Stephen M. Walt's blog

The dazzling incompetence of the Bush administration left Barack Obama with a long list of problems to fix. Yet Bush did provide his successor with one unambiguous gift: the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. By negotiating a timetable for the orderly removal of U.S. forces, Bush gave Obama a "get of Iraq free" pass, a clear path to ending Bush’s most expensive mistake. It is an opportunity that Obama should not squander.
 
As part of that agreement, U.S. troops are to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities today and deployed at nearby military bases, as a first step toward their eventual withdrawal. But does this course of action still make sense, given the recent increase in violence, a development that many people fear heralds a return to pre-"surge" levels of violence? The answer is yes. Despite these worrisome developments, the United States should "stay on course" out of Iraq.

The grim reality is that the United States is no longer in a position to guide Iraq's political future; that task is up to the citizens of Iraq. America's armed forces are extremely good at deterring large-scale conventional aggression and at winning conventional military engagements, but they are neither designed for nor adept at occupying and governing foreign countries whose character and culture we do not understand, especially when these societies are deeply divided. To say this takes nothing away from the sacrifices borne by our armed forces and their families; they were asked to do a job for which they were not trained or equipped, and which may have been impossible from the start.
 
Although often touted as a great success, the fate of the 2007 "surge" reveals the limits of U.S. influence clearly. Although it did lower sectarian violence, the surge did not lead to significant political reconciliation between the contending Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish groups. The "surge" was thus a tactical success but a strategic failure, and that failure is instructive. If increased force levels, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and our best military leadership could not "turn the corner" politically in Iraq, then prolonging our occupation beyond the timetable outlined in the SOFA agreement makes no sense. No matter how long we stay, Iraq is likely to face similar centrifugal forces, and our presence is doing little to reduce them.
 
Equally important, prolonging our stay in Iraq involves real costs, apart from the billions of extra dollars we will spend between now and the planned withdrawal in 2011. Our armed forces have been stretched thin, and are badly in need of retraining, re-equipping, and recovery. Remaining bogged down in Iraq also diverts time and attention from other strategic issues and continues to supply anti-American forces with ideological ammunition about our "imperial" tendencies. Delaying the agreed-upon withdrawal would thus be yet another strategic misstep.
 
The good news -- of a sort -- is that the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people increasingly agree that it is time for us to go. The Maliki government drove a hard bargain with Bush over the SOFA agreement, insisting on a shorter deadline than Bush originally wanted and demanding greater restrictions on U.S. activities during the drawdown. The Maliki government did this because it understood that taking a tough line with Washington was popular with the Iraqi people, and it hasn't budged from that tough line despite continued internal problems.
 
It is of course possible -- even likely -- that violence will increase as U.S. forces draw down, and there is still some danger of open civil war. That will be a tragedy for which Americans do bear some responsibility, insofar as we opened Pandora's Box when we invaded in 2003. But that danger will exist no matter how long we remain, and our presence there may in fact be delaying the hard bargaining and political compromises that will ultimately have to occur before Iraq is finally stable.
 
In any case, that task should now be left to Iraqis themselves. Historian Edward Gibbon once observed that "There is nothing more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest." A wise admonition, and one that President Obama should keep in mind as he leads the United States out of the Iraq debacle. Getting out may not be easy but way ahead is obvious: just stick to the agreement that the Bush administration already signed.

I am heading to California tomorrow on a family vacation, and will be posting infrequently over the next ten days. I've asked a few people to contribute guest blogs while I'm gone, and I'm sure I'll chime in from time to time, but I plan to spend most of my time reading, hiking, and catching up with my family out west. I wonder if there's good Wifi in Yosemite Valley...

Our FP colleague Marc Lynch notes that Obama’s principled stand on Israeli settlement expansion and a two-state solution may be paying off in other ways, most notably in an easing in checkpoints, etc., on the West Bank. This is encouraging news and I don’t want to sound like a killjoy, but it is important to keep the big picture in mind.

After all, as Marc notes, at the same time that Israel is easing restrictions on the West Bank, they've apparently approved the construction of another 240 homes at an outpost near the Palestinian city of Ramallah. One hand giveth, the other hand taketh away.

At this point, freezing settlement expansion, lifting checkpoints, building up more effective and professional Palestinian security forces, reforming Fatah, trying to get Hamas to recognize Israel, etc., are all just means to an end; they are not ends in themselves. As Obama appears to understand, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not be put to rest until there are two states for two peoples, and the Palestinian state cannot be some sort of permanently crippled Bantustan akin to the open-air prison that now exists in Gaza. Until Israelis, Palestinians, and their supporters elsewhere get to that finish line, in short, we haven’t really solved anything. 

Getty Images 

Kyrgyzstan has reversed an earlier decision to end U.S. access to Manas air base, a valuable hub supplying U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Both Reuters and the New York Times describe this step as a "victory" for the United States and for the Obama administration.

In fact, it's a victory for the government of Kyrgryzstan, which had threatened to close the base earlier this year, shortly after Russia had offered them a $2 billion loan. Like a smart landlord in the midst of a housing shortage, Krygyzstan threatened to evict us if we didn't pay more rent. So the annual charge for using the base will rise from about $17 million to $60 million, and the United States also agreed to spend $36 million to expand the airport and additional millions on economic development and drug eradication programs.  

When Washington cares more about Central Asian security than Central Asian governments do, it will be child's play for them to charge us whatever they think the market will bear. Admittedly, it's small change when you consider the overall cost of the Afghan operation (over $200 billion in defense costs since 9/11 and currently running $2-3 billion per month, according to the Congressional Research Service). But when the federal budget is hemorrhaging red ink and state and local governments are slashing budgets and programs right and left, I don't see why succumbing to this sort of blackmail is a "victory" for us. Krygryzstan gets a bigger air base, and we get a less well-educated and less healthier population here, not to mention crummier public infrastructure. Maybe it's the best of several bad alternatives, but let's hold the high-fives.

VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO/AFP/Getty Images

The New York Times has an important piece today on why Iran's clerical regime is unlikely to fall in the face of the current wave of protests. The short version is that Iran's rulers have several overlapping security organizations that they can call upon: the police, some three million members of paramilitary Basij, the 120,000-strong Revolutionary Guards, and an army of some 400,000. All report to Ayatollah Khameini and as far as one can tell from news reports, none of them show significant signs of disintegrating.

This story points to a serious lacuna in our understanding of what is happening in Iran. Despite the government’s efforts to exclude correspondents and shut down other channels of information (e.g., the Internet), we've been getting lots of reports and videos from the reformist forces.  But I haven't seen any interviews or tweets from Basij members or Revolutionary Guards, or from the millions of Iranians who did in fact vote for Ahmadinejad. In short, we have no good way of knowing how firm the government’s position really is.

The literature on revolutionary upheavals teaches that governments do not fall so long as the leadership remains resolute and the security forces and the army remain loyal. If the Basij, Revolutionary Guards, and other security elements remain willing to follow orders -- and that seems to be the case so far -- then Iran's current leaders will remain in charge.  

The only prospect for genuine revolution that I can see would be a prolonged and growing wave of popular discontent -- general strikes, funeral demonstrations that get bigger over time (as they did in 1979), etc., -- that begins to make normal life impossible, does further damage to Iran’s already-troubled economy and eventually leads to a major rift among the current rulers and to a major reshuffling of the leadership. But it is hard for me to imagine Khameini or Ahmadinejad boarding a plane into exile the way the Shah did in 1979.

Yet even if the current regime survives the present challenge, the impact of the crisis is likely to be salutary. Iran's appeal as a model of Islamic governance has been tarnished by this episode: instead of being the principled defenders of the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary vision of the "rule of the jurisprudent," his successors now look more like garden-variety authoritarians trying to hang onto privilege and power in the face of widespread popular discontent. And that means Muslims elsewhere will be less inclined to see Tehran as an inspiration, even if they are unhappy with political conditions in their own countries.

The current crisis may also put to rest a lot of the bellicose talk about military action. In recent years, advocates of "kinetic action" (read: preventive war) against Iran have sought to portray it as a nation of wild-eyed revolutionary fanatics, led by Holocaust-denying zealots who openly crave martyrdom and would therefore be willing to fire nuclear weapons at other countries even if it led to their own destruction. That alarmist image was always pretty ludicrous, and it looks increasingly inappropriate today. In the wake of this stolen election (and see here for more evidence of electoral chicanery), Iran's rulers looks less like a group of fanatics and more like a group of grumpy old men. I don't see Osama bin Laden or Che or Qutb or even Khomeini; I see Brezhnev, Andropov, Mussolini, or Ceaucescu. It is also clear that a sizeable segment of Iran’s population -- and especially its younger members -- isn't interested in a confrontation with the West and simply wants many of the freedoms that we claim to cherish. They are also patriots who love their country, however, and the surest way to turn them against us and to reinforce Ahmadinejad et al would be to start dropping a lot of smart bombs on them.  

In fact, we actually do know precisely how to deal with this sort of situation. As we learned during the Cold War, the proper response to thuggish authoritarian regimes is containment via deterrence, combined with hardnosed diplomacy on specific security issues and a sustained effort to win over their societies by showing them that we know how to produce a better way of life. That strategy won the Cold War without the manifold dangers of preventive war, and probably saved millions of lives in the process. The clerics and their front man may hang on for now, and they might even get a few (unusable) nuclear weapons one day. But time is on our side, and we can afford to be patient.

OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images