Policy Options and the U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq: An Analysis of the Way Ahead

摘要

It has become a cliche to remark on the overfull plate of the new administration, and certainly Iraq is a large part of that meal. Of all the seriously daunting and immediate international problems facing the newly elected U.S. President, none is more important to get his arms around quickly than the situation in Iraq. The picture is a little distorted as President Obama takes over, due to the supposed certitudes of the recently signed Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA); however, there are crucial decisions to be made, and made quickly, by the incoming American leadership. After nearly five years of fighting, first an organized army, then a rapidly concentrated popular insurgency, overlapped with a foreign-fed extremist terror movement, and finally a vicious civil war pitting Shi'a militia groups, some actively supported by Iran, against Sunni groups. Iraq is experiencing a pronounced lull in the fighting. By this summer, violence was down in Iraq 80 percent from the previous summer.1 As early as September 2007, General Petraeus could say in testimony to the U.S. Congress, 'The military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met.'2 A year later, retired General Barry McCaffrey returning from his most recent trip to Iraq, declared, '. . . the bottom line is a dramatic and growing momentum for economic and security stability which is unlikely to be reversible.'3 This, of course, is welcome after so much suffering by the Iraqi people and such manifest sacrifice on the part of United States and other coalition forces in that devastated country.