Should the U.S. Stay in Iraq or Go?

Nov. 29, 2006 — -- For anyone trying to understand what is going on in Iraq there was an interesting meeting in next door Iran today.

Iran's supreme religious leader, Ali Khamenei, met his neighbor, Iraqi President Talabani. It was a historic and overtly friendly get-together between two nations who had once been bitter enemies and fought a long war in the 1980s in which more than a million people died, making it one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century.

As Iraq faces descent into another bloody conflict, the United States is contemplating talks with Iran and Syria as part of what may eventually be an exit strategy. How will these two countries -- both of them long-time adversaries of the United States -- react and what do they want ?

Talabani's visit to Tehran this week is in effect the first major rapprochement between the two nations since the fall of Saddam Hussein. After the meeting, Ayatollah Khamenei pledged support for Iraq. He also blamed the United States for all the chaos there and said the answer to ending the violence was the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces.

The imminent threat of civil war in Iraq concerns its near neighbors, Iran and Syria, now as much as ever, and just as much it does the United States.

As President Bush travels towards a key meeting this week in Jordan with beleaguered Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, Iraq's neighbors are plotting their moves as they watch to see what the United States will do.

While Iran is very clear it now wants the United States leave the region and there is a real desire in the United States to find a way out of Iraq, long- or short-term, but preferably short. The United States is also now certain it should not allow Iran to increase its control over Iraq and -- just as importantly -- over Iraq's potentially huge oil reserves.

It's a big dilemma for the United States. If the Iraqi government collapses, not only is all-out civil war in Iraq a massive failure for U.S. government policies and efforts in the region, it potentially also hands power and influence over Iraq to a radical Iranian regime that the Bush administration has labeled an enemy and a force for evil in the world.

Iran's current prime minister is a Shiite, and his political backing is Shiite. The largest party in the democratically elected Iraqi parliament is Shiite and many members of that party have strong cultural and religious links with Iran.

Iran supported Iraq's Shiites during the long years that they were oppressed by Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime. The United States abandoned them after the Gulf War of 1990, and that is a legacy the United States is going to find difficult to shake as it holds out promises to the Maliki government.

This recent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has in effect bought the Shiites to power, and Iran stands to benefit from that power shift. What can the United States do to prevent Iraq from becoming an Iranian client state?

Should it try to bolster the Maliki government by keeping U.S. troops on the ground, perhaps confined to the relative safety of a few regional bases? Could their passive presence now prevent civil war?

Should the United States seek to persuade Maliki that his survival and the long-term health of his nation is best served by trusting in the United States, rather than in Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and the religious leadership that back him in Tehran.

Clearly they should do so, yet ironically Maliki may only be able to stay in power if he can deliver to his Shiite constituency a clear timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal -- the very thing Iran is also seeking.

For the United States, leaving U.S. forces in place for a long time may be the only sure option for Iraqi stability, no matter how unpalatable that may seem at home.

One other less tangible but important factor on the U.S.' side is the fact that many Shiite Iraqis are secular, like Maliki. This large proportion of Iraqis are religious with a small 'r' -- but they fear and dislike the extreme religiosity of Tehran's Mullahs.

Unfortunately for the United States and for Iraq, that centrist and secular Shiitism is being rapidly extinguished by the daily violence and brutal attacks, pushing once moderate Iraqis ever closer to more extreme and pro-Iranian Shiite leaders such as Muqtadr al Sadr and his Mahdi army militia, who seek ever closer ties with Tehran.

Some commentators in the region have taken these scenarios facing U.S. policy makers even further: the United States, they argue, is so concerned about growing Iranian influence and Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons that any exit strategy Washington has must also include a strategy to deal with Iran.

One plan, they say, that has no doubt been dusted off more than a few times recently by Pentagon planners would be to try and render Iran a non-nuclear-capable state by strategically bombing out its nuclear facilities.

That scenario would in turn render U.S. troops stationed in Iraq vulnerable to attack: another reason to pull them out of Iraq before any strike against Iran. Any resulting civil strife in Iraq would be horrible for Iraqis no doubt but strategically insignificant, if Iran was neutralized. It would be akin to a long-running Lebanese-style civil war -- an internal conflict of smaller regional significance

So should the United States stay in Iraq or go? Should it try to deal with Iran through talking or by bombing, and what might the consequences of these decisions be?

While this spiral of imagined consequences is head-spinning enough in considering Iran, over on Iraq's other border, Syria's intentions are equally cloudy.

On the face of it, Syria cannot want Iraq to spiral further out of control into all-out civil war. In Syria there are now already a million and a half exiled Iraqis who have fled the violence at home. As the situation in Iraq worsens, the number of Iraqi exiles grows by the day.

Syria is also used to very cheap oil from Iraq, since it has none of its own, and civil war could disrupt that supply with disasterous consequences for the Syrian economy.

On the other hand, Syria's greatest fear when the United States toppled the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein was that they would be next. They surmised at the time of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that a neoconservative agenda in Washington saw Syria as a despotic Arab regime that needed to be toppled, domino-like, before the forces of freedom and democracy, the same forces that would liberate Iraq.

It was a political theory that at the time the Syrian regime saw as being hatched by its regional arch rival and enemy Israel and delivered fully formed to a gullible and pliant Bush administration.

So, some analysts, argue Syria has actually enabled and cosseted the Iraqi Sunni insurgency. By allowing Saddam's supporters to set up shop in Damascus and run cross-border operations, Syria has ensured that the Sunnis of Al-Anbar province were supplied with both money and guns, largely via Syria, and those insurgent operations cloaked in Islamist slogans, so they could merge and blend with wider pan-Islamist anti-American movements like al Qaeda.

And, no doubt, so this theory goes, al Qaeda too operated and grew franchises in that environment. The U.S. death toll in Iraq has climbed and Syria, from one perspective, has gotten exactly what it first intended: a realization on the part of the U.S. military and government that invading Syria was both unachievable and undesirable.

Bashar Assad, who was portrayed as weak and unsure when he succeded his father, has suddenly, in regional Arab eyes, begun to look more like the Lion of Damascus that his father once was.

So how should the United States now proceed: Should it promise Syria what it wants in its negotiations with Israel or land in the Golan Heights? Should it honor Syria with more international recognition and then work to remove the threat of a U.N. inquiry into the death of Lebanese Premier Rafiq Hariri, in return for asking for Syria's help in quelling the Iraqi insurgency?

It's not yet clear if the United States can or wants to deliver on either of these Syrian desires.

But one thing is certain: Syria can and will remain a player in Iraqi politics for as long as -- if not longer than -- the United States. And Syria's game plan runs far beyond this next U.S. election