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Analysis: Seventy-Nine Ways to Fix Iraq

Council on Foreign Relations

December 6, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

The Iraq Study Group report contains seventy-nine proposals on correcting U.S. policy in Iraq. Chief among them is a call for recasting the U.S. military’s mission as one supporting Iraqi forces. To this end, the report recommends a five-fold increase in the number of U.S. troops embedded with Iraqi security forces as well as a phaseout of U.S. combat forces by the first quarter of 2008. The United States, said the bipartisan panel, should avoid making “open-ended commitments to keep large numbers of troops deployed in Iraq."

The panel also recommends a regional initiative that brings in all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, and calls for revived efforts to achieve an Arab-Israeli settlement. “Everything in the Middle East is connected to everything else,” says James A. Baker, III, one of the report’s cochairs. Finally, the report seeks to shift responsibilities onto the government in Baghdad to end the violence in Iraq, which some experts are calling a civil war. If the Iraqi government does not meet certain milestones on governance, national reconciliation, and security, the panel advises the U.S. government to reduce its economic, military, and political support. CFR President Richard N. Haass tells Bernard Gwertzman that the recommendations mark a return to traditional statecraft and give the Bush administration “the best chance that exists for making progress.”

But the panel’s suggestion to engage Iran and Syria on Iraq, a throwback to Cold War-era realism, is likely to be met with some resistance. Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy says Tehran “ has shown little interest in talks with the United States on Iraq, and, in any case, could do little to advance stability in Iraq.”

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.