Reconcilable Differences
KAGAN, FREDERICK W.
Reconcilable Differences The Iraqi parliament behaves like a bunch of politicians. BY FREDERICK W. KAGAN How much does it matter that the Iraqi parliament has not yet passed an oil...
...Violence and terrorism at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations continued to disrupt America’s peace for decades—and are not unheard of to this day...
...More likely, outside actors with an interest in stirring trouble in Iraq will fi nd their footing once again and either prevent the situation from stabilizing or destabilize it once it has...
...Which is what is happening among Iraq’s Sunni Arabs today...
...At that point, political players will either moderate their objectives or fi nd ways of pursuing them peacefully, or both...
...And this is almost certainly what will happen...
...The reduction in violence is partly a result of the presence of additional American forces and their adoption of a sound counterinsurgency strategy...
...Underlying this argument is the belief that a stable peace in Iraq can occur only after the Iraqis have worked out their own basic problems...
...Where previously Sunni hotheads believed that an alliance with terrorists would give them the leverage to insist upon a maximalist political solution, now local leaders, including leading sheikhs, recognize that the violence is hurting them far more than it is helping them, and that they must reduce their demands and find peaceful ways to pursue them...
...The passage of legislation now would not change that...
...For the United States, reconciliation should mean persuading the peoples of Iraq to address their problems and power struggles peacefully, through a political process rather than through violence, and to reject and oppose those who seek to use force to gain leverage in the political process...
...Nor do Sunni Arab tribesmen coming over to the coalition side ask when an oil law will be passed...
...They ask whether we will continue to help protect them...
...Even if the current Iraqi parliament passed all the benchmark legislation Americans desire tomorrow, Iraqis would continue to debate, argue, adjust, and press for reforms on these key issues, probably for generations...
...Balancing racial, ethnic, religious, and even regional tensions continues to be part of every national political campaign in the United States...
...No doubt the diffi culty of resolving political issues will also seem to some extremists an opening to gain leverage by use of force...
...Frederick W. Kagan is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...In particular, it has created an opportunity for al Qaeda and Iran to establish themselves in Iraq, either directly or through proxies...
...By that standard, even the civil rights legislation of the 1960s hasn’t brought complete and fi nal success...
...We are fi ghting to bring the violence under control as a means of driving al Qaeda and Iranian agents and proxies out of Iraq and keeping them out...
...This has allowed Iraqis to turn against al Qaeda and the Baathist insurgents and form their own local defense groups in concert with the Iraqi government...
...If the standard for a successful end to the American Civil War had been passage of legislation that satisfi ed all parties, then the war would have been judged a failure...
...We have been remarkably successful in 2007 in reducing violence in Iraq...
...Iraqis, like the people of almost any modern state, are engaged in power struggles...
...That is what a self-governing people does...
...But even the president’s most ambitious aims involved only establishing a stable and peaceful democracy in Iraq—which is very different from resolving all tensions, as anyone who knows anything about democracy can tell you...
...According to war critics, it is the only thing that matters: Iraqis’ failure to complete “reconciliation” by passing “benchmark” legislation as required by Washington is evidence not only that the current strategy has failed, but also that any strategy will fail and the United States should simply leave now...
...But achievement of perfect harmony was not the standard for the United States, and it should not be the standard for Iraq...
...There are likely to be spikes in violence in the coming years, as outside actors and hardcore extremists maneuver and resist fi nal defeat...
...What these positive developments do not refl ect is any expectation that Iraq’s internal tensions can be quickly or comprehensively resolved...
...The danger remains that these extremists will antagonize the Sunnis into renewed violence...
...There has been a 60 percent decrease in IED attacks in the past four months...
...Our interest in the outcome is limited: As long as the Iraqis are committed to the principle of resolving their differences through a political process rather than violence, and as long as any settlement they reach is suffi ciently fair so as not to reignite the violence, then our interests will have been secured...
...It even appears to have encouraged some Shias to turn against the Shia militias...
...The acceptance of a political process as the only legitimate means of resolving internal differences cannot be measured by any legislative checklist, but it is the measure that actually counts...
...Many believe that as long as major grievances remain, violence will persist...
...This is a remarkably unrealistic claim...
...The suggestion is that American forces must keep fighting in Iraq until the Arabs and Kurds have put aside their differences, resolved their internal tensions, and started singing “kumbaya” in Arabic...
...The Iraqis can continue to debate the oil law, provincial rights, federalism, and so on for decades (as Americans have debated civil rights, Social Security, immigration, health care, and states rights) with no harm to our interests, assuming their debates are channeled through a political process...
...As the violence recedes, leaders in all the contending Iraqi communities will naturally seek to address their internal differences...
...According to Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the operational commander of U.S...
...Also driving these trends are the Iraqis’ rejection of al Qaeda’s ideology and, more profoundly, their exhaustion with the struggle—a key development in the winding down of any violent internal confl ict...
...BY FREDERICK W. KAGAN How much does it matter that the Iraqi parliament has not yet passed an oil law...
...More likely, a point will be reached where contending groups are convinced that they will suffer more than they will benefi t from resorting to force...
...Rather than being settled once and for all, core issues are addressed through politics, and the accompanying violence is limited and infrequent enough that police can handle it...
...Any meaningful legislation would be a product of compromise, and it is the nature of extremists to reject compromise...
...To this day, not all outstanding political tensions have been resolved in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, or Kosovo, yet the civil wars and terrorist campaigns that once threatened to engulf those places have ended, and the competing factions are pursuing their agendas primarily by peaceful political means...
...There is still a long way to go...
...Our aim is to create a stable government in Iraq that is able to govern its own people and drive violence down to a manageable level...
...Hitherto these struggles have been pursued largely by violence that has destabilized the country and threatened to destabilize the region...
...forces in Iraq, enemy attacks are at their lowest since January 2006 and continue to drop...
...After our own Civil War, Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House did not coincide with the resolution of the slavery problem, much less the racial problem generally...
...Shia extremists inside and outside the government continue to see force as a way to change the situation in their favor and so shape the ultimate political contest to suit them...
...That is exactly what we are now in the midst of doing...
...What matters more than any benchmark laws, then, is whether Iraqis believe they must work to resolve their differences through a political process and that they cannot resort to force because doing so would hurt their cause...
...That is the essence of the reconciliation we seek...
...We therefore made an enormous mistake—one in which the Bush administration was complicit when it promulgated the benchmarks in 2006—by defi ning success as the resolution of Iraq’s internal problems, rather than as the creation of a political system within which Iraqis could pursue their struggles peacefully...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 9
