America's final mission in Iraq
WHATEVER PRESIDENT BUSH and his advisers might like to believe, it is too late now to stop the Sunni-Shi'ite civil war in central and southern Iraq. The proposed "surge" of 20,000-odd additional US troops will not change this.
Ethnic cleansing is not only an expression of hatred or a means of revenge; often it is a rational strategic response to real security fears. The more atrocities are committed in any ethnic civil war, the more everyone in both communities becomes afraid of the other. People on each side feel dependent on communal militias to protect them, even though those same militias may be murdering members of the other community and contributing to the escalation of the war.
At a certain tipping point, it is no longer possible for any authority in either community to muster a constituency determined and strong enough to suppress the ethnic cleansers emanating from their own community. Beyond that point, the war cannot be stopped until the warring communities are substantially separated. It no longer matters how the war started, or even whether most members of both communities actually want to wage an ethnic war. The ethnic cleansing will continue until nearly all mixed urban neighborhoods, towns, and rural districts have become unmixed, as forces representing whichever community is stronger in that locality kills or frightens away most members of the other. The eventual result is a de facto partition.
In the aftermath of the Samarra mosque bombing last February , it was clear the war in Iraq had passed its tipping point. Prominent leaders of both Sunni and Shi'ite communities, including clerics, made energetic efforts to dampen the upsurge in sectarian killing but had no measurable impact at all.
More than 2 million Iraqis have fled their homes since 2003, and roughly 5,000 more do so daily. Hundreds of towns, villages, and urban districts in Iraq that were ethnically mixed four years ago no longer are.
A poll in September by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 82 percent of Iraqi Shi'ites said that we are damaging, not improving security; 71 percent of Shi'ites wanted us out within a year, and 62 percent thought attacks on US forces were justified. Shi'ite attitudes toward the US military presence have hardened further since then, both because of policy disagreements and because of some actual combat. In their heads, many Shi'ites have already put us in the dustbin of their history. Sunni attitudes toward the United States are even more negative, but matter less because they are the weaker side.
Some politicians and academic analysts now propose a managed partition of Iraq as a way to end the sectarian killing. Opponents of partition argue that it would generate yet more refugees and might not end the war.
Both sides in this debate are asking the wrong question. The question is no longer: Should we partition Iraq? It is: Can anyone prevent Iraq from partitioning itself?
Probably not. The fact that virtually all Sunnis and most Shi'ites still oppose partition is not relevant; the structure of the situation is causing them to act in ways that are partitioning the country anyway.
Eventually there will be a de facto partition line -- even if parts of it run right through Baghdad. Self-preservation will cause both sides to make sure that that line will be very difficult to cross; the barriers and check points that US forces are now trying to pull down in parts of Baghdad will go back up and will be multiplied many-fold.
A US military surge will not change any of this. The presence of coalition forces in Iraq over the last four years probably slowed the escalation of the Sunni-Shi'ite civil war -- Bosnia, in contrast, went from almost no violence to full-scale war in the single month of March 1992 -- but they could not stop it.
In early November the top US commanders in Iraq admitted that a three-month effort to focus our resources on population security in Baghdad had not even managed to keep the situation from continuing to deteriorate. An increase in troop strength of roughly 13 percent or 14 percent will not make possible now what was impossible then.
It is not even clear that efforts to disarm militias implicated in ethnic cleansing, such as current US efforts aimed at rogue elements of the Shi'ite Mahdi Army , will actually reduce loss of life. The same militias also provide security for their own communities.
America still has one remaining military mission in Iraq whose completion is essential: refugee protection. Our 160,000 heavily-armed troops are more than enough to protect, transport, and resettle those Iraqis who have not yet become refugees but likely will as the civil war grinds toward completion. We should identify the 150 to 200 towns, villages, and urban districts that are most at risk for ethnic cleansing -- and sit on them until we can organize well-defended transport for those who wish to move.
The United States should do this because it is the right thing to do. Some people who might otherwise die at the hands of death squads will survive if US forces protect them long enough to relocate safely and without becoming desperately impoverished.
We also must recognize that by now most people nearly everywhere in the world blame us for all of the evils that have befallen Iraq since 2003 -- and will for all that happens for many years to come. Anything that shortens that bill of indictment, even a little, is in the national interest.
Beyond this, we must re think how to stabilize the region's future. Even with Sunni and Shi'ite populations largely separated, Iraq will remain unstable: its flat terrain, relatively good roads, and the world's second largest oil reserves will provide both opportunity and motivation for losers in one round of fighting to try again later. Neighboring powers, including Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will also have powerful motives to intervene.
The wider Persian Gulf region has also been destabilized. Iran and the Shi'ite rump of Iraq will be the region's natural dominant powers, while our current allies on the southern side of the Gulf are weak not only externally but internally. If they survive it will be by reform or by accommodation. American extended deterrence based on military power alone will no longer suffice.
The situation in and around Iraq today is reminiscent in many ways of the Balkans in the late 19th century. Faced with a deeply unstable configuration of competing local nationalisms and major power interests, the European powers sought to manage the region through a series of conferences, such as the famous 1878 Congress of Berlin. In the end, of course, they failed to avert World War I, but it is not obvious that the effort was doomed from the start.
Something like a "Congress of Amman" is called for now. Iraqi factions, regional powers, and global powers must forge ways to manage conflicting interests in the changed situation to minimize risk of an even larger war that no one wants. Each party must explain to others what policies they can expect, and must learn from rivals what they cannot tolerate.
Admittedly, few of the parties who need to talk to their rivals show signs of being ready to do so. In particular, neither the United States nor Iran appears ready to talk to the other constructively. Perhaps a sufficient achievement for the First Congress of Amman would be agreement that there will be a second.
Chaim Kaufmann is associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University. 
