Baker-Hamilton's fine print: Stay in Iraq

NIALL FERGUSON

The Iraq Study Group didn't pin Iraq's hope on Iran and Syria, nor did it call for complete troop withdrawal.

Niall Ferguson

December 11, 2006

'PERSUASION involves both incentives and penalties," Henry Kissinger once remarked. "So there is an element of implied coercion." Last week saw the publication of a masterpiece of persuasion. But whom will it persuade? And with what sticks and carrots?

Most commentators have interpreted the report of the Iraq Study Group as a well-crafted admission of defeat. Predictably, that was exactly how President Bush himself reacted to it. "I … believe we're going to succeed," he told reporters Thursday. "One way to assure failure is just to quit." Addressing one of the report's key recommendations, he bluntly declared that Iran and Syria "shouldn't bother to show up" for negotiations about Iraq if they don't understand their "responsibilities to not fund terrorists" and if the Iranians don't "verifiably suspend their [uranium] enrichment program."

Yet anyone who bothers to read the report carefully — as opposed to skimming the executive summary — can see that it neither proposes "quitting" Iraq nor pins serious hope on Iranian or Syrian assistance. Quite the reverse.

Persuasion in the realm of grand strategy is more a matter of rhetorical art than science. The first essential step is to identify your target audience. Most readers of the report assume that it is directed at Bush. That is wrong. Its principal target audience is Congress, and particularly the new Democratic majorities in both houses. And the aim is not to persuade a stubborn president to admit defeat. Rather, the report's aim is to convince legislators that withdrawal from Iraq — no matter how much their constituents may yearn for it — is not an option. The report's other intended readership is Arab governments throughout the Middle East. The message for them is the same: A U.S. exit from the region is what you most have to fear.

The second step in the process of persuasion is to conjure up a nightmare vision of the future if the action you envisage is not taken. The worst-case scenario proposed by the Iraq Study Group is the one about which I have been writing since February: "Sectarian warfare, growing violence or a slide toward chaos," leading to "the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe." Here are the report's most important lines: "Neighboring countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia clashes could spread … across the Islamic world. [There could be] Shia insurrections — perhaps fomented by Iran — in Sunni-ruled states. Such a broader sectarian conflict could open a Pandora's box of problems."

The consequences would be much more than a propaganda victory for Al Qaeda and a humiliation for the United States, which is what they worry about on Capitol Hill. In such a conflagration, no Mideast government — with the exception of the fundamentalist Shiite regime in Tehran — could feel secure. And that is precisely why Arab rulers should dread an American exit.

Step 3 in the art of persuasion is to propose remedies that sound attractive to your target audience. These the Iraq Study Group has certainly produced — in profusion. But you need to read the small print of all 79 recommendations. Consider the long-anticipated "diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region," involving Iran, a reviled member of Bush's "axis of evil," as well as Syria, no friend of the U.S.

"A nation can and should engage its adversaries and enemies," declares the report (in a sentence that Co-Chairman James A. Baker III must surely have written) and should offer them "incentives as well as disincentives." Note that word "disincentives." Baker's idea here is not to go cap in hand to Damascus and Tehran. Rather, as he explained to the media last week, it is to "flip the Syrians" by appealing to Sunni solidarity, and to isolate the Iranian regime by exposing its "rejectionist attitude." In other words: Get the leaders of all Iraq's neighbors into the same room and play "spot the Shiites."

Now let's read the small print on troop withdrawals. "By the first quarter of 2008," the report says, "all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq." This has been widely interpreted as the first step toward the exit. It says "out of Iraq," right?

Wrong. Look more closely at some of the report's other recommendations:

• The number of U.S. military personnel "embedded" in Iraqi army battalions and brigades should be increased from 3,000 or 4,000 to between 10,000 to 20,000.

• The number of U.S. police trainers should be expanded.

• The U.S. Department of Justice should lead the work of organizational transformation in the Interior Ministry.

• A senior advisor for economic reconstruction in Iraq is required.

• The U.S. State Department should train personnel to carry out civilian tasks associated with a complex stability operation; it should establish a Foreign Service Reserve Corps.

Does that sound like "out of Iraq" to you? I'd say it sounds more like "stay in Iraq" — only this time, let's not screw it up.

The media have fixated on the possibility of a quantitative reduction in U.S. troops — which is in any case conditional on there being no "unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground" — while missing the underlying argument for qualitative improvement.

Hats off, then, to Baker and his team. This turns out to be a classic work of persuasion. Its target audiences have been well chosen. Its worst-case scenario is plausible. And its recommendations are so carefully phrased that they sound like disengagement while actually signifying better engagement.

It is certainly not the exit strategy Americans want. But it might just help avoid a Middle Eastern Armageddon.

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nferguson@latimescolumnists.com