Seven Questions: Phebe Marr on the End Game in Iraq

ALI YUSSEF/AFP/Getty ImagesCoexistence: Can Shiite clerics and Sunni sheikhs learn to live with each other?

FOREIGN POLICY: Whats your assessment of Iraq today?

Phebe Marr: The security situation, especially around Baghdad and in Anbar province, has seen considerable improvement, by most reports and measures, in the last few months. Anbar province, and this predates the surge a bit, has definitely settled down. People can walk streets in Ramadi today that you couldnt even go near a year ago.

Theres still far too much violence, but the numbers have been reduced substantially. The big question were all asking ourselves is whether this represents a tipping point, whether the local population is going to do the things that are necessary to sustain it, or whether when our troops start to draw down a bit the bad guys will try to take advantage of that by fomenting more trouble. And have we got enough security forces in place, both Americans on the ground and trained Iraqis and the so-called concerned citizens? These are the people from Anbar and elsewhere, essentially tribal groups and others who were in the insurgency but have now have changed position and are keeping the peace.

FP: You mentioned the concerned citizens groups. But its the U.S. military that has been paying these folks rather than the Shiite-dominated central government, which appears to view them as a threat. How important is it that the government in Baghdad sign on?

PM: The only way you get rid of an insurgency over the long term is when the local population turns against the insurgents. They will give intelligence; theyll help cut off the funding; they may even take arms themselves to go after them. But the most important thing is that the swamp is drained and that the insurgents or whoevers making the trouble cant recruit. This is what happened in Anbar.

As for the concerned citizens, they can be vetted carefully. You can see whether their performance is good, whether they cooperate with other groups, whether if they have a mission to go after somebody whos been killing somebody it doesnt matter whether theyre Shiite or Sunni, they do it. And if they work out, then you promote them into the national force, and if it turns out that they dont, well you give them another kind of job.

FP: U.S. military officials are now saying that theres a window of opportunity for national reconciliation thanks to the improving security situation, but the Shiite-led government isnt reaching out to Sunni Arabs. Is that the right way to look at things?

PM: The distrust, the fear, the resentment on the part of the people who are in government is profound. You have to sit in a room and listen to these people talk to understand how deep the distrust is. The government is coming out of a long period of opposition to Saddam; in the case of the Sunnis the reverse is true.

So, I think reconciliation is the wrong word to use here. The process is inappropriate for the stage were at in Iraq, and a much more practical set of terms would be better. I would see it in three stages: First, coexistence, second, accommodation, and then maybe over the long term you could get some reconciliation. If we think of it this way, maybe well have a more realistic sense of how long its going to take and what sort of progress we can make.

Americans have to understand that its going to be a really painful and slow process. The idea that in the next couple of months were going to get some big breakthroughs is unrealistic. The best we can hope for is to get local communities settled down so that theyre policing themselves. In the mixed areas of Baghdad, thats going to take really deft politics. And at the national level, if we can keep working on specific, limited identifiable issues where parties have an interest in making a deal across ethnic and sectarian lines because they have more to gain by making the deal than not, thats probably the best we can expect.

FP: Whats an example of an issue like that?

PM: Well, getting agreement on aspects of the oil law, of course, would be one of them; amnesty is another. There are now huge numbers of insurgents in prison. A new de-Baathification law would be nice, but what Im going to look for, frankly, is how it works out in practice. When I actually see increased numbers of Sunni ex-brigadier generals in a couple of key positions; when I see the Ministry of Interior cleaned out and multisectarian security forces taking shape, Ill know that something is happening.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, needs to keep providing incentives and disincentives. One of the disincentives is to say to Iraqi leaders, If we dont get accommodation, were just going to have to start drawing down the troops and youre going to have to face the abyss yourselves.

FP: There have been a lot of comments from Shiite leaders and Iranian officials saying that if the United States would only let them take the gloves off, theyd be able to crush the insurgency. So is it possible that a U.S. withdrawal would actually be welcome in some quarters?

PM: We hear a lot of different things on both sides, and that is what makes it so difficult for anybody who deals with Iraq to make a clear assessment. We have to do everything in our power to tilt the balance in favor of people who are going to look at the abyss and say, Look, weve had enough. We really do have to make a couple of agreements here. What has to set in here is reality.

And when it comes to the Shiites, the question is, can they do it? Weve seen what has happened with the so-called New Armyit splinters; it cant handle everything. So, I think the question I would have to ask myself is, Would the peshmerga, the Kurdish forces, join in? Is the training and equipment far enough along to take on the Sunnis? Remember, a lot of the Sunni insurgent leaders are ex-Army and are probably better trained than their Shiite counterparts. But are they organized in units? Do they have command and control, or are they fractured? They may think they can finish off the Shiites as soon as the Americans go, but talk is cheap. So, Im convinced that neither one of these sides can actually win.

And you do see, when you talk to Iraqi leaders privately, a degree of realism and pragmatism setting in. This last year has been horrendous in Baghdad. It certainly has been a wakeup call for Iraqis, so they know what that abyss is going to look like.

FP: How should the United States approach the issue of withdrawal?

PM: People are going to have to take it seriously in Baghdad, and we have to get the international community participating. Economic development, jobs, getting the garbage collectedthese things that return normalcy to life will be helpful. There certainly is going to be continued violence. Nobody should think for a minute that this is going to end soon. Were probably going to get spikes in violence as, say, al Qaeda on one side or Shiite extremists see an opportunity. The question is whether the desire for normalcy has set in deeply enough so that there will be the right kind of popular reaction to that.

FP: You mentioned the international community, but what about the 800-pound gorilla in the room? What does Iran want to see in Iraq?

PM: Its not in Irans interests to have a totally failed state in Iraq where you have ethnic division and instability spilling over into Iran. Not all Iranian citizens are Persian. Iran has Kurds in the north; an Arab population in the south; Baluchis in the east. So, the United States does have a common interest with Iran in stabilizing Iraq. But the Iranians want more than that: They want to get U.S. troops out of Iraq and they want a government that controls all of the country; is Shiite-dominated and pro-Iran, or at least friendly to Iran. This is not, I think, a picture that most American governments would see as in U.S. interests.

We have a whole set of other issues that we have to negotiate with the Iranians about, but if we could take care of those in an international context and focus on Iraq in our current discussions in Baghdad, we probably could agree on a stable Iraq in which U.S. troops are down to a mutually acceptable level. Everything I hear about these talks in Baghdad between Iran and the United States suggests that they seem to be working; that explosives devices coming across the border have been greatly reduced, and that looks like a good sign. And I think theres every reason to expect that these talks will continue, and they should continue.

Phebe Marr is a Middle East consultant and scholar.

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