Foreign Affairs: Withdraw from Iraq

I have written before that it seemed that Foreign Affairs, the premier large-circulation magazine of international relations in the United States has turned against the war.

This article, in March's issue but available online, says that the war in Iraq is definitely a civil war and that the best U.S. option is to withdraw from the central fighting:

If the Bush administration sticks to its "stay the course toward victory" approach, of which the surge option is the latest incarnation, it will become increasingly apparent that this policy amounts to siding with the Shiites in an extremely vicious Sunni-Shiite war. U.S. troops may play some positive role in preventing human rights abuses by Iraqi army units and slowing down violence and ethnic cleansing. But as long as the United States remains committed to trying to make this Iraqi government "succeed" on the terms President Bush has laid out, there is no escaping the fact that the central function of U.S. troops will be to backstop Maliki's government or its successor. That security gives Maliki and his coalition the ability to tacitly pursue (or acquiesce in) a dirty war against actual and imagined Sunni antagonists while publicly supporting "national reconciliation."

This policy is hard to defend on the grounds of either morality or national interest. Even if Shiite thugs and their facilitators in the government could succeed in ridding Baghdad of Sunnis, it is highly unlikely that they would be able to suppress the insurgency in the Sunni-majority provinces in western Iraq or to prevent attacks in Baghdad and other places where Shiites live. In other words, the current U.S. policy probably will not lead to a decisive military victory anytime soon, if ever. And even if it did, would Washington want it to? The rise of a brutal, ethnically exclusivist, Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad would further the perception of Iran as the ascendant regional power. Moreover, U.S. backing for such a government would give Iraqi Sunnis and the Sunni-dominated countries in the Middle East no reason not to support al Qaeda as an ally in Iraq. By spurring these states to support Sunni forces fighting the Shiite government, such backing would ultimately pit the United States against those states in a proxy war.

Fearon's argument certainly sounds like things I've heard a number of other places, but now that it is being placed, without counterpoint, in Foreign Affairs, indicates just how the editors of that magazine think about the war in Iraq.

Anyway, as for the actual merits of the article, they are many. It has an interesting comparison to urban left-right and group-based gang/militia fighting in Turkey in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but says that the powerful Turkish military was able to end that fighting in ways the United States cannot in Iraq.

The article also highlights the Iraq Study Group's finding that partition (the Biden solution to Iraq) is likely a bloody, pointless non-starter.

The article is worth a read, and if you have the time, very interesting.