George Packer’s Must-Read Piece on Iraq

With the possible exceptions of John Burns and Dexter Filkins, there has been no better on-the-ground reporter from Iraq than George Packer. He's got a piece in this week's issue of the New Yorker entitled "Planning for Defeat." Anyone with an interest in the war, the surge, or the future of American foreign policy ought to read it.

Packer is of the we-broke-it-we-own-it school of reconstruction; he knows that the Bush Doctrine has failed in Iraq, but he's sober enough in his pessimism to realize that any immediate pull-out of U.S. troops will make matters worse. For one thing, the road out of Baghdad is even more fraught than the road in was, and will require extensive planning and coordination to ensure as few military casualties as possible. Picking off soldiers as they retreat will not be beneath the kind of homicidal thugs our troops have been fighting, so the question is not merely one of a timetable for withdrawal but also a schematic for withdrawal.

Packer tries to answer some of the harder questions of the current debate, such as:

What will the consequences be for the Iraqis if and when we withdraw?

Given the examples of Falluja and Baghdad—not to mention the unfortunate fates of Yazidis, Christians, Mandeans, and Gypsies in villages that America never occupied—the burden of proof lies on anyone who claims that Iraqis without Americans around won’t be substantially worse off, and might even fare better. Even Iraqis who want American troops out immediately acknowledge that the result will be more bloodshed. If America decides to leave Iraqis to their fate, they should at least be spared the parting thought that it’s for their own good.

Can we afford to allow wholesale ethnic slaughter, perhaps outright genocide, to take place in a country that we invaded and occupied for four years?

Even in narrow strategic terms, though, American interests would be harmed by large-scale slaughter in Iraq. The spectacle, televised around the world, would deepen the feeling that America is indifferent to human, especially Muslim, life. It would brand the U.S. as untrustworthy to potential allies and feckless to potential enemies. And it would destroy what’s left of American prestige.

Will Iraq disintegrate into three separate countries, reminiscent of its pre-Churchillian vilayet period?

A recent poll by academic researchers in Michigan found that the percentage of Baghdad residents identifying themselves as “Iraqis above all” more than doubled, across all groups, between 2004 and 2006. Civil war and sectarian rule have tarnished the prestige of religious parties and increased the appeal of a non-sectarian government. In August, the Shiite governors of two provinces in the south—a region that is almost entirely Shiite—were murdered, presumably by rival Shiite factions. This suggests that a partitioned Iraq would not be a peaceful or stable Iraq.

The kernel of good news here is that the increased misery over the last two years has blunted some of the sharper sectarian differences between Shia and Sunni, differences that the U.S. of course seems intent on exacerbating by hedging its bets with one side over the other. Selling arms to Saudi Arabia, home of the Wahabbism that was responsible for 9/11, is a fine way to have Mahdi-minded Iraqis lining up behind Iran's Republican Guard. But so it goes…

As for the progress being made by the surge, Packer seems, on the whole, guardedly optimistic. However, it's not hollow "benchmarks" he's using as his standards for judgment but rather this under-reported development:

One of the less noticed aspects of the surge has been a belated effort to return American officials to the more obscure corners of the country in the form of “provincial reconstruction teams”: joint civil-military efforts that funnel technical help and money from the American and Iraqi governments into the provinces, where political and economic development seems more feasible and responsive to the local population. The recent formation of local police forces and town councils in Anbar Province has had nothing to do with the central government and has been far more successful than previous attempts. These teams should be expanded during the life of the surge, so that they reach the self-sustaining, self-protecting size of a hundred and fifty people; this approach roughly follows the model of Afghanistan, where provincial reconstruction teams first developed several years ago have been an important, if insufficient, tool for extending development to the countryside.

At the microscopic level, U.S. counterinsurgency largely resembles the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention, which worked well in New York under Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton. When a community racked by violence witnesses new infrastructure being built, and more protective manpower cropping up on street corners, it has an incentive for self-preservation. As alien as the concept of Iraqi barn-raising might seem to us, especially in the midst of such brutal warfare, it's still powerful psychological lure for those looking to modestly rebuild a neighborhood if not quite an entire country. Even if the government in Baghdad is all but naught, Iraqis still need functioning municipal government and reliable local police precincts.