Moment Of Truth in Iraq

It is a measure of how vaporous the ground truths in Iraq have become that George W. Bush had to sneak into the country he conquered. Extra security was needed to proclaim that Iraq was more secure, the surge was working and the country was worth more American blood and treasure. Before the surprise trip on Sept. 3, a TIME correspondent was summoned to a Starbucks in downtown Washington, where he was informed of the Iraq mission–and then prohibited from telling anyone other than his spouse and his boss. At dusk on Sunday, Sept. 2, passengers boarded Air Force One inside its massive hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. Once darkness fell, the hangar doors opened, and the plane pushed out onto the runway for takeoff, its lights off and its window shades drawn. Laptops were returned in midflight, but their owners had to disable the wireless functions to prevent the President’s plane from being tracked across the globe. Twelve hours later, Air Force One touched down, and Bush stepped out onto the tarmac of another well-secured U.S. air base for an eight-hour visit to Anbar province.

Much of what happens in Iraq is bewildering and contradictory. A surge in U.S. troops has helped secure the capital–but seems to have pushed the violence elsewhere. Casualties among U.S. troops were down slightly in July and August but are surpassing last year’s levels. An avalanche of new progress reports is interpreted by both proponents and opponents of U.S. policy as validation of their positions. Even the President’s comments about troop levels can be confounding: Bush made the trip in part to pressure a reluctant Congress to permit his 30,000-troop surge, announced in January, to continue a while longer. And yet it was Bush who, during his brief visit to Anbar, hinted openly that troop withdrawals might begin soon. He told reporters that General David Petraeus informed him that “if the security situation continues to improve the way it has, we may be able to achieve the same objectives with fewer troops.”

Americans sense intuitively that Iraq has a way of reducing what was once solid and certain into sand. Lawmakers from both parties expected September to be a month of reckoning for the President’s Iraq policy–a stop-or-go moment when the U.S. would decide whether to continue the surge or begin an inevitable pullback. But even before Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker utter a word to Congress, that debate looks almost moot. Bush appears ready to continue the surge for another six months or so, and the Democrats lack the votes to check him. So what will unfold instead in Washington this month is not a debate about the surge but the beginning of a debate about what comes after: How long will the U.S. be in Iraq? (Probably a decade, possibly more.) How many troops will be needed? (Probably 130,000 to start, hopefully less.) What will the mission be after the surge? (Get in line–it’s anyone’s guess.) Will the Iraqis get their act together? (Not soon, as things stand now.)

Those puzzles are just for starters, their answers merely estimates. If you are following along at home, here are five other questions to keep in mind:

Did the surge work?

Yes and no. After Bush kicked a handful of other generals out or upstairs early this year, Petraeus changed tactics abruptly, threw a ring of fresh troops around most of Baghdad and crimped the flow of explosives into the city, making life there markedly better. The surge took place in a belt of outposts around the capital, where troops barricaded roads into the city, worked with local residents to flush out insurgents and spent millions creating safe zones where markets and normal life could return. Average Iraqis tell TIME that Baghdad feels safer; sectarian violence in the capital has been reduced, Pentagon officials say, and many Baghdad residents want the surge to continue. That’s in part what the operation’s architects had in mind when they sketched it out last fall.

But from the beginning, the surge was as much a political strategy as a military campaign. U.S. commanders in Iraq repeatedly stressed that American troops were simply buying time for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to do two things: buck up Iraqi security forces and take steps toward reconciliation that would, everyone hoped, lessen violence. The surge was designed to carve out a quiet space in which compromise rather than violence would rule. On this front, there is not much good news. Al-Maliki does not appear to need–or even want–to lead any hard negotiations. That’s largely because the three major Shi’ite blocs in the Iraqi government are operating under what they feel is a historical mandate to undo centuries of injustice against them by Sunnis. In practice, this means giving the Sunnis no quarter in negotiations. “The Shi’ites feel they are carrying the burden of history and that they will betray their entire community if they agree to even one concession,” says an Iraqi political analyst who asked not be be named. “This is not a matter of practical politics. It is a holy duty.”

Why are we siding with the Sunnis now?

It is a little startling that the Sunnis, whom the U.S. tossed from power in 2003, are being showcased by Washington as its favorite new allies. Bush and Petraeus have trumpeted the fact that Sunni insurgents in western Iraq who were once allied with al-Qaeda against the U.S. have joined forces with the Americans against the terrorists. These new alliances were in part the result of luck. Al-Qaeda violently overplayed its hand and started randomly killing Sunnis who refused to ally themselves with the terrorist organization. And in some places, America won the Sunnis over the old-fashioned way: by paying them. The question is how widely the Anbar model can be applied elsewhere. It is easy to forget that Anbar is the one part of Iraq that is largely Sunni and thus doesn’t suffer from the same kind of civil strife that upends order in other parts of the country. And if Anbar was truly secure and ready for a handover, Bush might be able to pull out the more than 20,000 Marines stationed in the province and send them elsewhere. In reality, no one thinks that is possible.

That’s because there are unmistakable risks to the new Sunni alliance. Arming the Sunnis against al-Qaeda is fine, but if they tire of their alliance with Washington, they become just another faction armed with U.S. weapons. Shi’ites and Kurds worry that the Sunni tribesmen who are fighting alongside American troops now have little or no loyalty to the Iraqi government and would just as soon turn their guns on Iraqi forces as on al-Qaeda. In addition, strengthening a Sunni stronghold in the middle of the country goes a ways toward cementing the very partitioning of Iraq that the Bush team has long sought to avoid. Which means the U.S. has to reckon with its new Sunni allies on roughly the same terms that lobbyists calculate the tenuous support of Senators they don’t really trust: the question isn’t whether you can buy the Sunnis; it’s whether they will stay bought. “These people used to be America’s problem, so America has bought their friendship,” says the Iraqi analyst. “When the Americans leave, these people will become Iraq’s problem.”

What happens now in Congress?

Less than many might expect. Democrats have been trying a variety of approaches since January: setting timetables, limiting deployments or easing troop-deployment schedules. Despite or maybe because of the consistent and vocal demands of the party’s antiwar flank, none of the Democratic efforts have yet attracted lasting bipartisan support. The few that have come close fall well short of veto-proof margins. The best proposals, like the plan developed by Democratic Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island that would begin withdrawals by 120 days after passage, mustered only 52 votes, not enough to overcome a filibuster or override a veto.

For now, Bush holds the high cards. Even if Democrats were able to peel off a dozen or more Republicans in the Senate and adopt a measure requiring a deployment on a specific timetable–and that’s a big if–the vast majority of House Republicans are unlikely ever to break ranks and support such a plan. So Bush has little to fear from the Democrats, for all their promises to change course on the war. And there’s a bonus in this for the President as well: if a close vote makes it to the floor of the Senate, Bush can allow most of the moderate Republican Senators who are up for re-election next year–Norm Coleman of Minnesota, John Sununu of New Hampshire and Gordon Smith of Oregon–to vote with the Democrats. That would permit endangered Republicans to strike an independent pose with voters and still enable Bush to sustain a veto in the House.

That doesn’t mean the Democrats will stop trying. A faction of Democrats has sought to make some kind of vote on the Iraq war a regular occurrence, simply to force Republicans to go on the record as supporting Bush. It is likely that some of the votes that take place this fall will be as much about the future of Congress as about the future of Iraq. There are a dozen Republicans in both houses who are in very tight races next year. A vote for the status quo, Democrats believe, is priceless advertising fodder in the coming election.

Will troops start coming home?

Petraeus is likely to recommend that troop levels remain constant at around 160,000 soldiers and Marines until April 2008, when a gradual redeployment will begin. The drawdown process will seem agonizingly slow, and that’s because it will be–one 3,500-strong brigade and its supporting personnel a month. The timing is strategic and political. Pentagon personnel predict a massive drop in recruiting and retention in April if troops overseas aren’t given long-promised breaks to go home. The political clock is ticking too. A partial springtime withdrawal would permit the White House to signal six months before the 2008 election that it is bringing the war to an end.

But what a smaller U.S. troop presence can accomplish is less certain and much less discussed. Some lawmakers want the U.S. to pull out of Baghdad to Kuwait or Kurdistan. Others have called for the military to concentrate on training the Iraqi army–a project that has already cost the U.S. billions, to little effect. American soldiers complain that their nominal allies in the Iraqi police and army are more loyal to Shi’ite militias than to the national government. An American intelligence officer in a western Baghdad suburb reports that the Iraqi police there are so thoroughly infiltrated by insurgents that the entire force is useless. Bush has recently returned to the mantra that as the Iraqis stand up, the U.S. will stand down. But it is an open question whether–or for how long–the Iraqi army can survive after the U.S. leaves.

Whenever they begin, then, the withdrawals are unlikely to last very long. Many experts believe the threat of a wider civil war–and the regional instability that would follow–means that the U.S. cannot afford to reduce its presence in Iraq much below 130,000 troops for the next year and probably beyond that. And so it could turn out that just six months after the long-awaited drawdowns begin, they stop again. The remaining forces, Pentagon officials report, will give the Army some badly needed margin to rest and retrain its brigades, but only a little. Some officers at the Pentagon want deeper cuts–and want them sooner–believing that the surge will keep the Army stretched too thin for too long. Virginia Senator John Warner, who is as close to the admirals and generals as anyone on Capitol Hill, cast his lot with this faction when he called recently for a reduction of 5,000 troops this year. Such a move would be more symbolic than real, changing little on the ground. And it would still leave a key question unanswered: What U.S. strategy could avert the wider bloodshed that looks inevitable in the wake of a smaller force? One small advantage of extending the surge is that it postpones having to find an answer to that question.

Are the Iraqis to blame?

Everyone is to blame. The U.S. marched blindly into Iraq, dreaming of Arab democracy, only to create a sinkhole of regional instability. In a pair of epic fiascos, Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary at the time, okayed an invasion force that was probably too small by half–and then agreed with U.S. envoy L. Paul Bremer to cashier the entire Iraqi army two months later. But it’s also true that for four years, the Iraqi government has had literally more money than it could spend and yet has produced little to show for it. Basic supplies–oil, electricity, water–are chronically short. Inflation and unemployment are rampant.

Nor are the political prospects in Iraq encouraging. Washington has blown hot and cold this summer about the wisdom of sticking with what the Government Accountability Office called the “dysfunctional” al-Maliki’s government. The current wind is marginally positive, but it was hard to miss the way Bush summoned the entire Iraqi A-team to Anbar during his surprise visit to press them to move faster. Iraqis tell TIME, however, that it doesn’t really matter if al-Maliki stays or leaves. As long as the current cast of dubious and discredited characters continues to dominate Iraqi politics, reconciliation is not going to happen. None of the likely replacements have shown particular inclination, much less ability, to rise above petty politics. “Some days, I think our problems are so big that we need a parliament full of Nelson Mandelas to solve our problems,” says Iyad Jamaluddin, a legislator in former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s multiethnic Iraqi National List bloc. “But the truth is, we don’t even have one.”

Blame has its uses, no matter how much there is to go around. In recent days, some Republicans have begun to argue that the U.S. did everything it promised militarily in Iraq and that the Iraqis and their government are the ones dropping the ball. It’s an appealing story line designed primarily to help Republicans deflect the heat for a mission that did not turn out as planned. That has always been an advantage of the surge, after all: when it was unveiled last winter, it was difficult to tell if the new tactic was really a blueprint for the final victory or just a holding action to signal to Americans that the U.S. had done its damnedest before quietly pulling the plug on the enterprise. Bush isn’t yet ready to blame anyone else. Instead, he has been waiting for months for this showdown with his war critics and now intends to prevail. He told journalist Robert Draper, author of the new book Dead Certain, that he was counting on Congress to continue a sustained military presence in Iraq through this year and into the presidency of whoever succeeds him. As early as May, Bush told Draper that the moment of truth would come in the fall. And now it has arrived.