GEOPOLITICAL DIARY: A RUMOR OF WITHDRAWAL
The New York Times and other media are reporting that the United States is considering withdrawing troops from Iraq this year. The Bush administration is thinking about withdrawing as few as one and as many as three of 15 combat brigades now operating in Iraq by inauguration day in January 2009. That would not be a stunning reduction, but it would be a substantial one. The leak to the Times is obviously designed to prepare public opinion and see how various constituencies respond. The administration leaks these things after it has decided to do something but wants to retain options. So we take the report seriously.
There are three audiences for this report. The first, obviously, is the U.S. public. This is an election year, and there is little doubt that George W. Bush would like to see John McCain succeed him, as partial vindication of his presidency. This was the week in which Barack Obama shifted his public posture on Iraq, indicating greater flexibility than he had signaled during the primaries. In fact, as we have said, Obama's position does not differ much from McCain's, save in rhetoric. Obama knew that he had to run to the center during the general election and had prepared for the shift in various position papers no one read during the primaries. When Obama went to the center, backing away from his automatic withdrawal plan to a more nuanced one, the administration responded by indicating that withdrawals were indeed possible. They tried to catch Obama off-balance. It was a clever move, but it's not clear that it will have any impact.
The second audience is Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. There are negotiations under way over the status of U.S. troops in Iraq. Al-Maliki is demanding a timetable for withdrawal, shifting away from his prior position that U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq to stabilize the regime to a new view that U.S. withdrawal is needed. The United States has, in a way, been the victim of its own success. Having created a much stronger Iraqi government than most thought possible, it now sees that government becoming demanding. If the United States ignores al-Maliki, it will undermine its own credibility. So, whatever is actually negotiated, the United States has little choice but to follow al-Maliki's wishes.
The third audience is Iran. The weird combination of apocalyptic threat coupled with diplomacy continues. While the obsession has been nuclear weapons, the real issue has always been Iraq. The United States is trying to give Iran every reason to stop enriching uranium. One recent offer was to begin talks without requiring a halt in enrichment ("pre-negotiations," it was called, as opposed to negotiations). Leaving diplomatic hair-splitting aside, the demonstration of a U.S. willingness to withdraw from Iraq is a critical issue to the Iranians. They have more than 140,000 U.S. troops on their border. Progress on nukes in Iran is much more likely with a reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq.
Audiences aside, of course, there is another looming issue: Afghanistan. That war continues to rage, with nine American soldiers killed over the weekend. Gen. David Petraeus, confirmed by the U.S. Senate as CENTCOM commander July 11, now is responsible for Afghanistan as well as Iraq. In looking at his board, he clearly sees the need for more troops in Afghanistan and feels he can cut troop levels in Iraq. Indeed, Iraq is the only place where he can find more troops. The Afghanistan issue is coupled with a clear deterioration of the situation in Pakistan and a looming crisis between Pakistan and India over the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul. Iraq is stable and happy compared to the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater.
But three U.S. brigades, added to the 52,000 NATO troops currently operating in Afghanistan, are not going to make a difference in a country where nearly 120,000 Russians with much looser rules of engagement couldn't make a difference. So the most important aspect of the troop reduction in Iraq will be the unfolding of Petraeus' Afghanistan strategy. It is not clear to us what he has in mind, but it would appear that the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq is something not only Obama, al-Maliki and Tehran want to see. Petraeus might want to see it, too.
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