No Surge of Interest
by Aluf Benn
Israel's focus is still on Iran.
TEL AVIV, Israel
Iraq is the most under-reported story in Israel. Though only several hundred miles away, the violent events in Iraq appear to most Israelis as happening on another planet. Israeli officials refrain from talking about the war in Iraq, and therefore, the issue has no domestic political angle. The media reports it as foreign news, treating sectarian violence in Baghdad as some sort of natural disaster, next to stories about floods in China and earthquakes in India.
Saddam Hussein's execution received more attention, but even that unique event appeared to Israelis as curiosity, rather than invoking public discussion. A fierce enemy of the Jewish state, who had fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam was long forgotten since his ouster. Only Shimon Peres, alone among Israeli officials, congratulated his death penalty. The government kept silent.
Amid this backdrop, it is little wonder that President George W. Bush's major address on Iraq policy, on January 10, attracted only little attention here. Typically self-centered, the Israeli media paid far more attention to breaking news about the coming investigation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on corruption allegations. Olmert was on an official visit to Beijing, and none of the traveling reporters even bothered to ask him about Bush's decision to send 20,000 more American troops to Iraq.
Despite some allegations to the contrary, Israel did not ask America to invade Iraq in 2003. Nevertheless, it was happy with the outcome: it's better to have the American army in Baghdad, however beaten, than Saddam's Republican Guard. Iraq had fought in several Arab-Israeli wars, and its demise reduced the risk of an "eastern front" of large conventional armies facing Israel. Moreover, with American troops fighting Iraqi insurgents, Israel's own military operations in the West Bank and Gaza are better understood and accepted. Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon blessed the invasion during its first successful months, but when it soured, he ordered Israeli officials to stay away from Iraq. He probably feared that Israel and its allies in Washington would be blamed for the fiasco if they keep talking about it.
Olmert, Sharon's successor, adhered to his former mentor's no-talk policy on Iraq. But last November, when news about possible American withdrawal started floating in anticipation of the Baker-Hamilton report, Olmert broke his silence. Calling on Bush at the White House, Olmert warned publicly against a "hasty American withdrawal" that might undermine the stability of moderate Arab states. His tone echoed the louder "don't-leave" messages from Riyadh and Amman, showing a united front of America's Mideast allies. According to Israeli officials, Bush has privately calmed Olmert and promised to stay in Iraq. However, even the prime minister's warning failed to raise public and media attention in Israel.
Israel's policymakers have a lot of interest in American involvement in the Middle East, but their attention is focused on Iran, not Iraq. Olmert et al., want Bush to do away with Iran's nuclear program, which they view as an unbearable threat to Israel's security. Therefore, they were more interested in the last part of Bush's address, where the president pledged to "work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region." Bush's announcement of sending another aircraft carrier to the Gulf signaled his commitment to stop the Iranian race to the bomb. From Israel's perspective, this was the good news in the president's address.
Aluf Benn is the diplomatic editor of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz and a contributing editor of The National Interest.
Reinforcing Failure?
by Al Webb
LONDON, England.
With the words of an old military axiom that "you should never reinforce failure" being writ ever larger over the deepening quagmire, a critical rift between U.S. and British strategy has cracked the transatlantic alliance for the first time since allied forces exploded across the border into Iraq, bringing about Saddam Hussein's downfall nearly four years ago.
The tyrant's doom has come and gone, but what has been described as the "dance of death" goes on: more than 3,000 Americans shipped home again in body bags, ditto about 130 British troops and thousands more Iraqis, with 17,310 killed in the last six months alone, according to one of the many grim statistics that continue to haunt this conflict day by day.
What has not occurred since the opening volleys echoed across that beleaguered land in March 2003, as America's military made a beeline for Baghdad and British forces zeroed in on southern Basra, is anything resembling victory in the traditional sense. In its stead, failure threatens to attach itself to the whole enterprise-and the reaction to that possibility has begun to split the seemingly once-unshakeable alliance between Britain and America and its lame-duck leaders, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The seismic shift in strategy was exposed in Bush's decision to dispatch another 21,500 soldiers into the Iraqi cauldron while, almost simultaneously, Blair's government has begun work on urgent plans to pull several thousands of its troops out of the war-torn country. As diplomatic correspondent David Blair of London's Daily Telegraph newspaper put it, "as Mr. Bush's forces are ‘surging in', Britain's are trickling out."
Although 27 nations form the so-called "multi-national force" are operating in Iraq, the project has been a U.S.-British show since the ink was still damp on the first war plan. Now, the Bush-Blair "best pals" act is ending with not so much a bang as a barely audible whimper. There was no ballyhooed summit between president and prime minister to plot the way past a critical juncture in the Iraq conflict, no evidence of any high-level consultation between Washington and London ahead of the fait accompli of the potentially fateful decision that could further move the two key allies in opposite directions.
Meanwhile, the operative phrase here is "lame duck." In Bush's case, the shipping of another 21,500 troops to the war zone is geared towards avoiding any notion of defeat ahead of the president's departure from the White House in two years' time. That, coupled with his rejection of the Iraq Study Group's central recommendations last month that troops be withdrawn by early 2008, suggests that if anything, Bush might be prepared to add more Americans to the allied mix (of which it already accounts for 86 percent).
Tony Blair is even more of a lame duck. He already has announced that he will step down as prime minister sometime this year and that-amid opposition to the war that seems to grow on a daily basis-would indicate he is ready to heed that military maxim about not reinforcing failure (or, in poker jargon, not throwing good money after bad). The prime minister was sunning himself in Florida when President Bush announced his latest troop "surge" in Iraq and, for the first time in perhaps years, appears not terribly upset about what the Americans might, or might not, be getting up to. At least, it's been a few weeks since he was last publicly tormented as Bush's "poodle" on the world diplomatic stage.
The subsiding of that unflattering metaphor is probably due to the advent of Blair's resignation and the expectation that he will, in a matter of weeks, announce that Britain will pull nearly 3,000 of its 7,200 troops out of Iraq by the end of May.
The prime minister is soft-shoeing any problems he might have with the Bush administration over Iraq, telling Parliament that Britain's military responsibilities in the Basra area of southern Iraq "differ in some very critical aspects" from the pressures U.S. forces are facing in the turbulent capital, Baghdad. But there is a stark divergence between Washington and London, and as it grows, so too do the efforts of Blair's spin doctors to, as Telegraph correspondent David Blair put it, downgrade "their definition of what ‘success' in Iraq would mean."
For example, General Richard Shirreff, commander of British forces in Basra, was widely quoted last month as saying he would be satisfied with "60 percent success." But as the tectonic plates of diplomacy and war-making shift, and shift yet again, the bloodshed goes on, and the end is not in sight even for the British, whose policy of eventually handing over more control and responsibility to Iraqi forces is a risky one that could backfire.
The reality here is that only a relatively small number of local army and police are loyal to the present regime that holds power in Baghdad. Most of them, as British military historian Max Hastings points out, "look instead to their tribes and factions" as the true sources of power. Whether ultimate failure is America's future in Iraq, or whether refusing to reinforce failure will make one iota of difference for either the United States or Britain in the long run, only the months and years ahead will tell.
But one near-certainty is that come the day the results are finally in, both George Bush and Tony Blair will have long since given up their power to have any say-so in either the glory or the anguish that is the legacy of Iraq.
Al Webb is a freelance journalist based in Britain and a veteran foreign correspondent. He served as chief Middle East correspondent, based in Beirut, for US News & World Report magazine and with United Press International as a combat correspondent in Vietnam, bureau manager at United Nations headquarters in New York, chief Middle East correspondent based in Beirut, news editor based in Hong Kong for the Asian Division, and news editor for the European-Middle East-Africa Division based in London.
Surge-and Sway
General Charles G. Boyd says the "chattering classes" have become myopically focused on the numerical strength of forces in Iraq, when the nature of the problem is sectarian and therefore largely defies a military solution. In an interview with National Interest online editor, Ximena Ortiz, Boyd says the uniformed brass has long tried to communicate to its "political masters" the limited utility of the military instrument in Iraq.
Boyd, a highly decorated four-star general, was a combat pilot in Vietnam, where he was shot down and survived 2,488 days as a prisoner of war. He was deputy commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in Europe.
NIo: Is it your view that the president last night outlined a plan that still relies too heavily on the military as a primary policy tool in Iraq. Is he trying to apply a military solution to entrenched political and social problems?
Gen. Charles Boyd: There is a fascination-not only this administration but within the whole of the chattering classes-with numbers. The recent debate has always been about numbers: a surge in numbers and with them a fascination with how those numbers would be used, how would they be deployed and what proportion they would be arrayed relative to Iraqi counterparts and so forth.
But what is troubling for me-and this is embedded in your question-is that the political objectives that this troop surge is intended to achieve remains opaque. We don't know with any clarity exactly what the new political objectives that the administration is trying to achieve are.
The president is trying to re-establish some support among the American people for this war. What's unclear is how he can sustain that support from the American people long enough for any strategy to have time to succeed. That's a long answer to your question, but I am troubled by too much talk about the military, and specifically military numbers, and too little about what the real nature of this conflict is and how we might be changing our objectives relative to it and our strategy for achieving those objectives.
NIo: How would you identify the nature of this conflict?
Gen. Boyd: It has evolved to the point now where it is almost purely a struggle for power between the Shi‘a and the Sunnis. It is about access to power-political, economic power. In an almost tangential way, force being is used against the power of military forces, but only to the extent that it would further discourage our continuing presence. The real objective-the objective of the conflict now on both sides is dominance, political and economic.
NIo: And would you say other members of the uniformed brass share your opinion about the nature of the conflict?
Gen. Boyd: I think that there is-among the senior military people that I talk with, and I talk with many of them frequently-a very good understanding of the nature of this conflict. There is a very good understanding that, in the end, you're not going to solve it with military force. Abizaid has said that repeatedly for a very long time, but other senior military people do as well. But the emphasis on helping the to Iraqis find a solution to this political tension has been always subordinate to the use of force.
Moreover, I think that the senior military officers have a wide understanding that solving the problem of Iraq in isolation is not possible. This is a regional-or it is certainly has the potential of becoming a regional conflict-and there are regional players deeply involved in the conflict now. So, to solve it-it seems to me, and it seems to all the senior military people that I talked with-requires regional solutions, not just an Iraqi solution in isolation.
NIo: So is it fair to say then that this plan will not be very well received by senior military officers?
Gen. Boyd: The senior military officers have challenged their political masters repeatedly to define for them the political objectives that the administration is trying to achieve. Establishing a troop surge is about a fourth-order question, and the military people have tried to focus their political masters on answering the first three questions before they determine how many troops, and for how long. Those first three questions are: What is it you're trying to achieve now politically? What is your strategy to do so? And how do you think you're going to go about maintaining enough political support at home to be able to achieve those objectives through this strategy?
NIo: The fact that the commander-in-chief does seem to be so focused on overplaying this military hand over and over again; how will that affect overall morale in the military in the long term?
Gen. Boyd: Well, the military is always going to support their political seniors. They are going to do what their president wants them to do to the best of their ability. It is not as if the military is going to say, "Because you have not provided priority on what you're going to do and how you're trying to do it, we're not going to show up." The military is the only institution in the American government that has shown up for this war, and the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the Agricultural Department have not gone to war in the kind of total way that the military has gone to war.
NIo: Given your experience in both Bosnia and Vietnam, is it your view that there are there military or other lessons from the past that the president is not heeding?
Gen. Boyd: There are always lessons from the past that are applicable, and then there are lessons from the past that are not applicable. No two conflicts are ever the same, and we sometimes get confused by that. You hear, "This is another Vietnam", or "This is a quagmire", or "There is a resemblance of this war to Vietnam", and it clouds people's thinking and how we should go about it, or what the consequences would be if we were to leave. We left Vietnam in '75 with few consequences for the United States. There were tragic consequences for an awful lot of Vietnamese people, but not for the United States. And so you find people saying, "We can pull out of this one exactly the same way we pulled out of the one in 1975, and there will be no consequences." The two are so radically different, and the consequences will be radically different.
NIo: If you were to offer your own plan last night, what would the bullet points or main parameters of that plan be, in light of the fact that you don't feel that a Vietnam-style withdrawal is possible, but you also don't see a purely military solution being feasible in Iraq?
Gen. Boyd: I would not leave the region. I would not even threaten to leave the region. The idea that by threatening to leave the region will cause the political players to become sufficiently frightened that they will get their act together politically-I don't necessarily believe that. I would stay in the region because we cannot afford this to become a regional conflict, but we might need to back away from the center of the conflict and let that fire burn, while keeping our troops in the north and perhaps on the southern border. And there is much that we can do, to keep both Iran and their Sunni neighbors from coming in massively to augment that conflict between the Shi‘a and the Sunnis. To let the fire burn in the center-this is an Arab conflict; it's not Kurdish conflict; it's an Arab-Sunni-Shi‘a conflict-and let conflict burn itself out.
A Gamble at Very Long Odds
by Stephen Biddle
Under previous U.S. strategy, the odds for success in Iraq were very poor. The new strategy improves them, but not by very much.
There is some good in the new strategy. Changing the mission of U.S. troops to emphasize population security for Iraqi civilians, for example, is a step in the right direction. So is the replacement of the old, open-ended U.S. commitment with some degree of willingness to make our presence conditional on Iraqi political progress toward reconciliation.
But there are also some important shortcomings. The sustainability of the troop increase, for example, is unclear yet very important. If our troop increase is temporary, insurgents and militias have an incentive to wait us out by hiding their weapons, melting into the civilian population and reemerging as soon as conditions improve for them. The administration has argued that even a temporary respite in Baghdad could create political momentum and catalyze reconciliation. Yet Iraqi politicians are not fools-if the surge is temporary, then they know perfectly well that the same gunmen are simply waiting for the United States to leave and that nothing fundamental has changed in the Iraqi security calculus.
And if so, then it is hard to see why vulnerable Iraqi politicians would be willing to take risks for reconciliation without a promise of a continuing U.S. presence to protect them and their constituents if they do. In short, if the U.S. presence is known to be temporary, then so will be any reduction in violence. Real progress toward reconciliation would require the offer of a sustained, long-term U.S. presence in exchange for compromise.
Arguably the biggest problem here, though, is the scale of the announced reinforcements. The new troop commitments still leave us well short of the usual rules of thumb for the number of troops needed to pacify a city the size of Baghdad, much less the rest of central Iraq.
A widely used ballpark norm for pacification calls for at least one capable combatant per fifty civilians. Given ongoing violence and the associated refugee flows, Baghdad's current population is unknown, but a conservative guess might put it at about five million, implying a preferred troop strength of at least 100,000. Yet the five brigades of US reinforcements the president announced for the city would bring U.S. troop strength in Baghdad to only around 48,000, or less than half the standard figure.
To make up the difference will thus require a major contribution by Iraqi forces. The new strategy calls for just this, in the form of some 18 brigades of Iraqi soldiers and police with about 50,000 combatants in all. The competence-and the loyalty-of these combatants, however, is far from certain. Training and tactical proficiency is very uneven across the Iraqi security forces. Most important, however, they are subject to the same sectarian tensions that are pulling the country apart around them. The Iraqi police in particular are deeply penetrated by militia influences, but none of the Iraqi security forces are immune, and all are disproportionately Shi‘a and Kurdish. The better trained Iraqi units, at least, may well be effective against their natural sectarian rivals, but it is far from clear that any of these institutions will be willing or able to destroy militias of their own sect. And this poses major challenges for pacifying a city in which much of the violence is now promulgated by the Shi‘a coreligionists of Shi‘a-dominated security forces. Nor is it clear that Sunni civilians will accept predominantly Shi‘a security forces as defenders; to date they have been more prone to see them as hostile occupiers. The new strategy calls for these Iraqi brigades to be stiffened by teaming them with embedded U.S. battalions, which is surely better than trying to employ them independently. But it will take a considerable leap of faith to assume that the embedded Americans will be able to motivate Iraqi Shi‘a in the midst of an ongoing sectarian civil war to make war on their own Shi‘a brethren-or even to behave decently toward their Sunni rivals.
And all of this assumes that the promised 18 brigades actually appear. To date, the Maliki government has been consistently unable or unwilling to make good on such troop commitments, and certainly has shown no interest in using them to take on Shi‘a militias. Either way, no reasonable observer could credit 18 Iraqi brigades as the military equivalent of 18 brigades of Americans. And if not, then the troop strength in Baghdad, though higher than today's, will still fall well short of what is normally sought.
This in turn means that the political value of making the U.S. presence conditional is correspondingly limited. We need to increase our bargaining leverage if we are ever to get recalcitrant Iraqi factions to compromise on reconciliation. U.S. military forces are potentially our greatest source of such leverage. Our old strategy actively undermined this leverage by making our presence independent of Iraqi political cooperation-we promised to stay until and unless the Iraqi government could defend itself whether the Shi‘a-dominated government compromised with Sunnis (and vice versa) or not. It is clearly a step forward to end this unconditional promise and to start using conditions on our assistance as leverage to compel compromise. But the leverage we get from this is a direct function of the military value of our presence. If our presence is too small to provide much security, the threat to remove it or the promise to maintain it offers only limited leverage. Five more brigades in Baghdad offer a bit more leverage than five fewer, but only a bit.
So the new strategy is thus a long shot gamble. The odds are a little less long than before, but only a little. Are the odds too long? There is no objective analytical answer. The issue turns on one's personal tolerance for risk and cost, and reasonable people will judge the same odds differently. After all, failure in Iraq would do grave damage to U.S. interests-it may be worth a long shot gamble to get even a small chance at averting disaster. But the chance offered us here isn't very great, while the cost of the gamble in American lives is likely to be heavy. It is not unreasonable to judge that the odds are now too long and the cost too high.
Stephen Biddle is senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Pretending It's 2004
by Robert E. Looney
President Bush outlined on Jan. 10, 2006 a plan for Jan. 10, 2004. Back then, there was enough security in many areas for a meaningful reconstruction package to gain some traction by stimulating follow-on investment and increased activity. The billions of dollars the president rolled off Wednesday may sound sizeable and impressive, but it will be consumed by the conflagration of conflict in Iraq.
Although it has been scarcely noticed, the Bush Administration's economic programs in Iraq since the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority have been patterned on the highly successful Chilean experience. Clearly, Iraq is not-and was not-Chile. Iraq and the Maliki government are a far cry from the Chile of the 1970s under Pinochet. So the administration must convulse its whole mind-set in order to come up with and implement a successful economic program, in tune with the current realities. But the options available for a successful policy are dwindling by the day.
Consider the native adversaries to economic progress in Iraq: the growth and dynamics of the shadow and criminal economy; the deterioration of community trust and good-will, otherwise known as social capital; and the rise of-and conflict between-tribes, gangs and the insurgency, partly as a result of the first two conditions. These problems are so intractably interrelated that progress in one or two areas alone will not deliver significant or sustained economic gains.
What the Decider Can't Decide
And Bush has limited to no control over many of the key economic initiatives he laid out in his much-anticipated Wednesday night address. While the president somewhat facilely proposed that the Iraqis pass oil-revenue-sharing legislation, this has been one of the most contentious issues in Iraq. The Iraqi government has made little real progress in this regard, other than making some general statements in the 2005 Constitution that guarantees an equitable regional-sharing arrangement. Of course, equity is in the eye of the beholder-or holder of the purse. To date, Sunni provinces such as Anbar have received considerably less than what most objective observers would consider "fair." It will be challenging, to say the least, for different ethnic groups to arrive at an actual formula, given the levels of friction and distrust.
In any case, Bush did not propose anything new. An innovative policy would disburse a certain percentage of oil revenues directly to the population. This would not only be more equitable but would also assure the kind of purchasing power necessary to stimulate new-business creation at the local level. By taking a large percentage of revenues out of the government's hands it would also reduce the corruption plaguing that country. And such an approach would give, for the first time, broad segments of the population a stake in the country and its future.
Bush also said the United States would give U.S. commanders and officials greater flexibility to spend funds for economic assistance. Also, the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams will be doubled, and those teams will assist Iraqi communities in fostering reconciliation, strengthening moderates and establishing self-reliance. Finally, Bush said Secretary Condoleezza Rice would soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance funds spent in Iraq.
In theory, expanding the Provincial Reconstruction Teams is a move in the right direction, but, again, realities conflict. An October 2006 audit by the Office of the Special Inspector General For Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) of PRTs found their effectiveness depended on a level of security. At that time, of the 9 existing PRTs and 4 satellite offices, "4 were generally able, 4 were somewhat able, 3 were less than able, and 2 were generally unable to carry out their PRT missions." Due to security problems, the PRTs were unable to interact with local authorities in al-Anbar and Basra provinces.
Before the president's speech there were indications that a new $1 billion aid package would be in the offering, yet no mention was made of this initiative. Even if this does materialize, it is still considerably below the U.S. $18.3bn appropriation of 2003. Given the inability of the Iraqi government to effectively implement their capital budget, the reduction in U.S assistance, together with slim prospects for significant foreign investment, it seems unlikely that even financial reconstruction needs would be met, to say nothing of their viability given the circumstances.
Apparently, the administration will also expand the Commanders' Emergency Response Program (CERP), a program that has already spent upwards of $2 billion. And some of the constraints on commanders on how to use the money will be dropped, presumably allowing more flexibility in targeting funds for local projects and activities. But even here the administration will have a hard time defending its action. While the program is widely praised, there have never been any credible impact studies done demonstrating its effectiveness.
Baghdad's Billions?
Bush also proposed that, in order to show that it is committed to delivering a better life to its citizens, the Iraqi government spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. Just because the proportions of that sum are significant does not mean it won't be squandered. The Iraqis have controlled considerable sums of oil money over the last several years and have not been able to spend anywhere near $10 billion, due to bureaucratic inefficiencies, corruption and just plain incompetence. There is little reason to believe this Baghdad's fiscal management will improve in the near future, regardless of plans laid in Washington.
Bush's plan appears to heed political expediencies-by, for example, dispensing with Iraq's, rather than America's, billions-rather than Iraq's current realities. In the end, such calculations cannot be too politically, or economically, savvy.
Robert E. Looney is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.
Bush's Dollars for Peace in Iraq
by Amitai Etzioni
I am sure to fail any social-science sophomore who submits a paper suggesting that a package of job creation and public construction could help save the day in Iraq. Yet this idea is a key part of President Bush's New Way Forward. He has asked for a significant increase in the budget of the Emergency Response Program, which gives military officers in Iraq money they can spend on job-creation projects, such as raking leaves and painting schools. For Bush to resort to this old-fashioned, liberal idea-long mocked by neo-cons-is a sign that he is either truly desperate or believes this folly would be difficult for the Democrats to vote down.
Anyone who completed Econ 101 knows that even under much more favorable circumstances than currently prevail in Iraq job creation is a very difficult and costly endeavor. Both Germany and France long put up with high unemployment, 10 percent and 9 percent, respectively, not because they never heard of the notion that the government can make work, but because they found how futile such programs are. As a rule, such jobs last only as long as the public pays for them, at costs that are at least twice as high as the tuition at Harvard, not to mention the Sorbonne.
Moreover, the idea that giving the unemployed (or the poor) jobs will help drain the swamp from which terrorists are drawn is incompatible with the findings of studies on the subject.For instance, Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova of the National Bureau of Economic Research conclude: "there is little direct connection between poverty, education and participation in terrorism and politically motivated violence."
Indeed, many insurrectionists, among others, already have jobs-as Iraqi cops. You do not need a Ph.D. in sociology to realize that if you hate an occupying force or hold that it undermines a religious order you consider sacred, you will find time to fight such an army, even if you punch a clock at nine and five.
Moreover, the record in both Iraq and Afghanistan shows how much easier it is to blow up a newly completed school or pipeline than it is to build them. That is, realities demonstrate that reconstruction requires security first, rather than reconstruction leading to security. Finally, the idea that one can win the hearts and minds of the Sunni-who lost their elite status-through a handful of reconstruction projects has already been tested and found wanting. The United States has already spent some $25 billion on reconstruction in Iraq and over $7 billion in Afghanistan, with little to show for it.
And the successful reconstruction of Germany and Japan after World War II pivoted on many conditions that today are absent in the Middle East. Calling for a Marshall Plan for Iraq ignores the hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese troops that were killed-rather than sent home with weapons intact, as they have been in Iraq. There was no danger that Japan or Germany would break up due to a civil war among ethnic groups, as is the case in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hence no effort had to be expended on national unity building. Both nations had competent government personnel and a low level of corruption. And, crucially, there was a strong culture of self-restraint in both Japan and Germany, rather than one of blaming the occupiers for the regimes' failings.
Still, these occupations lasted much longer-and cost much more-than many assume: for Japan, nearly seven years and for Germany, ten years. In 1948, the first year of the Marshall Plan, aid to the 16 European countries under the plan totaled thirteen percent of the entire U.S. budget. In comparison, Bush plans to spend less than a small fraction of one percent on the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Granted, a billion-dollar slush fund may allow Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to buy off some political opposition. But such a political give and take will not prompt the insurrection fighters to lay down their arms. Political outlets do not absorb conflict when they are corrupt.
There is no way out of Iraq and no way to reconstruct it until the main parties are genuinely committed to working out a united government. And if this is not in the cards, each of them should be allowed to govern a part of these devastated nations.
Amitai Etzioni is professor of International Relations at George Washington University. His book Security First will be published by Yale University Press this spring.
