Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from an Iraqi Civil War

Chapter 3: Policy Options for Containing Spillover

If Iraq spirals into an all-out civil war, the United States will have its work cut out attempting to prevent spillover from destabilizing the Middle East and threatening key governments, particularly Saudi Arabia.Washington will have to devise strategies toward Iraq and its neighbors that can deal with the problems of refugees, minimize terrorist attacks emanating from Iraq, dampen the anger in neighboring populations caused by the conflict, prevent an outbreak of secession fever, keep Iraq’s neighbors from intervening, and help ameliorate economic problems that could breed further political or security concerns. This will not be easy. In fact, the history of states trying to contain the spillover from civil wars suggests that it is most likely that the United States will be unable to do so. But if Iraq does descend into an all-out civil war, America will have to try. With this in mind, below are a number of policy options and broader observations on containing spillover. At best these options are likely to solve only part of the problem. Moreover, all are difficult, and some are costly and require a large U.S. military commitment. 3 Policy Options for Containing Spillover 60 1379-1 ch03 4/16/07 11:41 AM Page 60 But planning now is essential. Iraq is descending into the abyss, and it risks taking its neighbors with it. Planning now, even while the Bush Administration struggles to prevent such a deterioration, will enable the United States to better limit the overall scale of the spillover and mitigate its effects on key U.S. allies if worse does ever come to worst. A failure to begin planning , on the other hand, will lead to an ad hoc approach that would almost certainly result in many avoidable mistakes and missed opportunities. Don’t try to Pick Winners There will be an enormous temptation for the United States to try to aid one Iraqi faction against another in an effort to manage the Iraqi civil war from within. In theory, the United States could choose proxies and use them to secure its interests. James Kurth, for example, argues that the United States should “crush the Sunnis” and split Iraq between the Shi’i Arabs and the Kurds.63 However, as noted above, proxies often fail in their assigned tasks or turn against their masters. As a result, such efforts rarely succeed, and in the specific circumstances of Iraq, such an effort appears particularly dubious. Once an internal conflict has metastasized into an all-out civil war, military leadership proves to be a crucial variable in determining which faction prevails (sooner or later). In Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud’s generalship was the key to the Northern Alliance’s ability to hold out against the Taliban, and it is unclear whether it could have survived had the United States not crushed the Taliban a month after his assassination by al-Qa‘ida on September 9, 2001. However, it is extremely difficult to know a priori who the great military commanders are because this can be demonstrated only by the “audit of battle.”At the start of civil wars, it is the political leadership that is well-known, and this rarely equates to military capacity. Lebanon is the best example of this, where the highest profile political leaders of the Maronite camp at the start of the civil war (the Chamouns, Franjiyehs, and even the Gemayels) were displaced by military commanders like Samir Ga‘ga‘ and Michel ‘Aoun—who were unknown at the start of the war but emerged as the key leaders because of their battlefield skills. In Iraq, as in most civil wars, it is not clear which proxy would be the most effective militarily. In Iraq, most observers know about Muqtada as-Sadr and Hakim but know very little about the field commanders of either the policy options 61 1379-1 ch03 4/16/07 11:41 AM Page 61 Jaysh al-Mahdi or the Badr Organization—and none of them has yet been tested in combat. It may be that over time, if competent field commanders do not emerge in these militias, they will be defeated, taken over, disbanded, or co-opted into other militias led by those with real combat skill. To back a group now, without any proof that it can survive in a civil war, would be risky at best, and possibly counterproductive if it further alienates...