The Republican support for US troops in Iraq is falling apart even more quickly than the Iraqi Government itself. It is no surprise that a sketch is taking shape in Washington for a “half-exit” for US forces.
You know that a country is in real trouble when diplomatic analysts start using the always laboured metaphor of clocks racing each other, which gives an illusion of quantification to an unpredictable crisis. In Iran, this convention pits the “nuclear clock” (the race to build a bomb) against the “demographic clock” (how fast young people will get rid of the mullahs). No prizes for guessing that the first is ahead.
In the Iraq conflict, it has been clear since November’s US congressional elections that the “Washington clock”, measuring the American public’s appetite for the war, has been moving much more quickly than the “Baghdad clock” of progress by the Government of Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister. The race must end on September 15, when General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US Ambassador in Baghdad, report to Congress. It was a measure of President Bush’s weakness after the November elections that he had to volunteer a date for assessing the “surge” of troops that was only two months after the last ones arrived in Iraq.
It will be a struggle for him to defer a decision even until September, given the speed with which Republican senators are turning on him. Bush must present Congress this week with an account of Baghdad’s progress on 18 “benchmarks” set by the US last year. It will be long, but it needn’t be; more or less, progress is zero.
For more than a year, the US has been giving al-Maliki the benefit of the doubt, preferring to think that he could not push through reforms, not that he would not. It is now hard not to conclude that he won’t.
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He is a Shia, leading a Shia-majority government, and he has done nothing, in essence, to protect the rights of the Sunni minority. In the past year of promises, the country and the capital have become split along sectarian lines, probably irreparably. According to US reports, the Prime Minister made the same promises to Bush last week that he made earlier this year. It is hard to see why Petraeus and Crocker will have anything different to say in September. They can argue that the surge has tamped down some violence, for all the spate of car bombs. But they cannot argue that the Iraqi Government has made use of the time so painfully bought for it.
Yet few senators are going to push for a full withdrawal. The US cannot afford to leave completely, abandoning Iraq to its neighbours and al-Qaeda. A tempting answer, and one being studied, is to cut troop levels and to focus on al-Qaeda, as well as securing the borders.
That would help to deter Iraq’s neighbours, Arab as well as Persian, from filling the vacuum. But it would leave even more security, including in Baghdad, to unreliable Iraqi forces. It would not be a pullout, but it would be an admission that the US cannot bring peace to the capital.