Obama's Iraq Challenge

In his speech to the nation Tuesday night, Barack Obama will try to make the seven-and-a-half-year conflict he once called a "dumb war" sound a lot smarter. He will try to turn social chaos into rhetorical order, to make America's ill-fated incursion into Iraq seem like it's at the beginning of the end when it's really closer to the end of the beginning. Obama will try to map a politically driven withdrawal schedule--the Aug. 31 deadline he is proudly meeting by drawing down to a remaining 50,000 "noncombat" troops--onto a fractured nation that is operating on a whole other schedule, if it can be called a schedule at all.

Obama is doing the best he can with what he's got--probably the best that anyone can--but nonetheless all of this amounts to putting a presidential imprimatur on a national delusion. The president will be careful to say that the transition from "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to "Operation New Dawn" does not mean "Mission Accomplished." But his speech is still likely to mask, from Americans, the deeper reality of what is happening in Iraq. If there is indeed a new Iraq growing up--and that idea by itself is still wishful thinking--it is growing up around the U.S. presence. The new Iraq will remain as dependent on the U.S. military as a severely disabled child. The Iraqi Constitution is, like postwar Japan's, an American import, a set of Western concepts grafted onto a still-alien culture that could take generations to come around. The Iraqi military and security forces can't operate without U.S. support. The disputes over boundaries between the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites are largely unresolved. There is simply no getting around the little-noted corollary to Colin Powell's infamous "Pottery Barn" rule: it's not just that if you break a country you own it; it's that you never really stop owning it. This is even true of other countries we have "broken" in wars and then remade, ones that were a lot further along in development and social stability like Japan and South Korea, both of which continue to host substantial numbers of U.S. troops today.

Things are not nearly as bad in Iraq now as they were in 2006, when I was last there, and a similar stalemate prevented the creation of an Iraqi government (the Iraqis needed to "get governing," George W. Bush kept saying with exasperation). But then, as now, there was really only one cohering force in the country: the American presence. And then, as now, even with vastly improved conditions (the lack of an all-out sectarian war, a dramatically reduced Qaeda presence despite the recent spate of attacks), there is very little evidence that Iraq can hold together without the glue America provides--in security, in politics, in Iraq's very sense of national identity. This isn't going to be a model of democracy. Instead it's more likely to be--if it works out--a new model for post-Cold War colonialism, albeit a colonialism that dare not speak its name. Substantial numbers of U.S. troops will almost certainly be necessary well beyond the deadline of the end of 2011, a presence that any new Iraqi government, if it manages to come into being, will almost certainly be happy to approve. If that does happen, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker writes in Tuesday's Washington Post, "I hope we will listen."

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