Walking with the Devil
Mini Teaser: The United States must avoid getting trapped in its commitments with unstable regimes, and Iraq is the prime example.
BY THE George W. Bush Administration's self-imposed standards, a successful conclusion to the Iraq War was well within reach. The president declared victory on May 1, 2003, a constitution was ratified on October 15, 2005, and a general election took place on December 15 to elect a permanent 275-member Iraqi council. The current government, headed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, took office on May 20, 2006. Yet this government-as of early 2007-had not met one of Washington's benchmarks regarding national reconciliation, security or governance. Maliki's government refused to distance itself from radical clerics or curb their private militias. Non-sectarian technocrats were not invited to join the cabinet. Police units that practiced sectarian partisanship were not suspended. Government ministries stacked with loyalists bred corruption.
How could a government so utterly dependent on American collaboration defy U.S. wishes, yet hope for U.S. forces to remain in Baghdad? With ample evidence of Iraq's failure to meet the public security and civil service criteria of a secular state, why has the Bush Administration not tied aid to policy performance? Why has it not made continued support contingent on achieving explicit milestones?
The trap the United States faces in Iraq exemplifies a recurring dilemma in U.S. foreign policy: Presidents have continuously coddled client regimes unwilling to make the political trade-offs necessary for national legitimacy. Similarly, throughout the Cold War, despite American rhetoric about overseas reform and rejuvenation and ambivalence about backing dictators, many American political leaders relied on one authoritarian regime to help defeat another, more odious authoritarian regime. And there were the proxy wars, too: arming Iraq against Iran and the mujaheddin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Such myopic policies consequently impaired America's ability to forcefully advocate domestic reforms in those regimes. Once engaged, U.S. support and subsidies typically preclude a withdrawal option, weakening American demands for pro-reform quid pro quo terms.
Such is the U.S. commitment trap: Committed to the survival of allies, yet lacking the leverage to discipline recalcitrant regime leaders, America creates a strategic vulnerability that even weak client states can exploit. The commitment trap acts as a repressive force that reduces America's credibility as a reform advocate. It binds the United States so that it cannot walk away from allies without its credibility suffering. Curiously, this trap isn't sealed abroad, but at home in the fears that have driven the U.S. electorate since the Cold War began.
Client regime reform is certainly within the American ideological tradition, and attempts at such efforts have been an important component of U.S. security policy since the Cold War. For example, meeting with the Shah of Iran in 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson suggested that the best way to deter war and achieve security "was not by military preparations but by so developing our free economic and social structures as to protect them from foreign aggression and upheaval." Presidents Kennedy, Eisenhower and Carter gave similar advice to the shah. However, under the threat of civil war or external aggression, even presidents who entered office advocating overseas reform eventually reinforced the very regimes they once condemned. Regardless of their political philosophies, every president has put democracy on hold when larger security issues arose. And as keen observers of U.S. policies, autocrats, such as the shah, use security threats-either of insurgency or invasion-to serve their private ambitions.
Why are we not surprised, then, that Maliki wagers that Bush will hold extremists responsible for his government's failures and admonish the prime minister's detractors for underestimating the difficulties of implementing reform? In the past, a client regime obtained commitments from America by painting dire scenarios of "either me or the possibility of something far worse." In fact, it was the implicit strength of the U.S. commitment that allowed client regimes like those of the shah, Chiang Kai-shek, Ferdinand Marcos, South Korean generals and a whole host of autocrats in Latin America and Africa to ignore external requests for accommodation and reform that frequently enjoyed strong internal support. Thus, the commitment trap can turn a great power into a creature of a smaller power: The tail wags the dog. The client can gain leverage because adversaries, other clients and the domestic political opposition within the United States will all interpret the failure to defend an ally in need as the erosion of U.S. credibility. Such reasoning by Washington is exactly what Maliki is counting on.
The United States has three ways to approach the problem of reform: 1) work with the incumbent to implement reform; 2) buttress the incumbent by suppressing opposition; or 3) withdraw support and abandon the incumbent. In a 1961 address delivered in the Dominican Republic soon after the assassination of dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, President Kennedy explicitly referred to them all: The United States, he said, "had three options, in descending order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or a Castro regime. . . . We ought to aim at the first, but we really can't renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third."
The third option has, with few exceptions, remained unthinkable. No matter how repugnant a regime, its loss as an ally has invariably damaged the president's domestic political credibility. Asserting that more U.S. resources should have been committed earlier and more intensely to Chiang Kai-shek, Republicans excoriated the Truman Administration for losing the mainland. The president's dilemma is that the U.S. incumbent administration, not some developing country, is always the final domino to fall. The loss of China helped precipitate the Democrats' loss of the White House in 1952. A prisoner of his own rhetoric, President Bush now fears being attacked from within his own party for not having done enough to prevent the spread of terrorism throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Moreover, changing a government's policy generally requires changing the government itself, along with its major institutions. In America during the Cold War, it was impossible to argue publicly that a radical leftist regime was preferable to a repressive rightist regime. Unpredictable behavior is far worse than the status quo. "Sure he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch", a phrase of disputed origin, at various times has referred to Franco and Somoza. If insurgents even appear ascendant, a client regime can strengthen its position in Washington by arguing that it represents the only alternative to chaos and uncertainty. Again, the more power a regime gains over the U.S. foreign policy process and the more assurances of U.S. support it receives, the fewer incentives exist for greater accountability-either to America or its own citizens.
Reform, especially when its outcome may be more perilous than existing circumstances, is very difficult to pitch domestically, chiefly because the U.S. public often lacks understanding of the historically complex social and political conditions of allied regimes. Opting for security and stability makes more sense than promoting uncertain projects, even those aimed at reducing inequality or ethnic favoritism caused by corruption and clientelism. Better to support a friend in need.
With regards to political and social development, the unpredictable relationship between cause and effect further weakens the case for reform. The wide variance of predictions of social collapse adds to the confusion. One observer may determine that a country is on the verge of becoming a failed state, another that it is ready to turn the corner. Since the diagnosis of social stability widely varies, so will the remedy. How close a country sits to the fault line will determine what reforms are needed and in what sequence; and since no one can definitively say if a regime is on the verge of collapse, sticking with a friend means that we can always return to reform later.
Currently, the incumbent administration as well as the Democratic opposition face pressure not to "lose" Iraq. Supporters of the Iraq War argue that abandoning the Shi‘a-dominated government will facilitate a jihadi victory, and having beaten the Russians in Afghanistan and America in Iraq, they will seek regional hegemony. Hoover Fellow Thomas Sowell offered a particularly compelling example of this logic in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal:
Whether we want to or not, we cannot unilaterally end the war with international terrorists. Giving the terrorists an epoch making victory in Iraq would only shift the location where we must face them or succumb to them. Abandoning Iraqi allies to their fate would ensure that other nations would think twice before becoming or remaining our allies.
Let us consider a possible scenario resulting from the Iraq War and consistent with entrapment. The Shi‘a ascendance in Iraq, which includes sectarian allegiances that penetrate the army and the police, widens the gulf between the Shi‘a and Sunnis. Policies of extreme de-Ba‘athification, such as limiting Sunni access to Iraq's oil revenues (the expectation is that they will receive less than 10 percent), continue to feed Sunni support for the insurgency. A winner-take-all outcome means that a Shi‘a dictatorship will replace a Ba‘athi dictatorship, plunging the country into a civil war under the banner of democracy.
Unable to take a neutral role, the United States will again be caught in a commitment trap, this time backing the Shi‘a; but it will resemble previous traps that engendered unfortunate estrangement from China, the support of successive dictators in Vietnam, the rise of Marcos and the blind commitment to the Shah of Iran. If the base of the Sunni insurgency widens, a secure secular state is not possible. Trapped into supporting a Shi‘a government that eschews compromise, the United States may end up facing a region-wide insurgency, which could produce even broader U.S. military involvement in the region. And the insurgency, having acquired deep roots among the civilian population, will poison relations with America for years to come. As it did in Vietnam, the United States will extract political defeat from military victory.
As doubts about the wisdom of intervening in Iraq spread, the debate in the United States will veer toward the question of who lost Iraq. Such a debate may restrain future interventions in the short run, but a comprehensive assessment of Cold War lessons might offer a variety of perspectives from which to frame future debates about overseas interventions. A shared set of convictions about social change and the value of democracy led supporters from all parts of the political spectrum to support the invasion of Iraq. The failure of Iraq's democracy to improve the quality of life, provide security or induce cooperation has debased its value for Iraqi citizens.
There is one final historical analogy to consider: Despite the victories of U.S.-backed forces during the Vietnam War, both sides understood that America had a short time horizon and that the warring forces in the north could wait out external actors. For this reason, the institutions created by the United States in Vietnam had little credibility. Both southerners and northerners understood that the institutions of power were not born of an internal consensus, but rather external support, and therefore had doubtful durability.
There is only one definitive way for the United States to extricate itself from future commitment traps, and that is for the White House and the incumbent administration to break ranks with the military view of conflict and accept that this perspective fundamentally mischaracterizes the complexity of social change in emerging nations. Throughout the Cold War, the military and the civilian bureaucracy fought over policy, with the military frequently supporting the status quo. The fear of failure, in either case, led both parties to do too much, never too little. "Too much" usually means that American administrations put too much effort into buttressing regimes. This latest chapter of U.S. military involvement resembles the other failures in which, regardless of the political landscape, military advisors concluded that training of and assistance for the nascent army was the key missing ingredient for victory. A more plausible assessment must combine military with political, social and economic analysis in which other areas of expertise are fully engaged. Such a change would require reconfiguring the entire structure of policymaking that currently informs the president's decisions.
Unconditional support of the Maliki government will only fan sectarian violence and push the Sunnis into greater collaboration with Al-Qaeda. Helping Maliki crush the Sunni insurgency without insisting on federalism, increased employment levels, a revenue-sharing compromise, moderated de-Ba‘athification and curtailment of the Shi‘a militias' abuses, the Bush Administration is being suckered into a commitment trap just like its Cold War predecessors. Inadvertently fueling Sunni resistance, it pushes Iraq closer to all-out civil war and sets the stage for the game-winning moves to occur politically-not on the battlefield, where U.S. forces have overwhelming superiority. Hoodwinked again by its own rhetoric into not crediting the opponent with anticipatory skill, U.S. policy-planners will again cede political victory to an insurgency.
Hilton L. Root, a senior Treasury Department official during the first term of George W. Bush's administration, is professor of public policy at George Mason University's School of Public Policy and author of Capital and Collusion: the Political Logic of Global Economic Development, Princeton University Press, 2006.
Essay Types: Essay