Here's an interesting view of the Iraq Study Group Report from today's Daily Telegraph. Summary: Study Group Report is aimed at Congress not the President, and rather than propose a face-saving way to exit Iraq, it argues instead why we cannot leave. Its core recommendation is a variant of what we have been calling Cut-And-Stay: pull back from policing the country and nation-building, increase the support for building the Iraqi Army's capabilities, stay in bases with a strike force to keep adventuresome neighbors out, and protect the oil. This Op-Ed piece adds that we should engage in carrot-and-stick dialog with Syria and Iran.
A very good read.
Another way to interpret this report is 'Stay but don't screw up' ... By Niall Ferguson
'Persuasion involves both incentives and penalties," Henry Kissinger once remarked. "So there is an element of implied coercion." Last week saw the publication of a masterpiece of persuasion. But whom will it persuade? And with what sticks and carrots?
Most commentators have interpreted the report of the Iraq Study Group as a well-crafted admission of defeat. Predictably, that was exactly how President Bush himself reacted to it. "I… believe we're going to succeed," he told reporters on Thursday. "I believe we'll prevail… One way to assure failure is just to quit, is not to adjust, and say it's just not worth it."
Addressing one of the report's key recommendations, he bluntly declared that Iran and Syria "shouldn't bother to show up" for negotiations about Iraq if they don't "understand their responsibilities to not fund terrorists" and if the Iranians won't "verifiably suspend" their uranium enrichment programme.
Yet anyone who bothers to read the ISG's report carefully — as opposed to skimming the executive summary — can see that it neither proposes "quitting" Iraq nor pins serious hope on Iranian or Syrian assistance. Quite the reverse.
Persuasion in the realm of grand strategy is more a matter of rhetorical art than science. The first essential step is to identify your target audience. Most readers of the report assume that it is directed at President Bush. That is wrong. Its principal target audience is Congress, and particularly the new Democratic majorities in both houses. And the aim is not to persuade a stubborn president to admit defeat. Rather, the report's aim is to persuade legislators that withdrawal from Iraq — no matter how much their constituents may yearn for it — is not an option. The report's other intended readership is Arab governments throughout the Middle East. The message for them is the same: an American exit from the region is what you most have to fear.
The second step in the process of persuasion is to conjure up a nightmare vision of the future if the action you envisage is not taken. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, for example, John Maynard Keynes depicted Central and Eastern Europe laid waste by anarchy and civil war, if the 1919 Versailles Treaty were not revised and Germany appeased. In his 1946 "Long Telegram", George F Kennan portrayed the entire world subverted by a ruthless Soviet Union, if the United States did not adopt a policy of retaliation and containment. Both masterpieces of persuasion; both highly influential.
The worst-case scenario proposed by the Iraq Study Group is the one about which I have been writing since February: "Sectarian warfare, growing violence [and] a slide toward chaos", leading to "the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe". Here are the report's most important lines: "Neighbouring countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia clashes could spread … across the Islamic world. [There could be] Shia insurrections — perhaps fomented by Iran — in Sunni-ruled states. Such a broader sectarian conflict could open a Pandora's box of problems."
The consequences would be much more than a propaganda victory for al-Qaeda and a humiliation for the United States, which is what they worry about on Capitol Hill. In such a conflagration, no Middle Eastern government — with the exception of the fundamentalist Shiite regime in Teheran — could feel secure. And that is precisely why Arab rulers should dread an American exit.
Step three in the art of persuasion is to propose remedies that sound attractive to your target audience. These the ISG has produced, and in profusion. But you need to read the small print of all 79 recommendations. Consider the long-anticipated "diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region". Much has been made of the willingness of the ISG's co-chair, James A Baker III, former Secretary of State, to open negotiations with Iran, once a reviled member of President Bush's "Axis of Evil", as well as with Syria, no friend of the United States.
"A nation can and should engage its adversaries and enemies," declares the report in a sentence that Mr Baker must surely have written, and should offer them "incentives as well as disincentives". Note that word "disincentives". Mr Baker's idea here is not to go cap in hand to Damascus and Teheran. Rather, as he explained to the press this week, it is to "flip the Syrians" by appealing to Sunni solidarity, and to isolate the Iranian regime by exposing its "rejectionist attitude".
In other words: get the leaders of all Iraq's neighbours into the same room and play "spot the Shia". The calculation is that if Iranian aspirations to regional hegemony can be laid bare, then it will be much easier to get broad support for some serious "disincentives".
Now for the small print on troop numbers. "By the first quarter of 2008," the report says, "all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq. At that time, US combat forces in Iraq could be deployed only in units embedded with Iraqi forces, in rapid-reaction and special operations teams." This has been widely interpreted as the first step towards the exit. It says "out of Iraq", right?
Wrong. Look more closely at some of the report's other recommendations:
• The number of US military personnel embedded in Iraqi army battalions and brigades should be increased from 3,000 or 4,000 to between 10,000 to 20,000.
• The number of US police trainers should be expanded.
• The US Department of Justice should lead the work of organisational transformation in the Ministry of the Interior.
• A Senior Advisor for Economic Reconstruction in Iraq is required.
• The State Department should train personnel to carry out civilian tasks associated with a complex stability operation… It should establish a Foreign Service Reserve Corps.
Does that sound like "out of Iraq" to you? I'd say it sounds more like "stay in Iraq". Only this time, don't screw up.
Other recommendations support that interpretation. The ISG clearly regards the training of the Iraqi army as having been woefully under-funded, noting that "the entire appropriation for Iraqi defence forces for 2006… is less than the United States currently spends in Iraq every two weeks". Clear implication: Spend more. Nor should American economic assistance to Iraq have been allowed to decline; the report recommends that it should now be increased to $5 billion per year. Other recommendations include more fluent Arabic speakers at the US embassy and more experienced analysts at the Defence Intelligence Agency.
The media have fixated on the possibility of a quantitative reduction in US troops — which is in any case conditional on there being no "unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground" — while missing the underlying argument for qualitative improvement.
Hats off, then, to Mr Baker and his team. This turns out to be a classic work of persuasion. Its target audiences have been well chosen. Its worst-case scenario is plausible. And its recommendations are so carefully phrased that they sound like disengagement, while actually signifying better engagement.
Not all works of persuasion are heeded. Keynes's call for a cancellation of reparations and war debts went unheeded in the 1920s; when it finally happened during the Depression, it was too late.
Kennan's plea for containment of the Soviet Union was interpreted by Harry Truman as a mandate for confrontation not coexistence; by 1950, Kennan was deeply disillusioned by the escalation of the Cold War. We must hope the Iraq Study Group's report fares better. It is certainly not the exit strategy Americans want. But it might just help avoid a Middle Eastern Armageddon.
• Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and author of 'The War of the World' (Penguin)
Superpower in quicksand?
The more you struggle the deeper you sink...
Posted by: rdneu56 | Wednesday, December 13, 2006 at 07:09 AM
I'll sign off on that scenario if 95% of our "blood" is withdrawn to Kuwait or Kurdistan, the run on our treasure is solved by wealthy individuals and corporations staunching it with a special aimed tax instead of the tax breaks, record profits and war profiteering from defense related industries we've seen up til now, and finally Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz et al are trotted out in public and kicked squarely in the ass for getting us into this mess in the first place.
Posted by: paradyforprofit | Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 01:25 PM