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Analysis: No Easy Solution on Iraq

Council on Foreign Relations

October 11, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

Ongoing reports of sectarian violence in Iraq appear to be competing increasingly with domestic U.S. criticism of the Bush administration’s management of the war. The sour mood was echoed at a recent CFR symposium on the war by CFR Senior Fellow Steven Simon, who asserted that Iraq has emboldened terrorists and not made the United States safer. “Movements like the jihad thrive on powerful imagery,” Simon said. “ Iraq has provided a plethora of these images.”

Meanwhile, Bob Woodward’s latest exposé, State of Denial, depicts Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as poor administrators who ignored the bad news from Iraq. Woodward says President Bush continues to present a rosy picture of the war, despite evidence to the contrary (Spiegel Online): “The president is out saying that terrorists are in retreat, which is really the opposite of what the [intelligence] reports say.” Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post has also published a critical account of Washington’s management of postwar Iraq that stretches back to the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, alleging the politicization of crucial U.S. posts in Iraq.

Three years later, experts warn a low-level civil war may be underway and a bloody insurgency shows no signs of abating. The U.S. Army and Marines are drafting a new counterinsurgency strategy (NYT) that emphasizes the safeguarding of civilians, something military experts say was lacking in the first three years of the occupation. As a result, a growing number of Iraqis—Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds alike—say Iraq is now heading in the wrong direction, according to a recent poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.