What Would Happen if the US Did Leave Iraq?

Celestine Bohlen of Bloomberg News reviews a book that postulates an answer to a question that more and more Americans are asking ...

"The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End"
by Peter W. Galbraith
Simon & Schuster, 260 pp., $26

Peter Galbraith, a sometime U.S. diplomat, journalist and foreign-policy analyst, has a solution to stop the ever-widening cyclone of sectarian violence that has engulfed Iraq and made a mockery of U.S. goals there.

Let the country fall apart, he writes in "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End." That, he says, is the only way to give the region the framework it needs to restore stability in the post-Saddam Hussein era.

To a large extent, that has already happened. The Kurds have effectively had their own state since 1991, when the U.S. guaranteed their security with a no-fly zone after the first Gulf War. Farther to the south, Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis are now pulling away from each other, even as they carry out increasingly horrible vendettas. Eight of Iraq's nine southern provinces are dominated by the country's main Shiite party.

Galbraith's book tracks his own itinerary through the Iraq story. His first trip was in 1987 when, as a U.S. Senate staffer, he witnessed Saddam's murderous policies against the Kurds, the country's largest minority.

He is not a man to hide his agenda. In 1991, Galbraith broke the Senate staff's code of silence with a public campaign to rescue Iraq's Kurdish population from the wrath of Saddam's army. As U.S. ambassador to Croatia from 1993 to 1998, he showed an obvious sympathy for the Croats as they sought to even the score with the Serbs during the Yugoslav war.

Return to Iraq

Galbraith returned to Iraq several times before 2003, when he went to cover the Iraq war for ABC from the region under Kurdish control. His book is unabashedly pro-Kurdish independence, justified because of their suffering under Arab rule and by the success of their autonomous regional government.

He's got no use at all for the U.S. administrators in Iraq, particularly L. Paul Bremer, who became head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003. In Galbraith's telling, the CPA chief matched his overlords in Washington in his ignorance and arrogance, relying largely on an inexperienced staff, including young recruits from right-wing think tanks. A 24-year-old former White House aide without legal experience helped negotiate the Transitional Administrative Law (which was later largely ignored).

The incompetence and even corruption on display during the first two years continue to haunt Iraq, Galbraith writes. In the meantime, the U.S. clings to an illusion of a united Iraq, which he says flies in the face of the deepening distrust among the country's three major communities.

Federalism

In Galbraith's view, the new Iraqi Constitution, adopted by referendum on Oct. 15, 2005, helped create a loose federalism that works -- at least for now. What isn't working, he argues, is the U.S. presence, which has not only failed to provide security but is a lightning rod for suicide bombers.

When it comes to a formula for pulling out U.S. troops, Galbraith's analysis is a bit tenuous, and even disingenuous. He argues that Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who dominated the country under Saddam Hussein and have since fought against the dissolution of central authority, "may come to see the formation" of their own separate region as necessary for their self-protection. Then, he writes, the U.S. could withdraw, provided the Sunnis guarantee that they won't give free run to al-Qaida.

Wishful thinking

There is more wishful thinking in Galbraith's scenario. He sees signs that Turkey, which has long opposed a Kurdish state, will accept an Iraqi Kurdistan as a buffer to an Islamic Arab state to the south. He suggests that a theocratic Shiite state in the south could become a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida and other Sunni fundamentalists.

There are, however, problems for which Galbraith provides no solution, such as the mushrooming civil war in Baghdad. He is certain only that a continuing U.S. presence is making a messy situation worse.

"By invading Iraq and mismanaging the aftermath, the United States precipitated Iraq's collapse as a unified state, but did not cause it," he says. The de facto partition in much of the country now in place should be accepted. "In Baghdad and other mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, the United States cannot contribute to the solution, because there is no solution, at least in the foreseeable future."

Which is where the wishful thinking ends.