[Mb-civic] EDITORIAL Next Steps in Iraq

[Michael Butler]

 The New York Times
February 2, 2005
EDITORIAL
Next Steps in Iraq

No one will be surprised if President Bush uses tonight's State of the Union
address to remind the country of how well Iraq's elections went last
weekend. He has a right to feel triumphant, if not yet vindicated. But he
needs to go further and spell out his plans for the future. Americans
deserve to hear the president's thoughts on how United States military
operations can eventually be brought to an end. Even more important, Mr.
Bush needs to let the newly elected leaders of Iraq know what the United
States will be expecting from them in return for continued large-scale
military support.

The Iraqis who voted, showing awesome courage and a fierce determination to
shape their own political future, heartened all Americans who are hoping for
a positive outcome there. Even in the Sunni areas, where turnout was
significantly lower than in Shiite and Kurdish strongholds, an encouraging
number of Sunnis expressed their desire to be part of the new government and
the assembly that will write a constitution for Iraq. That leaves some scope
for eventually creating a government that all Iraqi communities accept as
legitimate and worth fighting for. This is a rare moment of hope for a
country whose past has been scarred by tyranny and war and whose present
remains punctuated by hardship and violence.

This could indeed be the moment when Iraqis begin to build a truly
democratic state. But there are many, many ways that things could go very,
very wrong. For example, the newly empowered Shiite majority could overreach
and, instead of trying to build inclusive coalitions, could try to impose
wide-ranging religious legislation on secular Iraqis and centralized control
on minority regions. The Kurds, instead of relying on democracy to secure
their rights in a unified Iraqi state, could renew their historical drive
for a separate Kurdistan, fracturing Iraq and stirring anxieties in
neighboring countries, primarily Turkey, that have large Kurdish minorities
of their own.

Both of these groups owe their liberation from Saddam Hussein and Sunni
domination to the American invasion. Continued United States support should
depend on their commitment to a unified, pluralist Iraq. Otherwise,
Washington could find itself trapped, indefinitely and largely on its own,
fighting a bloody counterinsurgency war against an armed and embittered
Sunni Arab minority while Shiites and Kurds go their own ways in their own
regions.

Even if things go extremely well, the next months will be fraught with
tensions, making this exactly the wrong moment for the United States to be
setting fixed troop-withdrawal targets, as some Democrats now propose. Mr.
Bush needs to do something far more difficult and more nuanced. He must
begin to chart a middle course between an arbitrary exit timetable and an
indefinite blank check.

America's future presence must be linked to Iraq's own commitment to
nation-building under the leadership of its newly elected government. If
Iraq's new leaders can sustain the momentum of Sunday's democratic
beginning, Washington should be prepared to stay and train a robust and
reliable Iraqi security force. If the democratic experiment starts falling
apart in sectarian squabbling, America should not hesitate to use the threat
of an early departure to encourage Iraq's politicians to behave more
constructively.

At Mr. Bush's behest, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of
dollars on Iraq, kept well over 100,000 troops there for nearly two years
and sacrificed the lives, so far, of more than 1,400 American men and women
- as well as of untold thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. For the first
time in this whole sorry enterprise, it now seems possible to imagine an
acceptable political outcome.

Tonight Mr. Bush needs to tell his fellow citizens how he plans to use
America's continued presence to encourage Iraqis to build on this
extraordinary electoral moment.

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