The Clock Is Ticking On Iraq

Pundits have compared President Bush's escalation of the Iraq war to President Nixon's April 1970 decision to invade Cambodia as a means to a successful withdrawal from Vietnam. Five years later we were fleeing from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon – a lesson that our current president seems to have forgotten.

The key difference between Vietnam and Iraq is quite stark. An ethnically homogeneous Vietnam had been split into a communist North and democratic South as a reflection of larger Cold War rivalries. After the fall of Saigon, the reintegration of Vietnam was traumatic but successful. By contrast, Iraq as a nation was created by the British from three ethnically diverse regions – a largely Shia south, a primarily Kurdish north, and a mostly Sunni west – that have historically been at odds. Any wonder then that a Baathist dictator – not surprisingly, secular in his outlook – held the country together for almost three decades by brute force?

The sectarian strife in Iraq reached a tipping point almost a year ago, when Shiite Islam's holiest shrine in Samarra was destroyed by Sunni insurgents. Then the recent retaliatory and ham-handed execution of Saddam Hussein by a vengeful Shiite government more or less ensured that Iraqis had reached a point of no return in their attempts at keeping a united Iraq. So it has become almost impossible now for any western nation to try and secure Iraq in the short term.

NBC's Tim Russert was absolutely right when he called President Bush's proposal a "double or nothing" gambit, which is sure to, as the New York Times put it, "run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one." Unfortunately, the real disaster would be inherited by the next president who, in attempting to sort out President Bush's mess, will likely be doomed to one term. It therefore makes sense for Democrats and Republicans alike to coalesce around the May 2006 Biden-Gelb plan and ensure its success by involving all of Iraq's six neighbors in immediate discussions to fine tune and implement it. We need to act post-haste before the clock runs out on the only workable option for Iraq – a return to pre-British historical boundaries that had evolved naturally and co-existed in the pre-colonial era.