A Blueprint for an American Exit Strategy from Iraq

Charles V. Peña

There already are early warning signs that the United States can ill-afford to linger in Iraq and overstay its welcome. Thousands of Muslims -- Shiite and Sunni -- have protested against the U.S. military presence. American troops, saddled with peacekeeping duties they are not trained to perform, have fired on crowds and killed civilians in Mosul and Fallujah.  U.S. soldiers have been shot and killed in Hadithah and Fallujah -- even without these hostile fire casualties, U.S. troops are dying in Iraq at the rate of about one a day.  Still unable to impose law and order and restore basic services, many Iraqis feel that America cannot fulfill its pre-war promises of a better Iraq .  Liberation is slowly becoming occupation.  The United States must read the tea leaves and leave Iraq at the earliest opportunity.  

This means that the United States must avoid a Balkans-style nation-building enterprise in Iraq . In November 1995, President Clinton assured the American public that U.S. troops would be in Bosnia for only one year. Nearly eight years later, it would seem that those troops may be on the verge of being withdrawn.  But the former Yugoslavia is still largely "unbuilt." Unlike Clinton , Bush has not set a timetable for how long the United States will stay in Iraq , only that "we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more." That's an open-ended commitment. But if the United States can devise a plan and execute a decisive military victory in less than four weeks, certainly the administration can do a better job with an exit plan for Iraq .  

First, an interim Iraqi authority -- which needs to be inclusive and representative of all Iraqis, not just U.S.-handpicked Iraqi exiles and Kurds -- must be established immediately.  The interim authority must create the framework for a newly elected Iraqi government in 3 months or less.  And the U.S. support to the interim authority should largely be to restore law and order and basic services, not to staff the Iraqi government and run the country.  

The second step is to hold elections within the subsequent 2-3 months, once the interim authority is in place. This may seem ambitious, but it only took 6 months from the Bonn , Germany meeting, which created a plan for a new Afghan government after the Taliban was deposed, to have Hamid Karzai elected as the new president in Afghanistan . And when the United States ousted the Marxist military council that seized power in Grenada in 1983, free elections were held the following year.  

Once a new Iraqi government is in place, which according to the prescribed schedule would be no later than November, withdraw U.S. military forces by year's end. (After helping depose dictator Manuel Noriega, the United States handed over the entire Panama Canal and control of the country to the new government in a year.)  

Most importantly, the United States must be willing to live with the result, which is not likely to be a perfect democracy. (1) The temptation will be for the United States to stay on to help Iraq get it "right." And it is only natural that Americans will want to bestow upon Iraqis the same freedoms and liberties that we cherish. But our government's first responsibility is to the American people, not the Iraq populace. Liberating Iraq and creating democracy may be a noble purpose, but U.S. national security demands only that the new government not harbor or support terrorists who would harm the United States .  

Indeed, there is some hope that even an Islamic government would not necessarily be hostile to the United States .  In the words of one Iraqi: "We thank the Americans for getting rid of Saddam's regime, but now Iraq must be run by Iraqis." To prevent that gratitude from turning to resentment and hostility, we must have the wisdom to leave as quickly as possible. If we don't, the United States runs the risk of reliving its experience in Lebanon in the 1980s. Or worse, our own version of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan -- Arabs and Muslims from the region could flock to Iraq to expel the American infidel.  

(1)  Ray Takeyh observed that "the integration of an Islamic democracy into global democratic society would depend on the willingness of the West to accept an Islamic variant on liberal democracy . . . [that] will resist certain elements of post-Enlightenment liberalism."  "Faith-Based Initiatives," Foreign Policy, November/December 2001.  

Charles V. Peña is the director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute.