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 COVER STORY
Last Chance for Iraq?
A symposium on the war
No issue has so shaped America’s recent politics or defined its present role in the world as the Iraq War. NR asked a symposium of military experts, geopolitical thinkers, Middle East scholars, and conservative writers the two paramount questions: Are we winning; and, if not, how can we? Here is what they had to say.
DAVID FRUM
The U.S. has not yet lost in Iraq, but it is on the verge of losing at home. Public opinion has turned strongly against the war, driven both by a torrent of bad news over the past three years and, especially, by the explosion of sectarian violence in Baghdad this summer. What’s most urgently needed now is a strategy to restore order and government authority in Baghdad. A visible success in Iraq’s highly televised capital would in turn strengthen resolve at home.
Will 4,000 U.S. troops redeployed from elsewhere in Iraq suffice to do the job? I don’t know anyone who thinks that they will. Not for the first time, we are left to wonder: Does the Bush administration truly believe Iraq is as important as it says it is?
If we are to believe the administration’s words — if Iraq is truly the central front in the war on terror — then what’s needed now is a reinforcement of enough U.S. troops to retake Baghdad sector by sector and block by block, as the French retook Algiers in 1959. The operation would have to be conducted sensitively, with Iraqi forces visibly in the lead. At the same time, the U.S. would have to undertake a much more serious effort to sever the connections between Iran and its proxies in Iraq: not only doing a better job sealing the border, although that is important, but also engaging in political action to remove pro-Iranian officials from Iraqi ministries and security services.
 Car-bomb wreckage in Baghdad, August 2006Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters
A dramatic and visible success in the capital would restore morale in the U.S. — and enhance the credibility of the elected government in Iraq.
But make no mistake: A fight like that would represent a major escalation of the U.S. commitment to Iraq, a reversal of an 18-month-long policy of de-escalation and de-commitment. And if the Bush administration, for its own reasons, cannot or will not do what is now necessary to win — well then, it had better begin seriously contemplating a fallback position, a Plan B. As it is, the sacrifices of U.S. troops and the effusion of U.S. treasure are succeeding only in slowing the pace of U.S. failure.
Mr. Frum is the author (with Richard Perle) of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror.
NEWT GINGRICH
Today, Iraq is certainly not where, in early 2003, we had hoped it would be. If the current violence, instability, and confusion are measured against the planning assumptions of that period, this campaign to create a free and stable Iraq is clearly failing. What is still neither understood nor accepted is that Iraq is only one campaign in an emerging Third World War. Iraq is to our generation what Guadalcanal and North Africa were in the Second World War — important, but part a much bigger picture.
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