The situation in Iraq is far from static, but one is nevertheless left asking whether anything has fundamentally changed. Over the last year and a half, the country has pulled back from all-out civil war. The Iraqi wing of Al-Qaida has been thrown onto the defensive. The most troublesome of the Shi'ite militias, the Mahdi Army, has been weakened. The government of Nuri al-Maliki has gained confidence and become more assertive.
These are significant developments. But the question remains whether they are enough to make either American withdrawal (Senator Obama's solution) or American victory (Senator McCain's solution) viable.
It has been a consistent pattern since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that virtually every positive development has had its downside. Forceful American action has invited the charge of imperialism. Forceful Iraqi action has limited American options. And so it is now. One example is the hard negotiation over a SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement). A more assertive Iraqi government, conscious that important provincial elections could take place in early 2009, is playing the nationalist card and insisting on a timetable for US withdrawal -- even one hedged around with conditions. This is not what President Bush or Senator McCain want, but the Americans have had little choice but to bow to Iraqi demands. This may create Iraqi expectations which are not easily fulfilled.
A second example is the fate of the Awakening movements, made up of Sunni tribesmen co-opted and paid by the Americans to fight Al-Qaida. By common consent, they have played an important role in bringing calm to the western province of Anbar -- and enabling the Americans to hand the area over to formal Iraqi control. But, despite US pressure, the Iraqi government remains so mistrustful of these groups that it is unwilling to incorporate large numbers of their members into the Iraqi security forces. Some tribesmen now complain that the Americans have betrayed them and that they will have no choice but to re-join the insurgency. So in this important region, the gains of the "surge" are fragile.
The mutual mistrust between the Awakening groups and the government is symptomatic of the wider failure to bring about political reconciliation -- which was the political purpose underlying the "surge". Parliamentary debates about every key issue -- de-Baathification, the future of Kirkuk, the sharing of oil revenues, an amnesty for certain categories of militant -- have consistently been filled with rancor and recrimination. The political groupings still tend to see politics as a zero-sum game rather than a collective national endeavour -- and the prospect of elections is making this tendency more rather than less pronounced. Struggles for power within the Sunni and Shia communities remain unresolved and it remains to be seen whether the elections, whenever they take place, will heal the wounds.
For the contenders in the US presidential race, the situation poses deep and genuine dilemmas which campaign-trail slogans can do nothing to hide. A future President Obama would have to define -- and implement -- "responsible withdrawal". A future President McCain would have to define -- and produce a convincing strategy for -- "victory". What matters is not time frames and troop numbers. What matters is creating conditions in which either strategy -- withdrawal or victory -- becomes achievable. Without such conditions being met, both strategies may prove illusory.
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