Financial Times Editorial Comment: Iraq needs a diplomatic surge

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Iraq needs a diplomatic surge
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: September 14 2007 19:48 | Last updated: September 14 2007 19:48


This week’s long-anticipated testimony to Congress by General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, Washington’s ambassador in Baghdad, was a tactical success for the Bush administration – as tactical and ephemeral as the advances of the “surge” upon which they were reporting.

President George W. Bush’s attempt to subcontract Iraq policy and to trade on Gen Petraeus’s credibility in Washington – while compromising the general, politicising the army and eroding the constitution – may have bought him a bit more time for a doomed strategy.

Neither the general nor the ambassador made excessive claims for the surge. They nevertheless suggested incremental improvements that might add up to success with time and persistence. That was unconvincing and, moreover, some of the evidence was tendentious.

The fall in Iraqi casualty figures, for example, is not what it seems. Comparing the situation now with the bloodiest period of last year – at the height of ethno-sectarian cleansing that in some areas is now complete – is misleading. The Iraqi interior ministry’s manipulation of the number of dead, reported by some US papers as three times the stated figures for August, is mendacious.

The most acclaimed achievement – the Sunni tribal war against al-Qaeda in west Iraq – began long before the surge. Its leader, who appeared alongside Mr Bush in his photo-op in the desert this month, died in a reprisal bombing on Thursday. On the Shia side, Moqtada al-Sadr’s decision to stand down his Mahdi army seems a response to his people’s hostility to intra-Shia feuding, not the surge.

The main point is that the gains of the surge require a permanent presence of US forces. But Mr Bush has gratefully accepted Gen Petraeus’s recommendations for scaled troop withdrawals. “The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq is return on success – the more successful we are, the more American troops can return home,” Mr Bush said.

Yet, if the neat and linear diagram of force reductions the general presented to Congress has anything to do with reality, it is not the reality of Iraq. “Return on Success” is bumper-sticker politics, not policy.

The administration's discourse, to which Gen Petraeus is now inextricably linked, still revolves simplistically around good guys and bad guys – the latter increasingly an ominous and incredible conflation of al-Qaeda and Iran. But the reality of Iraq does not change and the imperatives remain the same.

Iraq’s elite and politico-military forces need to be given a reasonable but limited time to reach a modus vivendi before US troops withdraw. During that time, Americans, Europeans and Arabs need to forge a compact among all Iraq’s neighbours, including Iran, on stabilising Iraq and regional security. Time to unleash a politico-diplomatic surge.