wars, with Afghanistan being the prime example. I don’t understand how this makes any military or strategic sense. Afghanistan, while important, is on the periphery of the greater Middle East; it is not by any consideration less pivotal than oil-rich Iraq, which lies at the heart of the Middle East. The main difference between the two is that, so far, the going has been easier in Afghanistan, both in terms of casualties and the tempo of the insurgency. There is, of course, also the fact that Afghanistan-based forces carried out the 9/11 attacks, but this factor, while historically significant, does not necessarily suggest that other hostile powers ought not to be engaged with equal vigor. To state an obvious historical example, Nazi Germany had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. Yet, President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded that Germany was the more powerful and more dangerous of the Axis powers and chose to concentrate the first several years of the war on prosecuting the European land war, starving the campaign in the Pacific of men and materiel.

History, of course, has proved the wisdom of Roosevelt’s strategic choice, even though he had numerous critics who deplored the decision to enter the European land war, using essentially the same arguments — “Hitler did not attack us at Pearl Harbor” — that you are making today.)

Moreover, just because something is easier does not make it more important. In fact, operations in Afghanistan are steadily becoming more challenging as our enemies share lessons from Iraq at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. Do you really doubt that for the U.S. to accept an ignominious defeat at the hands of various Iraqi insurgents would prompt the Taliban and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan to redouble their efforts? Surely, Brian, a U.S. that refuses to defeat an insurgency in Iraq, while suffering a historically modest level of casualties, can hardly claim to be able to defeat an insurgency in any other country. Indeed, withdrawal would invite all of our enemies, in the Middle East and elsewhere, to discount to zero our ability to engage in military operations, because we would have just demonstrated our unwillingness to do what it takes to tackle insurgencies successfully.

I hate to put it in such stark terms, but choosing defeat in Iraq would effectively transform the world’s reigning military power into an impotent Gulliver, unable to protect either itself or its friends against the world’s rogue regimes. Once the world’s rogues know that the mere threat of an insurgency will deter the U.S. from going after them, they will feel emboldened to offer the same level of support to terrorist groups as that offered by Afghanistan’s Taliban in the years leading to 9/11.

Your notion that the U.S. military presence in Iraq, and presumably elsewhere in the Middle East, is the source of all our troubles is a political fig leaf covering up a strategy of flabby pacifism. Of course the U.S. military presence creates some anti-American sentiments and may even swell the ranks of jihadis. This, by the way, is true in any war. America’s engagement of its past enemies also served to antagonize adversaries and, for a time, to rally their populations around America-hating governments. But in war, traditionally the most complex and interactive of all human endeavors, more than one trend is underway at a given time. Decisive and successful engagement of our enemies eventually fractures the support they have managed to attract, brings countries and movements opposed to them to our side and creates new allies and opportunities. A reputation for toughness, willingness to stick it out, and, ultimately, military invincibility has served America and every other great power in human history well. Pretending otherwise is just a cop-out.

Related to the fallacious view that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is causing all the problems in the Middle East is the equally misguided belief that U.S. withdrawal would be a strategic panacea. To imagine that Syria and Iran, who have been doing their utmost to undermine Iraq’s stability, will suddenly change their stripes is incredible. The related idea that the United States would have the most leverage once it set a firm departure date from Iraq is simply not credible. As Henry Kissinger has frequently said, diplomacy not backed by the threat of force is inherently weak. The thought that Iran and Syria would do anything other than seek an utter strategic collapse in Iraq is unbelievable. Their overriding and consistent priority is to humiliate the United States, procure its defeat and drive it out of the region.

We must not give these regimes and the terrorist organizations they aid and abet the victory they seek. In Iraq, this means working hard to create conditions in which the American military presence can be reduced, casualty levels driven down and internal political reconciliation and regional dialogue promoted at all levels. Achieving these goals also means acknowledging that they may take years to perfect and that, despite all the abuse this term has incurred from the critics, the U.S. must “stay the course.” If we don’t, new attacks, far more horrible than those of 9/11, are certain to ensue, because the goal of our enemies is not merely to destroy Israel and drive the U.S. out of the Middle East. As you know, their ultimate objective is to destroy the Western democracies and establish a global Islamic caliphate, a social and political order deeply inimical to everything we hold dear. A U.S. defeat in Iraq would embolden them to press ahead all the more resolutely toward this end.

Finally, Brian, my problem with most of the criticisms you offer is that they deny even the need to ponder tough questions. If the U.S. military presence is counterproductive, then, by definition, you and other critics do not need to balance the costs and benefits of sustained American military engagement in a post-9/11 world. Likewise, when the critics claim that stressful interrogation techniques don’t work because they inevitably produce faulty information, or that warrantless surveillance is useless because it merely inundates the government with trivial data, they engage in conduct unworthy of America’s political and constitutional traditions. How to balance liberty and public safety is the age-old question for this and other democracies. It needs to be debated seriously and in a nuanced fashion. To claim that there is no need to worry about this balancing, that all of the difficult and controversial aspects of the war on terror need not be legitimately considered because they are all useless, is just a way to dodge more difficult questions. It is at best counterproductive and certainly not the way forward.

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.

No progress until the post-Bush era
By Brian Katulis

David, I’ve enjoyed these exchanges with you on this important topic.

The discussion has been quite revelatory in large part because your posts put on full display to the readers how irrelevant and outmoded the conservative line of thinking is — not only on Iraq but on the broader security threats that our country faces.

Your final post today demonstrates how out of touch with world reality many conservatives have become. Your post is a vague defense of the Bush administration’s discredited strategy; the argument amounts to a lot of bluster but not much substance. You seek to avoid the question at hand by engaging in lazy sloganeering (much of which sounds like it is circa 2005, which didn’t work then and won’t work now). It’s as if we simply just say the catchphrase “let’s not lose our nerve” and repeat Republican National Committee talking points like “let’s not choose defeat,” then everything will sort itself out.

The ingredients of this line of argumentation are pretty formulaic by now — make a few weak references to historical analogies that bear little relation to the challenges posed in Iraq and the broader battle against Islamist extremism, and repeat a series of slogans — “stay the course,” “embolden our enemies,” “cut and run,” and then you have an argument.

Sorry, but that won’t cut it anymore. It actually would be laughable if the consequences of the course of action (it would be too generous to call it a strategy) that you vaguely defend weren’t so dire.

More than six years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States is not winning a struggle it cannot afford to lose — a fight against global extremism. Though President Bush identified radical ideology and extremism as a central threat, his administration has taken few effective steps to reduce that threat in the world. As last year’s National Intelligence Estimate from our country’s intelligence agencies concluded, the Iraq war has increased radicalism and made the global terror threat worse. On the Bush administration’s watch, the number of global terror attacks skyrocketed — tripling in the years after the Iraq invasion. Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders remain on the loose, including top Al Qaeda propagandist Abu Yahya al-Libi, who escaped from Bagram prison in Afghanistan in 2005 — a stunning escape by any measure, but par for the course given the Bush administration’s incompetent management of the fight against global terrorists.

The extended conventional troop deployment in Iraq has produced considerable strains on our military. The Army has lowered it recruiting standards to unprecedented levels, and the United States no longer has a strategic ground reserve as a result of the extended deployments. The crisis is so bad that the Army recently had to begin offering a $45,000 signing bonus for potential recruits. It is sadly ironic that a group of conservative leaders who argued that “help was on the way” for the Pentagon in 2000 has brought the all-volunteer military to the breaking point.

The financial cost of the war is enormous — costing a family of four about $20,000 according to a recent estimate from Congress. The conservative agenda for America — spend, spend, and cut taxes, all the while funding a national security strategy that has not made Americans any safer — has weakened our position in the world while saddling us with a growing mountain of foreign debt.

The path outlined by conservatives is not making Americans safer, nor is it sustainable. Most Americans realize this, and that is why the country is in for significant change in the coming year — change that actually takes back control of our national security agenda, rather than continuing on the same path.

On Iraq, there is not likely to be a significant change of direction until a new commander in chief is in the White House. The plan of simply arming different sides of Iraq’s civil wars without any clear conception of how this moves the country to sustainable security will continue until January 2009. Unless the Bush administration takes a substantially different approach to the region, it will continue on the same path in Iraq. It is not likely to change course in Iraq or the region because it simply lacks a coherent strategy or set of policy objectives, as retired Marine Corps Gen. John Sheehan argued when he turned down the Iraq and Afghanistan war czar job earlier this year. Sheehan wrote, “What I found in discussions with current and former members of this administration is that there is no agreed-upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region. ... The current Washington decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically.”

So we are likely to muddle along as a country with the same outmoded strategy that we’ve had for the last seven years. In 2009, we will have a fresh start and a new opportunity to clean up the messes made by the Bush administration’s policies. A wiser course will be set — one that is not dissimilar to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that Bush imprudently chose to ignore last year.

Its main components will include a military alignment centered on a phased redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq that restores a realistic military engagement strategy combined with intensified diplomatic efforts to stabilize the Middle East. The U.S. troop redeployment will largely focus on getting forces out of the cross hairs of Iraq’s internal conflicts; we will keep a large contingent in the Gulf region to serve as a stabilizing force.

The international diplomacy focused on stabilizing Iraq will not be simple or easy, but it will be more robust and have a greater chance for success because the world will be more willing to cooperate with an America that is no longer led by Bush. It will take years to help Iraqi leaders settle their differences over power-sharing, but that will only come through an emergency diplomatic intervention with support from other global and regional powers. Much work will need to be done to clean up the messes involving the large Iraqi refugee problem that is affecting the region. A pragmatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear crisis will be explored through a policy of tough engagement rather than the course of passive appeasement followed by the Bush administration. The United States will begin to reengage in serious steps to resolve the key Arab-Israeli conflict, after largely ignoring it under Bush. This new strategy will fundamentally recognize that the different challenges in Iraq and throughout the Middle East are indeed connected, and that passively waiting for Iraqi leaders to settle their power-sharing differences and giving this divided leadership a permission slip on where to use America’s military forces is not the right path.

More broadly, we will embark on a new phase in our fight against global terror networks, one that recognizes that invading and occupying countries simply takes the bait from extremists who use asymmetrical warfare to advance their agenda. We won’t abandon democracy promotion, but instead will actually revitalize it by recognizing that democracy promotion at the point of the gun and under the threat of preventive war fails. The more effective course will be a strategy that enhances people’s prosperity and security — and not just a narrow definition of freedom centered on elections — to make Americans more secure.

All of these strands will be put together in a more pragmatic and coherent strategy that sees the world as it is, not as we wish and dream it might be. In essence, the United States will begin to take back control of its national security, rather than leaving it in the hands of dreamers who live a world more connected to their ideologies than reality. It won’t be easy cleaning up the messes left behind by the Bush administration, but America is a great country, and it is certain to move beyond this disastrous phase in our history.

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