Stephen Biddle, Council on Foreign Relations
October 18, 2007
Mother Jones: If and when a decision is made to withdraw or draw down U.S. troops from Iraq, what is a realistic time frame for doing that?
Stephen Biddle: A plausible range would be 10 months to 2 years, but obviously that's subject to significant uncertainty on either end. But it tends to be longer than many opponents of the war suppose.
Think of the equipment or office furniture, for example—so it's the stuff rather than the people. Secondly, we're almost certainly going to have to fight our way out. These movements have to be much, much more careful and much more aggressively secured, and the business of making sure that you're safe as you leave slows everything down dramatically. You don't just need to defend the points of departure in the routes; you also need to defend the parameter of the units that haven't left yet.
MJ: How much of this equipment are we actually going to take out?
SB: Surely we'll hand some over to the Iraqis. On the other hand, the more of it you leave behind, the longer the reset process when we get back. One of the issues for Iraq policy at the moment is we have largely exhausted the U.S. military with this struggle. One of our objectives when we get back is going to be to reset it so that it can respond to other contingencies and other challenges and other problems elsewhere in the world. And obviously, secure stuff has got to go.
MJ: How long do you think it would take to come up with a proper contingency plan for some form of withdrawal, partial or full-scale?
SB: It would be extremely involved, partly because you've got the detailed planning process of doing all this stuff for 160,000 people and all their associated equipment. You get a decent military staff, put them in a room, and they figure out how to deal with all of that. The tough part is, how do you mitigate the negative consequences for the U.S. and the region? The problem with that is that requires a skill set and regional politics, world politics, diplomatic interplay, economics, and domestic U.S. politics that are not typically resident in the average military planning staff. If you want to do that job right rather than simply getting the route structure organized so that all the convoys get out on time, that requires assembling a group of people that does not now exist.
MJ: So when you recently testified before Congress and said that Congress should require the Pentagon to come up with a contingency plan for withdrawal, you were talking logistical and also taking the broader view.
SB: Yes, and I think the second is the much more demanding of the two.
MJ: Tell me about the consequence of withdrawal in terms of it causing a humanitarian crisis.
SB: The total U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is very likely to lead to an expansion in the scope and the scale of violence in the country, which is going to produce more innocent people getting killed—potentially a lot more innocent people getting killed. I'm sure you've heard that once we leave that will quell the violence, either because people say, "We're the problem in the first place; this is resistance to a foreign occupation and when the foreign occupiers leave the problem will be solved and Iraq will become peaceful," or because people like Carl Levin think our presence is a crutch that's preventing a compromise peace deal and as soon as they remove the crutch they'll reach the deal, or because people believe that everybody who can be killed has been killed or will be soon and therefore when intermingling ends because of ethnic cleansing concluding the violence will stop. Those are all unsound claims.
Let me start with the "we're the problem not the solution" argument. I don't think that's ever been true, but it's certainly not true now. Initially Sunnis were attacking us and they were attacking us because they thought we were a tool of a Shiite government, not because we were hostile occupiers. Shiites were perfectly happy to have us occupying them. This has been an internecine civil war almost from the beginning. The violence in Iraq is overwhelmingly Iraqi on Iraqi. It's only secondarily Iraqi on American. The notion that if we leave, the cause of the violence will leave—it could not be more wrong. What will happen when we leave is we will remove one of the primary governors on the intensity of the Iraqi on Iraqi violence that's already dominating the conflict. It's a pipe dream at best to expect that if we go away the problem will go away.
There are also people out there who argue that the violence is because of the intermingling. Iraqis have already shown that they're perfectly willing to travel in order to kill people they think need to be killed; it doesn't require an intermingling to secure violence in Iraq. The underlying problem here is Sunni Iraq is not economically viable. And Sunnis understand this. And given this, they are prepared to fight rather than be consigned to a hopelessly impoverished piece of open desert, which is what their homeland looks like. Even if all the mixed neighborhoods are gone, Sunnis will counter-attack to try to regain control of something that has an economy, and Shiites know that Sunnis will counter-attack and fear it, and therefore will attempt to shrink to remain in Sunni enclaves, eventually destroying and eliminating them.
Right now we're putting a cap on the scale of that violence by conduct-controlling activity. Remove that cap and you can expect an underlying problem to get worse.
MJ: Do you think the conflict could spill over the border?
SB: Yes. The biggest downside risk associated with complete U.S. withdrawal is the possibility that sometime within the next decade we could end up with an interstate major war engulfing Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Emirates—all the neighbors with the Sunni alliance. But the single likeliest outcome in the next 10 years is that the war burns itself out within Iraq, eventually yielding two sides that are so war weary that they're willing to do a deal that they're not willing to do now. These numbers are obviously widely approximate, but there's a 30 to 40 percent chance that instead of that happier outcome you get a regional war. And the probability is that the risks of regional war go up over time, not down.
There are two problems that get worse in time. One is the political stability of the region. Refugees are hemorrhaging out of Iraq at a huge ferocious rate. Those refugee populations come to rest with coreligionist neighbors. Refugee populations are classically ill housed, ill fed, dispossessed, underemployed, and politically increasingly radicalized. These populations eventually destabilize the countries in which they're located, so you could easily imagine that for example a Sunni refugee population in Saudi Arabia that is none too happy in general and is very unhappy with the idea of Persian conquest in their homeland sitting uneasily in Saudi Arabia, watching a Shiite military under Iranian support gradually developing the ability to project force, taking ground and thus conquering and subduing Sunni Iraq as the Shiite government military gradually looks like it's about to steamroll over the last parts of the Sunni homeland—you can easily imagine this refugee population going to the House of Saud and saying, "If you guys are going to sit back and watch while our patrimony is crushed perpetually under the Persian boot, we're going to get rid of you," and the regime preservation incentives that are the best single predictor of government behavior in this region flip from staying out to getting in.
In the meantime, all the neighbors are acquiring arms at breakneck pace as everybody tries to hedge their bets against negative outcomes in Iraq. So what you get five, six, eight years from now is a situation in which destabilized neighbors face increasing domestic political incentives to intervene, and they have better and better tools for doing it as a result of most of the decade of arms racing, and you've got a decent chance that several of these actors either had or will acquire nuclear weapons by then. Certainly the Iranians, and possibly Saudis or others as well. It's a risk you have to take account of when doing this kind of planning.
MJ: What about the economic implications worldwide of withdrawal?
SB: A U.S. withdrawal will increase the risk premium on auto prices, period. There's already a risk premium on auto prices that will inevitably go up if the U.S. withdraws. The most serious economic impact is if the war regionalizes, of course. In the Iran-Iraq war, oil fields were targeted on both sides by both sides and you can expect that if the war regionalizes, the same would happen. There's a tendency especially on the left—"no blood for oil" and all that—to see this as really crassly self-interested as a policy consideration for the U.S. It's also important to recognize that if the global price of oil were to double, the consequences of a global recession are suffering among marginal populations in an awful lot of places. Plutocrats in the U.S. might get their pocketbooks hurt, developing world populations could end up in famine, and marginal families in the U.S. will get hurt. There are immediate, narrowly defined humanitarian consequences associated with withdrawal and innocent people getting killed in Iraq, but there is also a second order of humanitarian consequences in the degree of suffering that could attend a global economic contraction.
MJ: You said in your testimony that at this point the U.S. could actually be forced to re-intervene in Iraq.
SB: I think if it became a region-wide war and you were looking at a global economic contraction, I think there would be powerful pressures on the developed West to do something rather than stand by and watch it happen. We will have demonstrated by our experience between 2003 and 2008 that the U.S. is ill equipped to deal with this problem by itself. Should this scenario emerge, we'll go to our neighbors and allies and try to formulate some sort of Western response.
MJ: How containable do you think that would be even by a Western presence?
SB: It depends a lot on policy decisions made between now and then in the U.S. and elsewhere, and one of the important implications of this for U.S. diplomacy vis-à-vis NATO is to try to make the case that whereas the security debate in Europe right now tends to believe that the only national security problem that's real is climate change, or transnational crime, or what amounts to nation building and failed states is actually a much more old fashioned, much more traditional security challenge that might get raised by the U.S. screwup in Iraq in the form of an interstate region-wide war in the Mideast. It's incumbent on Western democracies in Europe to start changing the way they think and talk about security issues. The past may very well come back and bite them if they don't.
MJ: To what degree do you think that Iraqis are actually preparing themselves for U.S. withdrawal?
SB: I don't think they think it's imminent, but they think it's coming. My sense is that most Iraqis think we're on the way out.