How worried should we be about reports such as this and this in the Washington Post about how restricted U.S. troops have become in Iraq? One article reports on how U.S. troops, worried about an insurgent plot to mortar their bases, were not allowed to operate in the neighborhood where the attack was supposed to happen — the Iraqis insisted on handling the issue themselves. This is part of a broader Iraqi initiative to take U.S. forces off the streets that is raising concerns among some Americans over being denied the authority to protect their own forces. The other Post article contains this quote:
The Iraqi order runs “contrary to the spirit and practice of our last several months of operations,” Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote in an e-mail obtained by the Washington Post. “Maybe something was ‘lost in translation,'” Bolger wrote. “We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I’m sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be.”
He said U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis. “This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe,” he wrote. “We’ll do that, preferably partnered.”
I would say the Iraqi attitude is cause for concern — but not too much concern. At least not yet. Prime Minister Maliki continues to cater to nationalist sentiment, but he is enough of a realist not to simply kick out all 130,000 U.S. troops. He knows that the situation is still unstable and that U.S. help remains essential as Iraq continues to improve the capacity of its own security forces. But for better or worse, the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush administration allows him to call the shots on the ground.
The good news is that Maliki has allowed American troops to continue working with Iraqi special-operations units to target hard-core extremists — both Shia and Sunni. Those kinds of operations occur in the dark — literally. They are easy to shield from ordinary Iraqis. What Maliki doesn’t want to see is a heavy U.S. “footprint” on the ground that will allow his critics to claim that their country is still “occupied.”
Fair enough. It’s in our interest, too, to build up the Iraqi government as a strong independent force with the confidence of its own people. As long as Iraqi Security Forces continue to improve (and they are worlds better today than they were just a few years ago), this development shouldn’t cause too much of a problem. A further bit of good news is that, while the frequency of attacks in Iraq is still higher than in Afghanistan, it is much lower than a few years ago, and the trend has not changed much over the past seven months. In other words, notwithstanding a few high-profile attacks, there has not been a big increase in violence since most U.S. troops moved out of the cities, a process completed on June 30.
Whatever restrictions are placed on their operations, the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq creates some room for short-term confidence. There is only so much that can go wrong with that many Americans in the general vicinity — and odds are that if the situation starts to spiral out of control, those troops would be invited in to help stabilize matters. The real danger will come over the next year as the level of U.S. forces is due to fall to 50,000. Our troops are supposed to leave Iraq altogether by the end of 2011.
Until now, I thought those deadlines might get adjusted or ignored. But having seen how assiduously Maliki has behaved in implementing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities, I now think that there will be few if any American troops in Iraq by 2012. On its face, that doesn’t sound so alarming — after all, by then the U.S. troop presence in Iraq would have lasted almost nine years. Surely that should be enough time, right? Not necessarily. Consider the fact that foreign troops still remain stationed in Kosovo and Bosnia. It’s been 14 years since the end of the Bosnia war and 10 years since the end of the Kosovo war, but there is still a general expectation that if the peacekeepers leave, the violence could resume.
The situation in Iraq isn’t exactly identical, but there, too, U.S. forces serve as a vital buffer between deeply suspicious sectarian and religious groups that only recently were killing one another on a massive scale (and still continue to kill each other on a smaller scale). For Iraqis to have confidence in the future of their country, they will need the presence of foreign peacekeepers for many years to come. I only hope that Iraqi leaders realize that and are willing to act on that belief rather than simply cater to the most knee-jerk nationalist sentiment.
