Iraq After 2008
What follows the surge? Will it be ‘Plan B,’ ‘Plan B-H’ (Baker-Hamilton), or something like South Korea? Bush seems as hazy on this as he was on the initial occupation plan. All that’s certain, says a White House official, is that a ‘fairly robust’ U.S. force will long be in Iraq.Web-exclusive commentary
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 4:45 p.m. ET June 7, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19099768/site/newsweek/June 7, 2007 - While roaming around Balad Air Base north of Baghdad a year ago, I thought that the most telltale signs of how long George W. Bush intended to stay in Iraq were the cracks. Runway cracks, that is. Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, the base commander and leader of 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, was very worried about them. The Saddam-era concrete was getting pummeled by the constant landings of U.S. F-16s, C-130s and other aircraft that flew in and out so regularly they had turned Balad into the busiest hub in the world outside of Heathrow. So Gorenc was slowly, painstakingly, rebuilding the runways to U.S. specs. No short-term plan, this. When it came to controlling the airspace over Iraq, Gorenc told me, “We will probably be helping the Iraqis with that problem for a very long time."
Just how long is the issue of the day in Iraq-obsessed Washington. And frighteningly, no one seems more confused about the plan than Bush himself. In two separate appearances in the last week, he alternately invoked last fall’s Baker-Hamilton report—which envisioned a substantial pullout by early 2008—and America’s South Korea occupation, which has been a robust front-line presence for more than 50 years. Which is it?
Neither, as it turns out. The Washington commentariat has suggested recently that Bush seems ready to pronounce the imminent end of his “surge,” which by several accounts has failed both to secure large parts of Baghdad and, on a more strategic level, to prod the still-paralyzed Iraqi government to govern. “I would like to see us in a different configuration at some point in time in Iraq,” the president said at a Rose Garden news conference on May 24. So is he talking about a “Plan B?” he was asked. “Actually, I would call that a plan recommended by Baker-Hamilton, so it would be a Plan B-H,” the president joked.
In fact Bush has no intention of going back to Baker-Hamilton, says a senior White House official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on the record. Sure, he’s paying a lot more lip service to its recommendations, partly in an effort to gain new bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill after the White House’s successful effort to thwart a Democrat-led withdrawal plan. But one of the central recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report called for a dramatic consolidation of the U.S. presence onto a handful of large bases like Balad. There, U.S. air units and special ops would mainly focus on killing Al Qaeda and leave the Iraqis more or less to their own devices. A long-term presence at Balad is still part of the plan—it always was—but the White House official told NEWSWEEK this week that the Baker-Hamilton panel misunderstood the mission. “What Baker-Hamilton didn’t get right is the military feasibility of doing anti-Al Qaeda missions based primarily on special forces operations,” he told me. “That isn’t feasible because Al Qaeda is so entrenched in the population.” When the National Intelligence Estimate “gamed this out,” he said, it concluded that sectarian violence was now so out of control that to allow Shiite reprisals to occur while the Americans remained hunkered down on their bases would only fuel support among the Sunnis for Al Qaeda, which would grow even more entrenched. Hence the surge’s effort to rein in Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other chief culprits.
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All of which brings us to Bush’s recent invocation of South Korea, where tens of thousands of U.S. troops have been stationed along or near the border since the truce that ended the Korean War—there is no peace treaty—54 years ago. But here the president apparently hasn’t thought things through either. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an interview last week, told me that there was no Status of Forces Agreement with the Shiite-led government, which is increasingly dominated by the virulently anti-American Sadr, that would legally permit a long-term U.S. presence. <> Nor is there any sign of a truce between Sunnis and Shia. So Iraq really is nothing like South Korea.
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