Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pages 50-51
Waging Peace
Dr. John Nagl Sees Extended U.S. Â Involvement in Iraq
The Middle East Institute in Washington, DC hosted John Nagl, current president of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), to discuss the future of American involvement in Iraq.
The June 29 talk, coming one day before the withdrawal of U.S. troops from major Iraqi cities, was attended by a combination of students, foreign journalists and diplomats, including current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill.
After paying tribute to soldiers and other actors who have turned the situation in Iraq around, Dr. Nagl said there were “still real challenges to achieving stability.”
Paramount among these challenges, he said, will be problems in northern Iraq, particularly in the multi-ethnic, oil-rich city of Kirkuk. “A battle in Kirkuk between Kurds and Arabs over autonomy and oil could spiral out of control,” Nagl warned, also citing the potential ratification of a constitution by the Kurdish regional government as a looming threat to the Iraqi state.
Nagl dismissed the notion that Iraq could slide back into a sectarian “full-scale civil war” like the one the state “stepped back from the brink of...in 2007.” “There will be many more bombings,” he acknowledged, but it will be “next to impossible” for a sectarian conflict to succeed, due to the increased professionalism of security forces.
Despite improvements in the country, however, Nagl said he is “absolutely convinced that a continued American presence” will remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Regarding the 2011 target date for complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces, Nagl said, “I believe that the Iraqi government is going to come to its senses in 2010 or ”˜11.”
With this in mind, Dr. Nagl argued that the U.S. needs a “lower profile” in Iraq in the coming years. American forces will take more of a “behind-the-scenes” advisory role, predicted the retired Army lieutenant colonel, who spent his final two years of active duty in Kansas training transition teams to be embedded with Iraqi and Afghan units.
American troops will need to provide “security force assistance,” which Nagl said includes on-the-ground assistance when situations get out of hand as well as material support. Most importantly, he said, will be building “institutions loyal to Iraq and not individual leaders.”
Related to the last point is better governance, which Nagl defined as less corrupt with an egalitarian civilian promotion system.
Finally, Nagl argued, American advisers will need to aid Iraq in achieving “economic diversification.” “Ninety percent of Iraqi revenue comes from oil, while agriculture is less than 10 percent of GDP,” he said, arguing the latter sector is “a place where we can do a lot more.”
Ultimately, Nagl noted that it is in America’s interest to “have a strong, determined relationship” with Iraq, not only for strategic reasons, such as blunting Iranian influence in the region, but also because of international security and economic concerns.
Dr. John Nagl is the author of Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. For more information about CNAS, visit <www.cnas.org>. A podcast of Dr. Nagl’s lecture is available on the Middle East Institute’s Web site, <www.mei.edu>.
—National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations intern
