WASHINGTON – “The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability.”
That’s from the opening page of the 2006 Iraq Study Group report. Nine years later, it’s haunting to revisit the bipartisan commission review chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton. Their grim assessment still holds, and now you have to add Syria, Libya and Yemen as states where “the level of violence is high and growing” and “pessimism is pervasive.”
Re-examining the Baker-Hamilton proposals is a good way to refocus U.S. strategy for Iraq and Syria. The report made two basic arguments: Solving the sectarian conflict requires a new push for reconciliation internally, and a new diplomatic offensive externally.
President George W. Bush decided that Baker-Hamilton amounted to surrender, so he boldly took another route, authorizing a troop surge commanded by Gen. David Petraeus to reduce violence so that reconciliation could begin. It seemed to work for a time, but the ruinous sectarian hatred remained – and reignited, disastrously, after U.S. troops left and the Syria crisis was allowed to boil. Now parts of Iraq and Syria, both, are under the banner of the Islamic State.
Even the proponents of Bush’s 2007 troop surge don’t think massive U.S. military intervention is an option now. American troops can help train and advise Iraqi forces. (And President Obama should allow those U.S. advisers to accompany Iraqi forces into battle.) But “the Obama administration is right that the boots on the ground must be Iraqi,” argues Stephen Hadley, who as Bush’s national security adviser helped implement the surge strategy.