“Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days,” runs the proverb quoted by Colonel Timothy R. Reese, a senior American adviser in Baghdad, in a memo which surfaced in the New York Times at the end of July. His message was that, after six years in Iraq, it was time for the Americans to go. They should declare victory and leave by August 2010.
After the recent rise in violence in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul, it might seem odd for the Americans to be thinking – albeit in private – of accelerating their timetable for withdrawal. When Colonel Reese’s memo was leaked, the Pentagon was quick to distance itself from his views. But the course of action he proposes is, from America’s point of view, neither irrational nor implausible.
Two dynamics are at work, and both lead in the same direction. In the United States the public and the policy-makers are utterly tired of Iraq. They see no point in prolonging the pain. President Obama’s eyes are fixed, rightly or wrongly, on Afghanistan. He wants to withdraw – “responsibly” – from Iraq and he has an overwhelming mandate from the American people to do so.
In Iraq, a new nationalism is evident – and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is determined to exploit it. He wants to be the man who got the foreign forces out, and he believes this will be a winning platform in the parliamentary elections due in January 2010. （Although that’s four months away, Iraqi politicians are already in active pre-election mode.）
Few US officials, least of all Colonel Reese, are blind to the difficulties. Once US forces withdrew from Iraqi cities at the end of June, extremists – whether Al-Qaeda or ex-Baathists – had an added incentive to step up the level of violence. Their tactic, both in Baghdad and in Mosul, is to drive wedges between Sunni and Shi’a, and between Arab and Kurd. The violence is not as bad as it was in 2005 and 2006, but it is still bad.
Colonel Reese’s memo lists the problems with brutal candour: the deficiencies of the Iraqi Security Forces （ISF）, the corruption of Iraqi officials, the absence of reconciliation – and the new coolness in relations between Iraqis and Americans. But he does not waver in his conclusion: “while the ISF is not good in any objective sense, it is good enough for Iraq in 2009”. If the Americans leave, the regime will survive.
Other scenarios remain possible. A crisis of overwhelming magnitude – such as a return to the virtual civil war of a few years ago – would make it harder for the Obama administration to fulfil its pledge to withdraw responsibly. But right now we have not reached that point. One former Iraqi government minister, who is well informed about Iraqi and American thinking, says he believes the Americans will be out by the end of next year – in other words, well ahead of President Obama’s timetable. A small residual US presence will remain – both in Iraq and in neighbouring Kuwait – but, to all intents and purposes, the Iraqis will be on their own. If that happens, it will be a moment of truth for Iraq, for the United States and for the region.
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