[Mb-civic] The Big Question By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Big Question
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Since the start of the Iraq war, it's been clear that "victory" rested on
the answer to one Big Question: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was
the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the
way Iraq was ‹ a country congenitally divided among Shiites, Sunnis and
Kurds that can be held together only by an iron fist.

Unfortunately, to answer this big question ‹ even Iraqis didn't know ‹ the
U.S. had to provide a minimum degree of security for all Iraqis, so people
could feel relaxed enough to think beyond their most narrow tribal or
religious identities. We didn't do that, because of President Bush's
decision to approach the Iraq invasion with the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which
calls for just enough troops to fail, rather than the proven Powell
Doctrine, which calls for overwhelming force to win.

What happened in the absence of an overwhelming U.S. force was the looting
of government buildings and ammo dumps, open borders for infiltrators, and
then widespread insecurity, which naturally prompted Iraqis to fall back on
tribal loyalties and militias, rather than trusting the Iraqi Army or the
police. People are very good at figuring out who will protect them in a
crisis, and too many Iraqis opted for local militias.

Yes, we are now better at training an Iraqi Army and have held national
elections. But the failure to provide security after the invasion means we
are trying to build these national institutions in competition with the
insurgents, Qaeda terrorists, Shiite death squads and sectarian Iraqi
militias that sprouted in the security vacuum.

One thing that covering the Lebanese civil war taught me was this: once
sectarian militias take root, they develop their own interests and are very
hard to uproot. "Militias are the infrastructure of civil war, and the basis
of warlordism," the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told The
Washington Post.

This did not have to be. The Bush team repeatedly declared that it had
enough troops in Iraq and that no one on the ground was asking for more.
Totally untrue. As Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. civilian administration in
Iraq, reveals in his new book, "My Year in Iraq," he repeatedly asked for
more troops, but was ignored.

Mr. Bremer confesses in his book: "Coalition forces were spread too thin on
the ground. During my morning intelligence briefings, I would sometimes
picture an understrength fire crew racing from one blaze to another." He
writes that he told Condoleezza Rice in 2003, "The coalition's got about
half the number of soldiers we need here, and we run a real risk of having
this thing go south on us."

Mr. Bremer describes this in 2004: "On May 18, I gave Rice a heads-up that I
intended to send Secretary Rumsfeld a very private message suggesting that
the coalition needed more troops. ... That afternoon I sent my message. ...
I noted that the deterioration of the security situation since April had
made it clear, to me at least, that we were trying to cover too many fronts
with too few resources." But, Mr. Bremer writes of Mr. Rumsfeld, "I did not
hear back from him."

Because the U.S. never deployed enough troops, America alone cannot
establish order in Iraq today. We don't have a way to do that. And Iraq's
Army, no matter how well trained, will never have enough will ‹ without a
broad political consensus. So we're down to the last hope, and it's a mighty
thin reed. The only people who can produce a decent outcome now are Iraq's
new leaders ‹ by coming together, burying their hatchets, forging a real
national unity government and getting their followers to follow.

This is the season of decision. We have an Iraqi government elected on the
basis of an Iraqi-written constitution. Either the elected Iraqi leaders
will heroically come together and forge a national unity government ‹ and
save Iraq ‹ or they will divide Iraq. Our job was to help them decide in a
reasonably secure environment, not in a shooting gallery. We failed in that
task, but they will have to decide nevertheless.

It is Iraqis who will now tell Americans whether they should stay or go. A
majority of Americans, in a gut way, always understood the value of trying
to produce a democratizing government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.
That is why there has been no big antiwar movement. Americans should, and
will, stick with Iraq if they sense that Iraqis are on a pathway to building
a decent, stable government. But Americans will not, and should not,
baby-sit an Iraqi civil war. The minute they sense that's what's happening,
you will see the bottom fall out of U.S. public support for this war.

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