E-Mail This Article to a Friend Where do we go from here? Nine foreign-policy experts assess the Iraq quagmire INTERVIEWS BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN, ADAM REILLY, AND SUSAN RYAN-VOLLMAR

ONE YEAR AFTER the invasion of Iraq, everything that could go wrong, it seems, has. Predictions by experts that the US was invading without enough troops to maintain order in a post-Saddam Iraq have turned out to be painfully true. Within days of the regime’s collapse, looters raided the country’s precious art treasures, its hospitals, and most other public buildings. Security for Iraqi citizens, outside of the northern Kurdish areas, remains an elusive goal. The county’s infrastructure, already devastated by years of neglect under Saddam’s regime, has not been rehabilitated. Meanwhile, the fighting continues. Last week, 60 Americans died in combat — more than during any other week since the war began.

While the ferocious battles that broke out two weeks ago in Fallujah and Sadr City calmed down this week, ongoing fierce resistance by Iraqis — both Sunnis and Shiites alike — belies initial predictions by Vice-President Dick Cheney and other Bush-administration officials that US troops would be greeted as liberators. As the June 30 deadline for a transfer of authority from US forces to an Iraqi governing body approaches, it’s becoming increasingly clear that no viable government institution is ready to receive that authority. Amid all this, of course, no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

It’s not clear what the US should do next. Without the presence of international troops, American or otherwise, it seems likely that the country could devolve into civil war. But there is no guarantee that sending in more troops will solve anything, and how best to proceed remains frustratingly unclear. Against this backdrop, the Phoenix asked nine experts on foreign policy and the Middle East for their assessment of current events in Iraq. They talked about comparisons with Vietnam and the Intifadah, the biggest mistakes of the occupation, and what the US must do to salvage the situation. Edited excerpts follow.

Joseph Cirincione: We need to admit that we failed

This is a revolutionary situation in Iraq. You don’t see this very often. It’s a strategic shift, similar to what happened in Iran during the overthrow of the shah or at the Tet Offensive in 1968. Everything is changing, and our political institutions are lagging behind the change. You see this in the statements coming out of the White House and the Pentagon. They still think they’re fighting the battles of a few weeks ago. They don’t understand how radically different this is, and therefore there are radical new approaches necessary. We have to recognize that we, in fact, are not in control of the country, that this is no longer a situation where we’re battling a small band of insurgents or terrorists.

We are now in urban combat, laying siege to about a half a dozen Iraqi cities. We’re now at war with the people whom we said we were liberating. And we are about to enter one of the holiest months in the Shiah calendar, where a million Shiah pilgrims are about to come into these cities. What that means is that what began as a small revolt by a relatively small group will spread to become a broad-based revolt of the majority of the Shiah population.

There are some striking parallels to the Tet Offensive, which occurred during another presidential-election year, caught the administration completely by surprise, and fundamentally transformed the strategic situation in Vietnam — and also cost the sitting president the election. The forces of change, which we thought to be weak, have revealed themselves to be in fact quite powerful, and established institutions that were thought to be strong — for example, the US-created Iraqi militia and the Iraqi governing council — have been swept into irrelevance. This uprising changes everything.

For months, it’s been clear that the transfer of power was in trouble. It is now dead. There is no one to transfer power to; there is no Iraqi institution that can accept or defend that power. Anything we could possibly create within the next 80-90 days wouldn’t last more than 90 minutes. So at this point, we have to be talking about withdrawal. Not immediately, but what is the best and safest way to get US troops out and to give the Iraqis the best chance of creating a stable government structure.

There is no good solution here. But the one that has the best chance is to recognize that the US plan has failed, and to consider calling a national summit of the people who really do have the power in the Shiah, Sunni, and Kurdish communities. I believe that there are leaders in those communities that can quell the violence, if it is matched with a commitment for the US troops to withdraw from key areas. I think the military will recognize this perhaps more quickly than the political leadership, and will ask not for more troops but for an exit strategy.

Joseph Cirincione is the director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction (Carnegie Endowment, 2002).

Juliette N. Kayyem: Consider the unintended consequences

A lot of Democrats and human-rights activists supported the war in Iraq, and the question they always ask is, "Aren’t we better off without Saddam Hussein?" That question is way too easy. The harder question, the important question, is whether it was worth the price. Getting someone out of power has a price. And these efforts have tremendous costs. My thing is counterterrorism. I always ask, "How has this war affected our counterterrorism strategy?" Well, in Iraq the cost is the war on terrorism.

The truth is, if we had had a better idea of what we wanted the peace to be like, we would not have fought the war the way we did. Our goal was, we go in there fast, Baghdad falls, and that’s okay, that’s that. We were all watching our trucks barreling down the highway, now they’re two hours from Baghdad, now they’re an hour from Baghdad. That was our military strategy. There was no thought to how you bring stability to those areas you’re driving past. In hindsight, as you were driving to Baghdad, you didn’t stabilize Shiah areas, and you bypassed huge amounts of guns and military caches that are currently being used against us. How we waged the war was clearly the wrong way for winning the peace.

The justification for going into Iraq was that we didn’t want governments that wouldn’t or couldn’t control terrorists inside its borders. Well, if the US leaves now, we will have created another Afghanistan. So, what should we do from here? Dump the June 30 deadline. Nobody thinks it means anything. It’s a cosmetic deadline. It’s a date that has just come to plague us. That date exists purely for political reasons, for United States politics. It has no meaning within Iraq. We should increase troops, internationalize the troops, and commit for the long haul. Withdrawal is the wrong thing to do. The idea that we have no interest there boggles my mind. Not just for moral reasons, which would be enough, because we created the problems the Iraqis are facing. But there is a real consequence to what happens now. If we leave, the best-case scenario is a Shiah-majority government. The worst-case scenario is civil war. In a Shiah government, you would have Kurds facing persecution by the majority, so Turkey would want to go in to protect them. If you walk away, why wouldn’t Iran and Turkey get involved? What would be their incentive not to get involved?

Juliette N. Kayyem is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and national-security analyst for NBC News.

John Dean: How secrets lead to lies

Lyndon Johnson hoodwinked the public into going into Vietnam. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney hoodwinked the public into going into Iraq. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [passed in 1964 in response to North Vietnamese firing on a US warship, it authorized the president to take "all necessary steps" to protect American and allied armed forces] was nothing short of a fraud on the Congress. Getting us into Iraq has proven to be nothing but a fraud — and I don’t say that lightly, because the consequences of it are quite serious. Clearly, Vietnam was a quagmire. We have all the potentials of having stepped into a quagmire in Iraq.

Another similarity I see is, in Vietnam — notwithstanding the fact that we had some very able and now-legendary reporters there — there was still great control of the news that was coming out of Vietnam. And this was one of the problems that, really, the government tried to clamp down on. One of the lessons of Vietnam was, you can’t have too much free press in a war zone. They have taken that lesson and really stacked the news control, and we don’t know what is really happening.

So the parallels of dealing with what really is happening there are there as well. What is most evident to me is a parallel in not explaining what we’re doing, not really being forthcoming in how we got there. One of the problems of secrecy — of the kind of obsessive secrecy, particularly, we saw with Johnson in Vietnam, and was exacerbated by Nixon, and now has surpassed any prior presidency in the Bush administration — is the type of decision-making we get. One of the consequences of secret decision-making is a classic problem that was once described as "groupthink" — an internal thinking process where no outside thinking comes in, no public debate, no outside nations participate in that decision-making, and we have this belief that we have wisdom in all our own decisions, and we suffer from it. I see classic groupthink in our occupation of Iraq. We don’t have a clear strategy, we don’t have an exit strategy. We’re managing to do just about everything wrong. We’re driving opponents together to become fiercer enemies against ourselves. This is classic groupthink. And it is to me a product of secrecy.

One thing you can count on is that the American people will not get the truth. They will not know the facts. This administration does not square with the American people. We may pick it up from the foreign press, we may pick it up from the Iraqis themselves speaking out, but we really won’t know what’s going on because that’s the practice and standard operating procedure of this administration.

John Dean is the author of Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (Little Brown & Company, 2004) and a former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon.