COMMENTARY
Iraq sectarian war can't be solved militarily
By Carlos Pascual and Brian Cullin
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When Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker report next month on the results of our "surge" in Iraq, the most important category, political progress, should receive an F. Even if our military forces have made real progress of late, their sacrifices will have been for naught because our diplomatic strategy has been disconnected, anemic and ineffective.
The importance of diplomacy is rooted in Iraq's sectarian civil war. The war in Iraq is not the United States against a single enemy but the United States interjecting itself among many enemies fighting each other. That war cannot be solved by military means. Even if the United States were to quell the violence in the short term, fighting would erupt again with an American withdrawal. Until there is a political compact among Iraqi parties there will be no prospect for peace in Iraq.
Yet thus far there has been no serious effort in this direction. Regional meetings in Baghdad and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, did not produce action agendas. Regional visits by the secretaries of state and defense will produce little concrete action as long as "support" is seen as bolstering Shiite dominance. President Bush's remarks Wednesday on promoting democracy only reaffirm his administration's lack of realism about the complexity of political reconciliation and what's needed to achieve it. The passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1770 this month may offer the chance for a radical departure. The resolution renewed the mandate for the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq and called for the United Nations to promote reconciliation — a daunting task but one crucial to any lasting settlement.
To this end, the United Nations needs a team with a high-profile, respected leader. No one should have the illusion that the United Nations will replace the U.S. military role in Iraq. Its role should be political.
Strategic considerations critical to such a process include:
Eventually a judgment must be made on whether to try for a major meeting to broker an agreement, such as the Dayton agreement for Bosnia. Such a meeting must orchestrate negotiations among an inner circle of key Iraqis while engaging in a more limited way a wider contact group of the neighboring states. The United States will need to sustain constant bilateral diplomacy throughout this process, coordinating at each step with the U.N. negotiator.
The desire for a political agreement should not result in accepting just any settlement. The negotiating team will need to determine whether Iraqi and regional commitments are genuine, adequate and sufficiently encompassing of the key players to be viable.
The United States also must stop deluding itself about fleeting military progress amid Iraq's wider political debacle. It should be made clear to Iraqis that if they will not take advantage of a credible multilateral process to reach a political compromise, then American troops cannot make a sustainable difference and will be withdrawn.
Carlos Pascual, former State Department coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, is vice president of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. Brian Cullin, assistant White House press secretary in the Clinton administration, is director of communications of foreign policy studies at Brookings. They wrote this commentary for The Washington Post.
