How to Leave Iraq

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THE AL-QAEDA FACTOR
Advocates of a phased withdrawal from Iraq still must overcome the Bush Administration's most vociferous argument against it: that Americans must stay in Iraq to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing a safe haven there. As support from key Republicans has withered, the Pentagon has cranked up the al-Qaeda rhetoric. On July 17, the Administration released the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which said "Al-Qaeda will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaeda in Iraq" to plot attacks against the U.S. homeland. Bush has turned up the volume, mentioning al-Qaeda 27 times in a speech last month. "Leaving Iraq now," Bush said recently, would mean we'd "allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan ... People aren't just going to be content with driving America out of Iraq. Al-Qaeda wants to hurt us here."

Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the U.S. military estimates that al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group thought to number several thousand — accounts for only about 15% of the attacks in Iraq. (Other Sunni groups account for 70%, with Shi'ite militias responsible for the remaining 15%.) But, Cordesman says, those attacks are the most deadly and "probably do the most damage in pushing Iraq toward civil war." At the moment, al-Qaeda in Iraq is valuable to Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, even though the links between the Qaeda leaders and the jihadi shock troops in Iraq are tenuous. The violence perpetrated by al-Qaeda in Iraq helps the organization raise money and draw new recruits. The declassified NIE summary says al-Qaeda in Iraq helps al-Qaeda "energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources and recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for homeland attacks."

But it's also true that al-Qaeda in Iraq is on the run. On Wednesday, the U.S. announced the capture of the highest-ranking commander of the group in Iraq. When the U.S. leaves, many Iraqis say, they can deal with the terrorists and their patrons more harshly. The Anbar Salvation Council has been aggressively targeting al-Qaeda in that province, denying it safe haven in places it once controlled with an iron fist. The Administration has boasted in recent weeks that the Sunnis in Anbar are attacking elements of al-Qaeda. So why would that end if the U.S. withdrew? "If we withdraw from Iraq, a lot of the tensions we see today are going to be directed against al-Qaeda as well as against every other faction," says Cordesman. "So it's not going to be some sort of easy sanctuary for al-Qaeda."

But neither will the broader jihadist threat in Iraq or elsewhere vanish when we leave. Most plans for a reduced U.S. mission in Iraq — including the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, headed by James Baker III and Lee Hamilton — call for retaining a small counterterrorism force there. "No one is going to complain about going after an al-Qaeda target," says Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, who advocates a gradual disengagement from the sectarian conflict. Even so, the U.S. needs to be realistic about what 75,000 U.S. troops can achieve. "I want to blow up al-Qaeda wherever we can, but I don't think we're going to have any particular capacity to do that if we cut our troop strength in half and pull back into the desert," says Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations. Cordesman, who does not favor an immediate withdrawal, notes that all the worry about al-Qaeda in Iraq ignores the much larger threat that bin Laden's ideas already pose to U.S. interests. "Al-Qaeda does not have a center," he says. "Al-Qaeda operates in Pakistan; al-Qaeda operates in Afghanistan. It has distributed networks and affiliates in Algeria. It has ties, awkward as they are, to Hamas. We are talking about a network, which is international in character, which will be a major threat whether we win or lose in Iraq."

REDEFINING SUCCESS
As exhausting as the enterprise in Iraq has been for Americans, it remains merely the most urgent of a wide range of challenges to global stability. While it can only be glimpsed, an end to the debacle in Iraq does not mean an end to America's responsibilities in the world. With the U.S. drawing down, Iraq would diminish as a focal point of anti-Americanism. With most U.S. troops exiting the region, Washington would have more leverage with Iran, which has continued its march toward nuclear weapons while the U.S. has been bogged down in Iraq. And most important of all, the U.S. would regain the military, economic and intellectual bandwidth it once employed to advance its interests elsewhere and start rebuilding its reputation overseas.

But that will require the kind of diplomatic effort that this Administration has been reluctant to pursue. The most obvious place to start is Iraq, where U.S. diplomacy will still be needed to bring about a sustainable accord between Sunnis and Shi'ites, should they ever tire of fighting. A State Department official says what is needed is a greater willingness to engage hard-line forces on both sides of the sectarian divide as well as the Iranians and Syrians, all of whom will have a say in Iraq's future. Resistance to this idea comes from the White House, a U.S. diplomat says. "There is a reality on the ground in Iraq that we never really wanted to confront too much, but there are real politics in Iraq," says the official. "If we can tap into that and start working and engaging with Iraqis in a different way, we might actually become part of what emerges as a solution."

Beyond Iraq, a redoubled effort to build a viable Palestinian government that can eventually reach a settlement with Israel would undercut another source of anti-Americanism and Islamic radicalism. The U.S. must also attend to growing instability in Pakistan, a key but uncertain ally in its war on terrorism, and may need to send some of the troops coming out of Iraq to Afghanistan to shore up the shaky government in Kabul.

Can it be done? Michael Mandelbaum, who teaches U.S. foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, warns that potential gains in any salvage operation are limited, and this one is no different. "The goal here is damage limitation," he says, "not the kind of success envisioned when the operation began." Withdrawal from Iraq will be slow, messy and painful. But however difficult the passage, it is still possible to get to a place that is more secure than where we are now.

With reporting by Mark Kukis and Charles Crain/Baghdad, Scott Macleod/Cairo and Brian Bennett, Massimo Calabresi, Jay Newton-Small and Mark Thompson/Washington