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Analysis: 'Change the Course' in Iraq

Council on Foreign Relations

Updated: October 16, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

It is no secret that U.S. policymakers have lowered their expectations of what a future Iraq will resemble. President Bush’s hoped-for “shining beacon of freedom,” which would infuse its authoritarian neighbors with democracy, has been downgraded. James A. Baker III, cochair of a forthcoming report on Iraq, says the United States would be lucky to see a state emerge that is merely “representative,” not “democratic.” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is less charitable in his criticism. “The idea that Iraq would somehow become a democracy and example that would transform the region was a pathetic neoconservative fantasy from the start,” he writes in a new CSIS report. Yet neither Baker nor Cordesman says all hope is lost.

Quite a wide range of options are available to the Bush administration. None of them guarantee “victory”—more precisely, they try to minimize the effects of defeat—and all are fraught with risk. According to the New York Sun, leaked accounts of Baker’s commission on Iraq—whose official report is not due before December—suggest the White House has two main options. The first is to focus on establishing security in Baghdad while striking “political accommodation” with Iraqi insurgents. “The goal of nurturing a democracy in Iraq is dropped,” reports the Sun. The second option calls for the phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq but leaves open the difficult question of where and when these soldiers should be deployed.

Cordesman divides his options into the “almost good, the bad, and the ugly.” He suggests conditioning military and civilian aid packages on political effectiveness in Baghdad, particularly within Iraq’s ministries of defense and interior.

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.