Barack Obama‘s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times begins with a major misundestanding and follows with a dangerous pirouette.
His first paragraph reads: “The call by Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.”
Yet Maliki has made no such formal demand. Both Maliki and his security adviser, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, have stated that they wouldn’t endorse any agreement that might imply a permanent US military presence in Iraq. But neither they nor the Iraqi government as a whole has presented a demand for US troop withdrawal in the negotiations with the United States.
In fact, sources at the highest level in Baghdad tell me that the Maliki government doesn’t want America to reduce its military presence in Iraq significantly before the next Iraqi general election at the end of 2009. This is also the position of Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the primus inter pares of the Shiite clergy in Iraq.
Most Iraqis want all foreign troops to leave Iraq eventually – but not before Iraq is capable of defending itself against domestic and foreign enemies.
Obama might have asked Maliki or his entourage for more information about the Iraqi position. Obama’s aides might have phoned Sistani’s office to check the grand ayatollah’s position. Better still, Obama might have waited until after his coming visit to Iraq before penning his op-ed.
Maliki’s comments came in response to three political considerations:
1) When the time comes, Maliki doesn’t want to appear “more Catholic than the pope.” If a President Obama decides to leave in a hurry, no Iraqi leader would want to be seen begging the Americans to stay.
2) Maliki doesn’t want to burn all his bridges with Iran: If the Americans run away, Iraqi Shiites would have no credible protector against Sunni enemies except Tehran.
3) Finally, if the Americans leave, Maliki doesn’t want the credit to go to al Qaeda and Muqtada al-Sadr, who’d claim that they forced the Americans out.
In any case, Maliki’s is a coalition government in which a majority rejects any arbitrary timetable for US withdrawal. There’s also no parliamentary majority for such a demand.
The only Iraqi group that has formally called for a quick withdrawal of American troops is a Dawa Party splinter led by ex-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Jaafari is eyeing a return to power in the next general election with support from Iran.
Jaafari claims that, since his demand for US withdrawal echoes Obama’s position, he’d have a better chance of dealing with a new Democratic administration in Washington. That is, he assumes that he, Iran and Obama are united in demanding an end to the US military presence.
Yet that brings us to Obama’s pirouette: He doesn’t mention the word “withdrawal” but instead speaks of “redeployment,” which he claims is what he has “long advocated.”
Redeployment, of course, isn’t the same thing as withdrawal. You can redeploy troops within Iraq or from one mission to another. This happens all the time. Withdrawal means leaving altogether.
Even then, Obama makes his undefined “redeployment” conditional to what “is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.”
Yet this echoes President Bush’s policy and is very different from demands by al-Jaafari and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who want the Americans to just pack up and leave.
Obama writes: “We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months . . . A residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.”
No, it wouldn’t – because, the way the senator puts it, it would be redeployment. We aren’t told how big “the residual force in Iraq” would be – but the missions Obama details for it are the same ones Bush has set for the troops there now.
As a sop to his antiwar base, Obama insists that he opposed the war and the “surge” and remains opposed to both. Yet, when it comes to practical policies, he offers much of what Bush has already put in place.
Obama writes: “On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.” But that’s the mission given to Gen. Tommy Franks at the start of the war back in March 2003.
No one wants a war to go on forever. The question is how to end it – and there are only three ways: winning, surrendering or negotiating a stalemate. The weakness of Obama’s plan for Iraq is that it doesn’t say which option he has in mind.
Amir Taheri’s next book, “The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution,” is due out this fall.