Make Democracy Work

Published April 9, 2008 in East Valley Tribune Opinions as “Iraq five years later: Finding a path out.”

April 9, 2003 turned out to be the climax of the war—the day U.S. troops entered Baghdad and the Saddam Hussein regime fell. However, challenges quickly mounted and a simplistic happy ending eludes us.

Five years later President Bush prepares to hand the reins to his successor. Finding a path out remains as murky as ever—but for the sake of our country, our troops and the Iraqis, we need to navigate that treacherous course.

We have three factors to manage: local stability within Iraqi neighborhoods and provinces, finding a means for Iraq to come together as a whole, and relieving the tremendous burden war has placed on our armed forces collectively as well as individual soldiers and their families.

As General David Petraeus testifies again before the Senate and House Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, we should commend his impressive job transforming the manner in which our troops are engaged in Iraq. Petraeus drafted a new counterinsurgency manual in 2006. Building off lessons learned in Vietnam along with what troop commanders were discovering in Afghanistan and Iraq, he realized destroying an enemy through superior firepower fails. Instead Petraeus has emphasized building strategic alliances, including converting former enemies into partners. He’s given military field commanders far more latitude to strike up deals; there’s funding to help place these partners on the payroll and build community locally, and when it’s most effective we see reconciliation.

One recent account in Newsweek portrayed Army captain Tim Wright’s work in the Baghdad neighborhood of Bayaa. Most strikingly in reaching out to develop an alliance with leaders loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, he personally apologized to a man he had arrested before releasing him. In turn the man became his critical intermediary with a figure higher up who could not risk meeting personally with Wright. Wright helped organize a February 4 meeting of about 20 tribal sheiks, councilmen, religious figures and other community leaders to begin talks toward creating preliminary steps for Sunnis to begin returning to this once blended neighborhood. Even Wright admits that path will be a long one.

But progress in a neighborhood still doesn’t create a nation. The war has been a humanitarian disaster. The International Organization for Migration finds one in five Iraqis have been displaced; 2.7 million have fled their homes, but remain in Iraq and another 2.4 million are refugees primarily in Syria and Jordan. Most face miserable health or economic situations. In addition, three carefully managed scientific household field surveys indicate that the actual level of deaths among Iraqis from the war is at least 600,000 and possibly as high as 1.2 million.

Al-Sadr’s forces are likely the most powerful in Iraq. We recognize this locally, but have no way of handling it nationally. American strategists fear al-Sadr’s more militant followers could sweep Iraq’s October elections. When Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s Iraqi army attacked al-Sadr’s army to undercut his Shiite rival, the U.S. provided air attack support. That undermined the work of men like Wright working with Al-Sadr’s supporters in neighborhood regions. We can’t hope to bring peace, unless we’re honest brokers, but this will require a level of diplomacy internally and with neighboring countries, including Iran, that the Bush Administration has failed to embrace. We need to find international partners who can best help lead a path toward internal stability.

This imperative is further reinforced because our troop commitment is unsustainable. We cannot allow the physical and mental toll on our armed forces to continue as the deaths and injuries mount, marriages shatter, and those returning with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder rise with each returning tour. We’re already failing to provide sufficient services to those harmed. Foreign Policy magazine’s recent survey of 3,400 retired and active officers found 88 percent agreeing that our military was stretched dangerously thin as we contemplate future threats.

We must strategically transition toward troop withdrawal.

Dave Wells hold a doctorate in Political Economy and Public Policy and is president of the Arizona Institute for Peace Education and Research. Reach him at President@aiper.org.Sources:Newsweek on Petraeus field manual and Wright: