Author: Lionel Beehner, Staff Writer
June 25, 2007
IntroductionEven as they disagree on how long American forces will remain in Iraq, U.S. officials and foreign policy experts suggest a number of scenarios for what Iraq might resemble after coalition forces eventually pull out. President Bush has proposed the so-called South Korean model, a long-term residual troop presence to prevent civil war from breaking out. Many have also likened the conflict to Vietnam, where the fall of Saigon did not unleash the massive “domino” effect many predicted. Others have offered Lebanon, which suffered from a long civil war before an uneasy truce was inked, as a more accurate template. Then there are those who say Iraq should become a federalized state, akin to post-1995 Bosnia. Experts disagree over the degree to which the conflict in Iraq could spread to neighboring countries.
The South Korea Model<…>
Others say Korea is a faulty model, and a residual force will only embolden Islamic radicals and arouse suspicions that U.S. interests are related more to oil than democracy promotion. “Any U.S. bases remaining in Iraq, either to keep a finger on the oil, or to act as a jumping off point for attacking Iran, will similarly quickly come under
withering attack from Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda,” writes Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute, a public-policy research organization.
The Lebanon Model<…>
But other analysts fear Iraq may result in something worse than Lebanon at its nadir in the 1980s. “Lebanon’s simmering civil war eventually burned itself out and left a coherent, albeit weak,
state in its ashes,” writes Christopher J. Fettweis of the U.S. Naval War College in the
Los Angeles Times. “Iraq could soon more closely resemble Somalia in the 1990s, an utterly collapsed, uncontrolled, lawless, failed state that destabilizes the most vital region in the world.” Democratic presidential candidates, similarly, regularly refer to the prospect of “
genocide” in postwar Iraq.
The Vietnam ModelThe Vietnam War ended in a four-year-long withdrawal of U.S. forces followed by the fall of Saigon and the rest of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese. In Vietnam, the U.S. military slowly handed over combat duties to local forces as part of its “Vietnamization” campaign. Some analysts say employing a similar strategy in Iraq would be complicated because the conflict is more of a communal civil war, not an ideological struggle for national liberation. “Such a policy,” writes CFR’s Stephen Biddle in
Foreign Affairs, “might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the
communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it.” Some say the lesson of the “Vietnam model,” as it applies to Iraq, is to maintain a U.S. presence and economic aid to sustain a political solution. “The shame of Vietnam is not that we were there in the first place, but that we
betrayed our ally in the end,” wrote former Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird in
Foreign Affairs. Adds Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state, in a recent op-ed: “The
essential prerequisite for such a political solution is staying power in the near term.”
Fettweis says Vietnam is an apt comparison to Iraq because both represented major strategic mistakes in U.S. foreign policy, turning public opinion against the White House and against interventionism in general—what became know as “Vietnam Syndrome.” But he says the significance of pulling en masse out of Iraq, like Vietnam before it, may prove to be overplayed by the war’s architects. “(J)ust as the war’s critics predicted in the 1960s, Vietnam turned out to be strategically irrelevant,” he writes. “Saigon fell, but no dominoes followed; the balance of Cold War power did not change.”
The Bosnia Model<…>
But the main use of the “Bosnia model” has come from advocates who favor a looser federation rather than a centralized state, not unlike Bosnia post-1995. “The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group—Kurd, Sunni Arab, and Shiite Arab—room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of
common interests,” wrote Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) and the Council on Foreign Relations’ President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb in the
New York Times. “In effect, Iraq is already
becoming Bosnia,” adds Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, writing in the
Washington Times. Decentralization in Iraq, like Bosnia, would require land swaps, the separation of ethnic groups, and a political agreement that disperses powers to the regions, while keeping a unitary state. “Ethnic relocation is distasteful and not free from risk but if carried out with care as government policy, it can occur with less trauma than in the Balkans,” adds O’Hanlon.
Yet others disagree. More than a decade after the Dayton Peace accords, some say that Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats, and Muslims still do not share a unified vision for the country as a whole. “Of all the ironies of the American adventure in Iraq, perhaps none is larger than using the ‘
success’ of Bosnia as a model to solve the sectarian violence now raging in Baghdad,” write Don Hays of the U.S. Institute of Peace, R. Bruce Hitchner of the Dayton Project, and Edward P. Joseph in the
International Herald Tribune. “The Dayton legacy of balancing power at the central, cantonal, and local levels is hopelessly dysfunctional.” They say Bosnian Serbs, emboldened by Kosovo’s push for independence, may be poised to pull out of the Dayton arrangement. Moreover, Bosnia, given its porous borders, remains a lawless haven for drug and arms traffickers, terrorists, and other organized crime elements.
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