The death of foreign policy realism is one of the most painful and costly failures of our political and intellectual system over the last quarter century. Political Realism was always in a tenuous position, simply because it is crowded to both sides by different kinds of idealism, and it is constantly in danger of degenerating into cynicism. On one side is the idealism that is associated with the left, for a free and pacific world where the United States is not required to intervene or be entangled, on the other side is the idealism of the right, which places excessive faith in the ability of force to liberate, or in more cynical terms, occupy, nations which are under dictatorship. Realism also faces the internal problem that in accepting limits about what can be accomplished, it will give up on trying to make a difference at all.

The disintegration of political realism meant that when the time came to consider Iraq, the decision making process was fatally flawed, and a group of excessively enthusiastic, and one might even say pathological pollyanna, war planners was able to fob itself off as being "realists" about Saddam. Realism is often hawkish, but not all hawkish positions are realistic.

At this political moment it is essential to put realism center stage in our discussion about what is to happen with US involvement in Iraq. The place to start is not with our desired outcomes, but with the inputs as they are present on the ground in Iraq, and in the American body politic.

The first reality is that the occupation of Iraq has disintegrated into mere US presence. We no longer have the political, military or economic ability to frame terms of debate, let alone dictate them. The second reality is that Iraq has balkanized, and in fact two of its political divisions are engaged in a low intensity conflict against each other. The third reality is that the current US political leadership is out of touch with both economic and military realities in Iraq, and is going to pour gasoline on the fire for at least another year.

These realities indicate that Iraq is a failed state, and that we should look at it in the context of being in a pre-war, not post-war, moment.

The Reality of a Failed Occupation

In general, when a nation is invaded and its previous government is overthrown and previous arrangements nullified there is a moment of shock where the victors are given wide power to reorganize society. This time is relatively short, as people will again form political and economic arrangements, and attempt to get back to the business of living, and will resist attempts to severe these relationships. Anything which is not accomplished in this short moment will require a long period to effect incrementally, and failure to establish a stable structure will often lead to the disintegration of the occupation.

The United States attempt occupy Iraq has failed, and the order which was imposed is not effective. The reality of a failed occupation of Iraq hangs over all of the other realities which flow from it - a failed state, civil war, economic dysfunction and humanitarian disaster. The failure of the occupation to create a workable series of constitutional arrangements, rebuild Iraq, and put back in place the basics of infrastructure has been clear from objective measurements for some time. The levels of water, electricity, petrol, and other basics of subsistence have shown that Iraq has not even returned to the state it was in on the eve of the invasion in many respects, and has only lethargically exceeded pre-war production in areas.

The continued violence, sectarian and otherwise, is further indication of the failure of occupation.

The failure of the occupation phase of US involvement was readily evident even at the time of the US imposed constitutional deadline. According to reports at that time "soft" ethnic cleansing, a strange euphemism for assassinations and torture, were beginning in2005.

A large fraction of this comes from the ideological failures of the occupation itself. The first was that we were facing "resistance" from foreign backed groups to the imposition of our will, and the second that allowing a big bang scramble would produce a flourishing free market economy with a weak elected government which would be beholden to US interests. But the list of blunders, mistakes, and out right crimes would take pages to catalog. Billions of dollars were dropped down holes in Iraq from which we will never see it return, thousand of people will not return home, or will return home severely wounded. Millions of civilians will be killed, wounded or displaced. Bremer's 100 orders, laws made by fiat and bind until revoked by a future Iraqi government, are strangely ineffectual and in sum make one ask whether he thought that he had been appointed the mayor of some sleepy Ohio town. It's fairly clear that his view was that his most important job was to protect outside, Western, property claims in Iraq. He acted as if the UN Security Council had authorized use of force in a patent dispute or perhaps to enforce "supply side economics."

The first year of American occupation in Germany after the Second World War had similar mistakes. However, by the end of the first year the United States realized that reparations and a punitive Morgenthau Plan were impossible to implement, and with the food rations being cut for civilians to 1000 calories a day, the decision was made to stop dismantling factories and start putting Germany on the road to economic self-sufficiency. In Iraq, that dawning moment, that the best way to ever get the war to pay for itself was by having Iraq being a functioning nation as soon as possible, never arrived.

Contrast this process, of political appointees pillaging a country for the benefit of outside interests, with the following:

Lastly, as Colonel Hunt recommended after World War I, civil affairs-military government is a specialized military function and needs trained personnel. The War Department recognized the need early in World War II and provided the training. In doing so, however, it exposed some concomitant problems which it was not able entirely to solve. Chiefly, these problems were how to sustain the morale of relatively senior specialists during the long period of waiting before they could be employed; how to organize for service in the field a civilian-oriented activity operating within the military framework; and how to sustain an activity that could only be brought into full play after the war had ended and the rest of the Army was going home. Although the same problems could arise again, they were undoubtedly aggravated by the special conditions of World War II. Civil affairs-military government was new. It existed, but it had no established position in the Army. It had to find itself in situations in which neither the commands nor the personnel had adequate precedents from which to make judgments. As a result, EGAD, for instance, was not a table of organization division, and its members, already disgruntled at having been recruited for work they sometimes doubted would ever exist, suspected they were also being deliberately denied promotions and being treated as second class soldiers. Furthermore, having gone through several years of uncertainty, the civil affairs-military government personnel were all too easily caught up in the demobilization fever after V-J Day. Previous errors, however, do not have to be repeated. The World War II experience exists as guidance for the future. In particular, civil affairs-military government did find a place in the Army and did, although the path was not smooth, achieve organizational and doctrinal maturity. However, civil affairs-military government will probably always tend to be somewhat out of phase with the rest of the military structure. The answer appears to be a trained reserve.

Of course, an occupation also differs from a combat operation in various respects and in one in particular: the outcome of a battle will usually-that of an occupation, perhaps, seldom-be clear. In a strict sense, maintenance of law and order sufficient to prevent interference with combat missions during hostilities and unrest or to prevent resistance later on are enough to qualify an occupation as a success, but the judgment of history will demand more. And the Army in Germany accomplished more-more than even the detachment commander believed who summed up the first year, "We gave them enough military government to last a hundred years." Not every Nazi received the full deserts due him in American and some German opinion, but many did. Not all the Germans were converted to democracy, but they were given the opportunity for democracy without any snares or tricks. The tenor of some policy statements was harsh to the point of being vindictive, but the practice was as humane as a defeated enemy had a right to expect after a long and destructive war. Although many soldiers looted and played the black market, the Army protected and restored the country's art treasures and monuments and imported three-quarters of a billion dollars worth of relief supplies. The DPs were returned to their homes, the concentration camp inmates were cared for, and the numerous services without which a modern society cannot function were put back into operation and kept running. Certainly after 1946 there could be no doubt that civil affairs-military government had proven its value both in and out of combat or that the Army had demonstrated its competence to manage a major occupation in the national interest and the interest of a conquered people.

The US Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946 Earl F. Ziemke

The failure to impose a new order on Iraq has not come overnight, instead it was the repeated failure to change policy or apply oversight at crucial junctures. It was a repeated failure to come to the realization that had been come to in Germany: namely that a defeated nation, whatever the temptation for treating as a short term target for profit, will be a drain on the expenses of even a large nation, and that it is more valuable as an economic and military bulwark against the next enemy.

Nowhere is this more clear than in a contrast between the deBaathification and deNazification of Iraq and Germany. Out of the entire population of Germany, only a few hundred were sentenced as major offenders, and war crimes trials only expanded that to a few thousand. Even counting German's assassinated by the OSS, the total population of people actually punished harshly for their involvement in the party was relatively small. Most were fined in the inflated Reichmarks of the occupation.

In short the American occupation of Iraq duplicated many of the mistakes of the American occupation of German in the first year, without ever coming to consciousness that Iraq was not merely a target for the talons of American profits, but, in itself a potential bulwark. Even as the neo-conservative movement envisioned holding Iraq as the centerpiece for the Americanization of the middle east, the effect on the ground was to do allow the disintegration of the Iraqi state.

As importantly, the transition from occupation to presence has happened. While civilian power was gradually reintroduced in Germany starting with local elections, the United States wanted civilian authority to sign agreements with that would be exploited later. If one needs a specific demarcation line, the ascension of al-Maliki to the PM slot is as good a moment as any. He replaced two failed attempts at installing leadership by the US: Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim Jaffari. Both failed to produce the broad political consensus required of the policy of producing a unified centralized state of Iraq.

What should drive home the point that the United States is not the occupying power in Iraq any more, si both the military logic for the "surge" of 2007, and its failure.

In late 2006 the viability of the US presence in Baghdad was in increasing doubt. While sold as a strategy for "victory", it is clear, instead, that the "surge" was designed to stabilize US presence in Baghdad, and to secure the supply line. 2007 will be the year with more fatalities than any other in the US involvement in Iraq so far, and it has little to show for it. The surge strategy was to abandon much of the rest of Iraq to which ever forces could control it, and to concentrate on holding Baghdad and the supply line to the airport. As with the surge of 2004 associated with the Fallujah campaign, it was always a short term option, and by the summer it was clear even to the executive that the political support for it was collapsing in the United States. Like $3/gallon gasoline, 100 deaths per month seems to be a pain threshold in the American body politic.

The failure of the surge to do more than stabilize supply problems in Baghdad, regardless of the cooked books that General Petreus brought to Congres as a way of putting lipstick on the pig, is as clear and indicator as any that the United States does not have the ability to enforce its will in even geographic parts of Iraq, let alone on the future course of the country.

The Reality of a Divided Iraq

History is replete with examples of "regime change" which only managed to further destabilize the situation on the ground. The United States replaced Diem in Vietnam with a military junta, and US involvement there later mushroomed. Various regimes were overthrown by the CIA during the 1950's and many of these actions, including in US involvement in Iraq, led to continued instability. That the United States has overthrown the Baathists in Iraq should not in away prejudice us to think that Iraq is in an endgame situation. Instead it is as likely that while ending the current policy in Iraq is highly desirable, we may well, and the facts indicate, that our involvement in Iraq is only beginning.

Looked at objectively, the first question to be faced is the political state of affairs on the ground in Iraq as it stands. These facts on the ground must be the starting point for any discussion, because they are the starting point for any actions going forward. The basic reality is that Iraq is in a state of civil war, with regional entities of a variety of levels of political organization. There is no central state that speaks for the interests of a "nation", but instead a series of entities, most of which are pre-state actors.

The unified centralized Iraq was always a fantasy given the United States presence was not large enough to enforce it. The Kurds, having fought their civil war in the 1990's, were interested only in a breakaway status from the beginning, and while it might be convenient for bookkeeping purposes to have Kurdistan as part of an internationally recognized Iraq, this will continue only so long as the Kurds themselves tolerate it. That is to say, when they have nibbled away Kirkuk from the rest of Iraq, a city that is important to their own security and communications.

The remainder of Iraq as a single national unit, absent the ability of the Kurds and the Sunni to form a balancing power bloc - and with the Kurds headed for the door and the United States presence in sufficiently large to restore security, that is the reality – One is left with a state that is roughly 80% Shia, but with a large bloc of Sunni who are armed, motivated and geographically concentrated with a slice of the country pointed straight at Baghdad.

Kurdistan is a functionally independent zone, and is working on de facto independence. It has signed an oil deal with at odds with the central government and is engaged in a low intensity conflict with the Baghdad government which has included a border closure and a hot pursuit agreement granted to Turkey. The relative stability of Kurdistan has even persuaded some Arab nationalists that peace might be preferable inside of Kurdistan than turmoil inside of Iraq. There is a broader conflict brewing with the "Kurdish Regional Government" accusing Iran of shelling border areas.

Kurdistan is a state, and it is a state which is vaguely willing to coöperate with Baghdad on the issue of Sunni militarism, but unwilling to do so on almost any other issue.

The next case is Al-Anbar. Unlike Kuridstan, Al-Anbar is not a functioning state, but as Dahr Jamail, who has been covering the situation there for years notes "The United States is losing control." This is in fact a generous description of the scene he paints. The Sunni dominated wedge of the country is routinely reinvaded, for example Samarra. It does not have a centralized administration, nor a single political focus. However, they have made themselves ungovernable from the central administration, and want nothing to do with it.

But even within the areas of Iraq with nominal allegiance to Iraq, civil war is a common condition, with cities such as Basra coming more and more under the control of local governing councils. In Basra, for example the governing council is setting up its own security operations. And rival militias are pressing their way to control vital economic infrastructure. Which is increasingly in the hands of a black market.

The next reality that has to be faced is that there are other external actors with their own interests. The Sunni Arab world continues to fund Al-Anbar because it does not want a Shia superstate with its borders lapping up on Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Iran funnels money into the SCIRI in southern Iraq as a way of maintaining a foothold.

That is, even absent the problems left behind by the failure of US occupation to produce a state headed for stability, there would be parties interested in producing instability.

The sum of these realities is that Iraq is not a united nation, and is not on the way to becoming one in the current political environment.

The Reality of Government by the Surreality Community

Listening to the debate over Iraq today, across the political spectrum, it is striking how little the realities just listed have filtered into the official public debate. The Biden resolution itself is an example of this. The tiem to talk about Federalizing Iraq was in 2004, when it would have meant something, or even earlier, in 2003 during the early occupation. By the time of the second inauguration of George W. Bush, the reality of Iraq was that of balkanization.

However, this is not the world that either George W. Bush sees, or the world that the United States Congress sees. Instead, there is a bi-partisan agreement to continue to pour money down the hole of Iraq, and Petreus' dog and pony show was simply the window dressing required to do this. It is abundantly obvious that the US economy, absent the massive stimulus from the spending on the Iraq war, would be careening into recession. The Congress does not want the blame for a recession, and will not take the hard steps required to bring the executive to heel. The massive explosion in the form of the vote to condemn the Moveon.org ad was not a ground swell of popular outrage, but the outrage of an old lady who is being bilked and wants to be bilked.

The executive sees a different picture, where they have a certain pain line of unpopularity below which even they cannot function. They burn popularity to attempt to secure permanent economic advantages for their favored interests generally and their favored cronies specifically. Corruption in Iraq is runs to tens of billions every year.

Both of these "realities" however, exacerbate the problems on the ground. The United States has lost control of Iraq, it has allowed Iraq to balkanize, and the behavior of elites in the United States is to have the US military act as yet another balkanized force out to maintain its territorial ambitions and pursue its own narrow interests.

An example of the surreality in place is the failure of reporters and politicians to state clearly what has just happened in Iraq. The reality is that US presence in Iraq was in the process of unraveling in 2006. The surge was intended to stabilize the situation, which it did, albeit at a more restrictive US presence. However the data is suspicious for a different reason. Consider this CFR report. Why is it that the data, previously in wide disagreement, has, since April, become so uniform? It is possible to attribute to a military operation a reduction in civilian deaths, but it is not possible for it to remove the noise from the data which was so obvious from last year so rapidly.

In fact, analyzing the skedastics of this data, one would say that the most like situation is that there has been no over all change in the rate of civilian deaths since the large leap upwards that began somewhere in 2006. It is more likely that the reporting methods have been altered, than the numbers themselves, simply because a five fold drop in the uncertain of a data series coinciding immediately with the surge is not merely improbable, but virtually impossible. It would be as if two ordinary dice sudden started rolling nothing but 7 or 11.

The repeated failure to hold repeated failure to account the hallmark of Congress under Bush, one strategy after another has been put forward, one milestone after another put forward, and the most that Bush can show is that we are in more agreement about exactly how many civilians are dying for a mistake.

The Debate over Iraqi Status

During the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the international community repeatedly favored keeping together "Yugoslavia" as a maximalist entity even as it disintegrated. First there was to be no secession, then Slovenia and Croatia were to be the end of it, then Bosnia, then Macedonia, then Montengro, and now Kosovo is on the verge of declaring independence from the rump of Serbia. At each step of the way, the convenience of not having to deal with another internationally recognized state was trumped by the desire of groups on the ground to organize their own political arrangements, and their willingness to kill to achieve those arrangements.

The result is that Yugoslavia has completely disintegrated, regardless of outside preferences.

However, the converse is no great consolation. Somalia and Congo have both been kept together as nominally unified states, and it is the Congo, not Iraq, which is the current reigning champion of bloodiest ongoing conflict. Unity of legal fiction is less important than the ability of forces to impose peace on the ground.

At the present time poles of unreality have been created around the issue of the nature of the future Iraqi state.

The vote for "Federalism" in the Senate can be best seen as a message to George Bush about what next year's dog and pony show needs to look like for them to continue to vote for war funding. It isn't that they don't want to continue doing it, it is however, necessary that they get political cover for doing so.

It is not a plan, but a plea. In the kabuki dance of Washington politics, like the dance over the surge last year, it is about packaging a decision which has already been made, in order to gain political cover to actually make it, in the face of a Congress that is wildly unpopular and a chief executive who has been unpopular for his entire second term.

It seemed uncontroversial because the Constitution of Iraq already defines it as a federal entity, in the view of the people passing it, this is a "push" – just show them that there is some pig with lipstick on it that shows that the regions of Iraq are governing themselves without US presence, and there will be another heaping bucket of slop put into the trough.

The View forward

Given the realities of a balkanized Iraq and an insufficiency of US military force on the ground to dictate, or even frame, the terms of final disposition, it is tempting to produce a "plan" for Iraq with which to prove one's seriousness. However, all such plans are not serious with the reality that the Congress is intent on voting further war funding.

The reason for this is the mind boggling wastefulness of the US presence in Iraq. Consider that the estimated population of Iraq is about 27 million, and the proposed next supplemental for Iraq is 200 Billion US dollars. For the same price as another year in Iraq, we could send every Iraqi a check for $7,500. The total GDP for the country per capita is only $3500. The entire GDP of Iraq is only around $90 billion US dollars.

There are as many as 4 million displaced Iraqis, including some 2 million refugees. Compare this with the number of Palestinian refugees in 1950, some 711,000, and it becomes possible to see that the Iraq war is producing, an Iraqi diaspora of historic proportions.

There are other temptations. One is to simply "cut and run" – to treat Iraq as if it were a steaming turd to be hidden behind a chair and ignored. However, given the state of the world's oil markets, the central location of Iraq and the level of violence and instability, it is unlikely that Iraq will evolve in a direction that will allow it to be left alone. However, as the above numbers point out, military involvement is easily the worst and least productive manner of engaging in Iraq. It costs twice as much to wreak havoc in a small section of Iraq than the entire official economy. If the US were to simply send huge checks to the KRG, the government in Baghdad and to a few other entities, fighting would drop far more dramatically than the surge. It would be nice to say that we should, say, restore electricity to Baghdad, but given the failure of US forces to do this in the time since invasion, this is not a credible promise.

Another temptation is to place an inordinate attachment to the placement of deck chairs on the Titanic. Neither a unified Iraq, nor a "federal" Iraq are going to alter the facts of continued ethnic cleansing on the ground, nor will they prevent continued conflict.

The next temptation is to see Iraq as a staging ground to pressure Iran. This is, simply put, a ghastly and catastrophic mistake. It takes full strategic commitment from the US, and a politically unsustainable number of casualties, simply to stabilize the situation in Iraq. This is not a conducive situation to launch, or even threaten to launch, strikes against a hostile third power, one which has significant backing inside of Iraq itself.

From the forgoing it can be seen that US Military presence in Iraq is a major destabilizing force in itself when compared to the simpler alternative of withdrawing, renouncing various colonial ambitions in Iraq, and sending money to deal with the humanitarian disaster and to influence the actions of state actors. The United States is sending guns and money to the people who are most prone to engage in violence. The drop in civilian deaths in the Petreus report, throwing out the suspicious reduction in uncertainty, is that the US ended combat operations in much of Iraq, and since the US accounts for between 20% and 40% of civilian deaths from war related causes depending on ones sources, ending US combat operations in an area is likely to reduce civilian casualties. Part of this reduction is of the peace of the grave, absent US forces, the localized cleansing can continue apace.

Instead simplicity is the only virtue which can be maintained in present circumstances. The presence of a large, organized and unified war party in the United States is the political obstacle against which real pressure can be mounted. It is a waste of time to worry about political pressure that can be brought to bear in Iraq, because there is none. It is a complete fantasy to pretend that there even is an Iraq, per se, or an Iraqi people, as such. We have no more ability to enforce a unified nation of Iraq than we have of getting them to adopt a swing version of the book of Job as a legal code. The same goes for any other political arrangement you care to name. The path of least resistance to continued US presence is to encourage centrifugal forces and fund local elites, however this, absent a legal frame work is not buying time, but simply time shifting trouble, since the effect will be to encourage those forces to higher aspirations.

Instead removing the huge flow of dollars from the American occupation, and the arms that we are supplying is likely to decrease conflict, it is also likely to focus the various political groups in Iraq on the real supplies of money which can be had. While it is inevitable that there will be armed conflict over some of those sources, the reality is that fighting over mosques will not last long, since those assets must be left in tact.

The message must then be simple: OUT. It is not to Iraqi political leadership that the US discursive system is talking to. They aren't going to listen to what American activists, academics and wonks have to say, and they aren't going to care, However, influencing the direction of US policy, in the face of massive barrels of pork, is going to take a simple and concerted pressure. Whether low ridicule or high analysis, the bottom line is that the withdrawal of the American Expeditionary Force sooner rather than later is preferable, and moving the United States from military to diplomatic and economic engagement as soon as possible is the best use of increasingly limited resources.