Op Ed of the Week August 4, 2006

Time for Plan B
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
August 4, 2006
It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.

When our top commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, tells a Senate Committee, as he did yesterday, that “the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it,” it means that three years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working. That means “staying the course” is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B — how we might disengage with the least damage possible.

It seemed to me over the last three years that, even with all the Bush team’s missteps, we had to give our Iraqi partners a chance to produce a transitional government, then write a constitution, then hold an election and then, finally, put together their first elected cabinet. But now they have done all of that — and the situation has only worsened.

The Sunni jihadists and Baathists are as dedicated as ever to making this U.S.-Iraqi democracy initiative fail. That, and the runaway sectarian violence resulting from having too few U.S. troops and allowing a militia culture to become embedded, have made Iraq a lawless mess.

Yes, I believe it was and remains hugely important to try to partner with Iraqis to create one good example in the heart of the Arab world of a decent, progressive state, where the politics of fear and tribalism do not reign — the politics that has produced all the pathologies of unemployment, religious intolerance and repression that make the Middle East so dangerous to itself and others.

But the administration now has to admit what anyone — including myself — who believed in the importance of getting Iraq right has to admit: Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening, and we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.

Since the Bush team never gave us a Plan A for Iraq, it at least owes us a Plan B. It’s not easy. Here are my first thoughts about a Plan B and some of the implications.

I think we need to try a last-ditch Bosnia-like peace conference that would bring together all of Iraq’s factions and neighbors. Just as Bosnia could be solved only by an international peace force and the Dayton conference — involving Russia, Europe and the U.S., the powers most affected by Bosnia’s implosion — the civil war in Iraq can be quelled only by a coalition of those most affected by Iraq’s implosion: the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan, India, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Syria and Jordan. As in Bosnia, any solution will have to be some form of federalism, a division of oil wealth and policing by an international force, where needed.

For such a conference to come about, though, the U.S. would probably need to declare its intention to leave. Iraqis, other Arabs, Europeans and Chinese will get serious about helping to salvage Iraq only if they believe we are leaving and it will damage their interests.

What would be the consequences of leaving without such a last-ditch peace effort, or if it just fails? Iraq could erupt into a much wider civil war, drawing in its neighbors. Or, Iraqis might stare into this abyss and actually come to terms with each other on their own. Our presence may be part of the problem. It’s hard to know.
If Iraq opts for all-out civil war, its two million barrels a day will be off the market and oil could go above $100 a barrel. (That would, however, spur more investment in alternative fuels that could one day make us independent of this volatile region.)

Some fear that Iran will be the winner. But will it? Once we are out of Iraq, Iran will have to manage the boiling pot next door. That will be a huge problem for Iran. The historical enmity toward Iran by Iraqi Arabs — enmity temporarily focused on us — will re-emerge. And Iran will also have to compete with its ally Syria for influence in Iraq.

Yes, the best way to contain Iran would have been to produce a real Shiite-led democracy in Iraq, exposing the phony one in Tehran. But second best is leaving Iraq. Because the worst option — the one Iran loves — is for us to stay in Iraq, bleeding, and in easy range to be hit by Iran if we strike its nukes.
Finally, the war in Iraq has so divided us at home and abroad that leaving, while bringing other problems, might also make it easier to build coalitions to deal with post-U.S. Iraq, Iran, Hezbollah and Syria. All these problems are connected. We need to deal with Iran and Syria, but from a position of strength — and that requires a broad coalition.

The longer we maintain a unilateral failing strategy in Iraq, the harder it will be to build such a coalition, and the stronger the enemies of freedom will become.

Read What Friedman wrote a year ago about supporting the Iraq War. It is interesting!!!

Why did Friedman support the war in Iraq?
Why did I think this was important? It had to do with 9/11.

The events of 9/11 highlighted something fundamental, as far as I was concerned. It highlighted the fact that for the last 50 years we, the U.S., have treated the Arab states as a collection of big gas stations. That’s all. And our basic message to them was: Guys, just keep your pumps open, your prices low and — in recent years — be nice to the Israelis, and you can do whatever you want out back. You can treat your women however you want as far as we are concerned. You can teach your children to hate Christians, Hindus and Jews however much you want. You can preach from your mosques whatever intolerance you want. You can deprive your young people of any chance to engage in free and democratic elections as much as you want. You can indulge in however much corruption you want. You can print whatever conspiracy theories and lies about America in your newspapers that you like. You can choke your universities with almost all religion classes and nothing that will prepare your young people for the 21st century as much as you want. Yes, you can do all these things “out back” — just keep your pumps open, your prices low and be nice to the Jews out front. That was our message.

It is my view that on 9/11 we, America, got hit with the distilled essence of everything that was going on out back in the Arab-Muslim world. That is where Al-Qaeda emerged — from the swamp of pathologies that were bubbling out back in that world. Therefore, it seemed to me that we had both a moral and strategic interest in fundamentally shifting policy from preserving the status quo to overturning it. That is, we had a fundamental interest in trying to collaborate with Arabs and Muslims — in this case the Iraqi exiles — to see if we could actually produce a decent government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world that would begin to take on the pathologies and dysfunction there that were producing a generation of young people who hated us, hated their own governments, were totally humiliated and were ready to commit suicide almost at the drop of a hat.

Because when you have a civilization that is spinning off so many young people ready to commit suicide, you have a real threat to open societies as we know them. When you have people ready to blow themselves up using instruments from our daily lives — the cellphone, the shoe, the backpack, the car, the airplane — you have people who are destroying the very thing that keeps an open society open, and that is trust.

I trust when I get on an airplane that the person next to me doesn’t have exploding shoes. I trust when I walk to my office the person next to me is not carrying a bomb-laden backpack. Without trust there is no open society, because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society. So you will pardon me if I feel that we, the residents of every open society, faced a fundamental danger, post-9/11, from the pathologies going on out back in the Arab world.

It was for those reasons that I was ready, after 9/11, to entertain the idea of invading Iraq and, in collaboration with Iraqis, trying to build a new model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. As readers of this column know, I never believed or wrote that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could threaten us. I never believed or wrote that invading Iraq on the pretext of W.M.D. was legitimate. In fact, I wrote a column before the war urging the president to “tell the truth” [Feb. 19, 2003] that the right reason for the war was not W.M.D. It was to deal with the problem of P.M.D. — people of mass destruction. They were the real threat to open societies, and they were coming from out back in the Arab-Muslim world.
But, as much as I felt that the Iraq war if done right could be really important, I also knew that it would be really hard. That was why I coined my ''Pottery Barn rule”: You break it you own it. (I told it to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; he told it to Colin Powell; Colin Powell told it to Bush and to Bob Woodward, without saying it came from me, and that is how it ended up in Woodward’s book in Colin Powell’s voice.)

I knew from living in Beirut in the midst of the civil war there that it would take a lot of troops, a lot of money, a lot of domestic sacrifice, a different energy policy, a different approach to the Arab-Israel question and a lot of international cover to make this work. Everything I wrote before, during and after the war stressed those points. One in particular that I repeated was that there is no country in the world that we could not destroy on our own, but there was no country in the world that we could rebuild on our own. We needed allies to both share the cost and buy more legitimacy for the time it will take to transform Iraq.
My anger at the administration derives from the fact that I thought Iraq was so important that, as a columnist, I was going to set my own personal politics aside as I weighed the pros and cons. I checked my politics at the door. What I so resented — and anyone who wants to call me naive on this is fully justified — was that the Bush people never checked their politics at the door and that these people actually thought this was going to be easy.

They sent many political hacks to run the post-war in Baghdad, and Don Rumsfeld used Iraq as a lab test to try to prove that the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force was no longer valid. He gave us instead the Rumsfeld Doctrine, what I call “just enough troops to lose.” I believe, and have written, that Rumsfeld should have been fired a long time ago. He is the most overrated man in Washington, and young Americans have been killed and maimed because of his stubborn foolishness.

Let me repeat, anyone who says I should have known this before the war that these guys would never deliver the kind of war I advocated has a point. I placed my hopes over my experience. I assumed that given how important Iraq is to the Bush legacy, the president would never tolerate the sort of incompetence he has tolerated. I was wrong.

As for the overall enterprise, though, I still have a glimmer of hope that we can get a decent outcome in Iraq, one that will, over time, help tilt the Arab-Muslim world from the downward slope that it is on now onto a more positive track. And I believe that if we do that we will have done something very, very important both morally and strategically.

So to all of you who are writing in asking me to give up, let me simply say: I will give up when Iraqis give up and when the young Americans over in Iraq give up. My sense in talking to both of them is that they too still feel that, despite all that has happened, a decent outcome is still possible. As long as that is the case, I am going to hang in there.

I am not trying to win a debate. I am trying to report and write in a way that might make a little contribution to getting this thing right and on the right track — because I think it really could be that important for the world that my kids and yours are going to grow up in. That is my focus. I may be all wrong, but I did not come to this position frivolously or by just following my political loyalties. I know what I think and I know why I think it. And if I draw the conclusion that there is no hope for success, I will say that. But I am not there yet.