The Crisis in Defense Spending
By Gary J. Schmitt
Posted: Friday, November 3, 2006

NATIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK
AEI Online
Publication Date: November 1, 2006

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The defense budget has grown appreciably since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But too little of the increase has gone to purchase new equipment or to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps. The result has been a “hollow buildup” that makes it increasingly difficult for the U.S. military to carry out its part of America’s national security strategy.

Unprecedented. In August 2006, General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, refused to submit an Army budget proposal for fiscal year (FY) 2008 to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Air Force and Navy heads met the August 15 deadline, but General Schoomaker, limited to a $114 billion budget top line by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, simply said no. The Army was seeking a top line of $138 billion. As he explained in a speech at the National Press Club shortly thereafter: “There is no sense in submitting a budget that we cannot execute . . . a broken budget.”[1] For the first time in anyone’s memory, a service chief was allowed to ignore a secretary of defense’s budget guidance and appeal directly to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for relief.[2]

But a one-time bump in the Army’s budget will not cure what ails it. The logjam of tanks and other military vehicles and helicopters is massive. Some 2,000 tanks, M2 Bradley fighting vehicles, and Humvees await repairs at various Army depots. To begin to address this problem, the Army requested and received a supplemental of $17 billion this year to repair and replace vehicles worn out or destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It believes it will need an extra $13 billion next year and similar amounts for the following years just to stay on top of the problem.[3] As Army officials explained to Congress last year, the service was already $50 billion short in equipment before the terrorist attacks of September 11, and with the wars the equipment deficit has only grown worse.[4]

Equally significant, the men and women of the Army are exhausted. We are now in the sixth year of the global War on Terror. Sustaining operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world has come at a high cost. It is increasingly difficult to keep 150,000 soldiers in the field, fighting year after year, with an active duty force of some 500,000--and not wear out that force. By not expanding the Army’s numbers significantly, the Pentagon now has on its hands a force whose overall readiness is faltering. Faced with continual rotations into and out of the theaters of conflict, the Army reportedly has no more than 10,000 soldiers who are not currently deployed and who are at the level of readiness necessary to handle a new military crisis should one occur.

Although the Army (and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps) has borne the brunt of the recent wars, both the Air Force and Navy face significant budget woes as well.[5] In the case of the Air Force, its fleet of last-generation fighters and fighter bombers is showing its age through increased metal fatigue. The refueling tankers, which give those short-range fighters the “legs” necessary to sustain operations over distant targets, are now three times the average age of compa-rable commercial jets now flying. Its bomber fleet is old and so numerically small--there are fewer than 200--that it would be hard-pressed to sustain operations over a prolonged period against a major military power. According to Air Force chief of staff General T. Michael Moseley, his service is at least $20 billion short of funds for this year and for each succeeding year.

Of all the services, the Navy seems the least stressed. Yet it too faces major budgetary pressures in the years ahead. The “600-ship” Navy of the 1980s dropped to less than 400 ships by 1995, the smallest battle fleet since before World War II. And it has continued to shrink, falling through the 300-ship benchmark in 2003 on its way to a floor of some 280 ships. The Navy hopes to turn that trend around and rebuild the fleet to 313 ships, a size that it believes is necessary to handle possible major military contingencies--such as a North Korean invasion of South Korea or a Chinese attack against Taiwan--while at the same time carrying out its other global responsibilities.

But even the Navy anticipates a flat service budget in the years ahead. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Navy is underestimating its planned shipbuilding costs by as much as $5 billion per year over the next three decades. The Navy’s modest goal of a 313-ship fleet is based on optimistic assumptions by the Navy. Among the more problematic of these assumptions are that Navy personnel costs will remain flat; that fleet operations and maintenance costs will not rise; that the target costs for building new ships across every ship class will be accurate; and that the Navy’s own major aviation procurement plans over the next two decades will not balloon in cost and, in turn, reduce available funds for shipbuilding. The Navy might have better luck playing the slots in Las Vegas than in betting that each of these assumptions will come up aces.[6]

The problems described above may be surprising to most Americans, given that the defense budget has grown appreciably since the September 11 attacks. Recently, President George W. Bush signed the 2007 Defense Authorization bill, which provides some $463 billion for the Pentagon and an additional $70 billion, for ongoing costs related to the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States will now be spending more than half a trillion dollars on its military in the year ahead. That is a lot of money by any account.

Yet as Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has noted, America’s military buildup has been “a hollow buildup,” filled largely with funds for operations, maintenance, readiness, and health care--but not for the acquisition of new military systems or added manpower.[7] To be sure, between FY 2000 and FY 2006, spending for planes, ships, and systems increased from $55 billion to $78 billion, and the Army’s end strength was bumped up by 30,000 troops. Nevertheless, these increases are inad-equate given the needs of the military, the wear and tear of war on both men and materiel, and the set of global responsibilities placed on the American military by existing treaty obligations and the strategic policies of the last two presidents.

How Did We Get Here?

The collapse of the Soviet Union inevitably gave rise to calls to cut America’s Cold War force structure. Throughout the 1990s, that is precisely what happened. But these cuts were based on the mistaken premise that the active duty forces of the early 1990s were the same forces with which the United States would have gone to war against the Soviet Union and its allies. In reality, America’s active duty forces were stationed around the world to buy time until the United States and its allies could muster the additional hundreds of thousands of reserve troops needed to wage the actual war. The force of the early 1990s was, in effect, America’s global placeholder, deterring threats in key regions of the world and reassuring allied states that the United States would be there should a conflict erupt. Yet these tasks remain. The decision to cut U.S. forces since then has made it increasingly difficult to provide this necessary global presence, especially when combined with the fact that the American military has been asked to take on mission after mission (Panama, the first Gulf War, the Balkans, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq) since the Cold War’s end.[8]

As a nation, we could have said no to all or most of those missions. Yet one of the most striking facts of the post-Cold War era has been that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush took office determined to have America play a less active day-to-day role on the world stage. Clinton left and Bush will leave office having accepted the same basic fact of international life: in the absence of an effective system of global governance, the United States will inevitably be left with the primary responsibility for keeping the peace. Moreover, doing so means that we will also be in the cross hairs of those whose agendas we frustrate by playing that role, requiring in turn a commitment on our part to deter and, if necessary, confront them militarily. In short, while many have suggested that the United States undertake fewer overseas commitments, the logic of the international system is such that no administration--Democratic or Republican--has seen fit to stem the demand for U.S. forces. Unlike the title of the old Broadway play, Stop the World--I Want to Get Off, the United States cannot just withdraw.

When it comes to providing adequate resources for our military, however, we seem to act as though we can. Beginning in the early 1990s, Washington dug a hole for the military from which the services have yet to climb out. Comparing the final defense plan put forward by the George H. W. Bush administration in 1992 for the Future Years Defense Program with what the Clinton administration actually spent over those years, the net reduction totals $162 billion. Although Congress added $50 billion to the Clinton administration’s requests through budget amendments and supplemental spending bills, most of the additions went to cover shortfalls in operations and readiness. These added funds did not “buy back” the administration’s deferred procurement of weapons and its cuts in active duty personnel. Indeed, the Clinton administration’s last budget (FY 2001) was the first to fulfill its own stated goal of providing $60 billion for new equipment and systems--a goal that had been set years before.[9] In other words, even by the Clinton Pentagon’s own measure, the procurement deficit was approaching $70 billion.[10] Others placed the figure considerably higher. For example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had put the bottom-line figure for procurement at $75 billion a year.[11] In 2000, the CBO was arguing that some $90 billion was needed annually just to maintain a steady rate of procurement for the forces then in place.[12]

Given the Bush team’s campaign rhetoric in 2000 that “help [was] on the way” for the military, one might have expected the Bush administration to have substantially increased procurement spending. It has not. If the CBO estimate is taken as a baseline, the shortfall in spending from the Bush years now totals an additional $100 billion. And, for FY 2007, the defense procurement budget remains at just over $84 billion, below the $90 billion target suggested by the CBO. When inflation is taken into account, the shortfall is even larger in real terms.

Nor has there been much relief on the personnel front. From 1989 to 1999, military end strength was cut from 2.1 million to 1.4 million. For the Army in particular, this meant a dramatic reduction in the number of divisions--from eighteen to ten. As early as 1997, the House Armed Services Committee reported that the Army was being worn down by repeated deployments and that readiness levels were low and getting lower. Factor in two major wars, stabilization, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency operations, and the marginal increase in Army manpower (approximately 30,000) in recent years is little more than a Band-Aid for what ails America’s ground forces.

When the military became an all-volunteer force, the United States undertook an implicit contract with those signing up for military service. In exchange for a young man or woman’s commitment to serve and fight for the nation, the country would provide him or her with decent pay and a chance to raise a family in an American middle-class lifestyle. Military pay and benefits have largely kept up with this promise. But with the size of the present active-duty force and repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, we have created a situation in which military families--especially those in the Army and the Marines--are being pulled apart as husbands, wives, and parents are constantly rotated into and out of the theaters of war. To maintain a force of 150,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan requires a base force larger than today’s if we expect to keep readiness levels adequate, train and educate officers, and not exhaust the men and women who are putting their lives on the line.

The Five Percent Solution

If the government’s projected budgets hold true, these problems will only get worse. According to OMB budget tables, defense spending is expected to decline from 4.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2006 to 3.1 percent by 2011.[13] Yet because of deferments in procurement from the early 1990s on, there is a planned wave of new systems and platforms coming on line in the years ahead to replace and upgrade worn-out and outdated equipment. This “procurement bow wave” cannot possibly be met under current spending plans.[14] If the Pentagon’s budget is not increased, it is inevitable that the American military will shrink in terms of both materiel and manpower. And, in turn, the gap between what our national security strategy calls for and what the men and women of the U.S. military are able to provide will continue to grow.[15]

Although the defense budget has increased, the non-war budget (which excludes the supplemental appropriations passed each year to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has grown by only 22 percent when adjusted for inflation.[16] The Pentagon is not breaking the nation’s bank. On the contrary, as a share of both the economy and the federal budget, military spending has been declining. In FY 1991, for example, defense expenditures accounted for over 20 percent of federal outlays; in FY 2011, they are expected to account for just 16 percent.

Despite the fact that the country is at war, defense spending as a percentage of the national economy remains low relative to any set of years since World War II. Hence, as AEI visiting scholar Lawrence Lindsey, the former chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, has noted, the U.S. economy is more than able to handle what needs to be spent on defense. That cost, moreover, like any investment, should be calculated based on the benefits it secures: success in Iraq, the defeat of the global jihadists, and deterrence of other hostile states would be an immense return on money spent.[17] Dedicating 5 percent of the country’s GDP--a nickel on the dollar--to defense is a wise investment.

Winning in Iraq and Afghanistan, winning the global War on Terror, having the arms and men to react to a new crisis--be it with Iran, North Korea, or an imploding Pakistan--and preparing the military to hedge against a rising China are all tasks that the United States and its military will face in coming years. Attempting to carry out those missions within planned defense budgets is a recipe for failure--and one potentially far more costly than the increased spending necessary to tackle each of these missions effectively.

Gary J. Schmitt (gschmitt@aei.org) is a resident scholar and the director of the Program on Advanced Strategic Studies at AEI. This National Security Outlook is adapted from an introductory essay entitled "Numbers Matter" in a forthcoming AEI Press book on defense needs, edited by Thomas Donnelly and Mr. Schmitt.

AEI research assistant Rebecca Weissburg and editorial assistant Evan Sparks worked with Mr. Schmitt to edit and produce this National Security Outlook.

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Notes

1. Cited in Peter Spiegel, “Army Warns Rumsfeld It’s Billions Short,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2006.

2. Thom Shanker and David S. Cloud, “Rumsfeld Shift Lets Army Seek Larger Budget,” New York Times, October 8, 2006. According to news reports, the Army’s appeal to the OMB to increase its budget for next year has not panned out. (David S. Cloud, “White House Is Trimming Army Budget for Next Year, Officials Say,” New York Times, October 28, 2006).

3. Fred Kaplan, “How Bush Wrecked the Army,” Slate, September 25, 2006, available at www.slate.com/id/2150337 (accessed October 24, 2006); and “Army Gets $17B to Reset Equipment,” Defense News, October 9, 2006.

4. Thom Shanker and Davis S. Cloud, “Rumsfeld Shift Lets Army Seek Larger Budget.”

5. Loren B. Thompson, “An Aging Air Force Struggles to Keep Its Edge,” Lexington Institute Issues Brief, October 11, 2006, available at http://lexingtoninstitute.org/1000.shtml (accessed October 24, 2006); “U.S. Military Services Talk Budget Directly with OMB,” Defense News, September 18, 2006; and “USAF Secretary Polishes Sales Pitch,” Defense News, September 18, 2006.

6. Robert O. Work, “Numbers and Capabilities: Building a Navy for the 21st Century,” chapter in a forthcoming AEI Press book on defense needs, edited by Thomas Donnelly and Gary J. Schmitt.

7. Cited in Dave Ahearn, “Weapons Systems Seem Unaffordable in Coming Years,” Defense Today, February 22, 2006.

8. Even before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military was busy. As the House Armed Services Committee noted in the report accompanying the Defense Authorization Act for FY 2001, “The U.S. armed forces were employed overseas more times in the past decade than in the previous forty-five years. Since 1989, the Army has participated in thirty-five major deployments.” (House Committee on Armed Services, Report on H.R. 4205, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001, 106th Cong., 2nd sess., 2001, H. Rep. 106-616, 12, available at http://armedservices.house.gov/billsandreports/106thcongress/hr4205committeereport.pdf [accessed October 24, 2006].)

9. Bradley Graham, “Pentagon Leaders Urge Accelerated 50 Percent Boost in Procurement,” Washington Post, November 11, 1995.

10. In testimony before Congress prior to stepping down from his position as deputy secretary of defense, John Hamre noted: “Even though [the Clinton administration] got to $60 billion in [its] modernization budget, we’re still not really making up for the hole that we dug for ourselves during . . . the second half of the ’80s and the ’90s.” (House Committee on Armed Services, Report on H.R. 4205, 15.)

11. See Anthony H. Cordesman, Trends in U.S. Defense Spending: The Size of Funding, Procurement, and Readiness Problems (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2000), 7, available at www.csis.org/index.php?option=com_csis_pubs&task=view&id=1668 (accessed October 24, 2006). For a direr estimate of the procurement budget problems, see Daniel Gouré and Jeffrey M. Ranney, Averting the Defense Train Wreck in the New Millennium (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1999).

12. Congressional Budget Office, Budgeting for Defense: Maintaining Today’s Forces, September 2000, summary, available at www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=2398&sequence=1 (accessed October 24, 2006).

13. Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2007: Historical Tables (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006), 136, available at www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy07/pdf/hist.pdf (accessed October 24, 2006).

14. Congressional Budget Office, The Long-Term Implications of Current Defense Plans and Alternatives: Summary Update for Fiscal Year 2006, October 2005, available at www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/67xx/doc6786/10-17-LT_Defense.pdf (accessed October 24, 2006); Congressional Budget Office, The Long-Term Implications of Current Defense Plans and Alternatives: Detailed Update for Fiscal Year 2006, January 2006, available at www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/70xx/doc7004/01-06-DPRDetailedUpdate.pdf (accessed October 24, 2006); Dave Ahearn, “Procurement Crunch Won’t Be Averted by Ending Tax Cuts,” Defense Today, February 2, 2006; Richard Mullen, “Analysts See Gaps between Budget, QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review],” Defense Today, February 10, 2006; and Dave Ahearn, “Weapons Systems Seem Unaffordable in Coming Years.”

15. National Security Council, The National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC: The White House, 2002 and 2006), available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/ (accessed October 24, 2006).

16. Stephen Daggett, Defense Budget: Long-Term Challenges for FY 2006 and Beyond, report prepared for the Congressional Research Service, April 20, 2005.

17. Lawrence B. Lindsey, “National Security Report Card” (conference presentation, Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC, April 21, 2006).

Contractors Rarely Held Responsible for Misdeeds in Iraq
By Griff Witte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 4, 2006; A12

The list of alleged contractor misdeeds in Iraq has grown long in the past 3 1/2 years. Yet when it comes to holding companies accountable, the charges seldom stick.

Critics say that because of legal loopholes, flaws in the contracting process, a lack of interest from Congress and uneven oversight by investigative agencies, errant contractors have faced few sanctions for their work in Iraq.

And the inspector general's office credited with doing the most to root out waste and fraud is scheduled to go out of business by next October.

Senators from both parties said yesterday they would push to extend the work of the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, which has uncovered such problems as shoddy construction and bribery schemes.

Some also say more needs to be done to follow up on that office's work.

"Contractors know they can push prices up. They know they can be late," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla). "They know they don't have to perform."

Contractors have done more work in the Iraq war than in any other conflict in American history, performing tasks as varied as serving meals and interrogating prisoners.

Stan Z. Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, a trade organization of government contractors, said they have done their best to do their work under extraordinarily dangerous conditions. "Many of the cases where performance was not what was expected, or even looked shoddy, were due to factors that were external, outside the contractors' control," he said.

The rules for holding contractors in a war zone accountable remain uncertain, with few precedents to go by.

"From a command-and-control point of view, I think we've got a problem. And it's going to be very difficult to solve," said Scott L. Silliman, executive director of the Center for Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University.

For military contractors, Silliman said, it is unclear which laws apply. For example, they are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs soldiers' behavior. A law passed in 2000 that is supposed to hold contractors responsible if they commit crimes in war zones has never been tested.

Several civil cases have been tossed out of court for lack of jurisdiction. In September, for example, a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by former Halliburton Co. truck drivers and their families who argued that the company knowingly sent a convoy into a raging battle without proper protection. A federal judge in Texas ruled that the Army, not Halliburton, was ultimately in charge and that the court could not "try a case set on a battlefield during wartime without an impermissible intrusion into powers expressly granted to the executive by the Constitution."

A similar case against the private military firm Blackwater USA has been allowed to proceed in North Carolina. But Blackwater has fought the case to the Supreme Court, enlisting high-caliber legal talent along the way -- including former Pentagon inspector general Joseph E. Schmitz and Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr.

One contractor that had its day in court was Custer Battles LLC. Whistle-blowers claimed the firm used an elaborate string of shell companies to drive up profits, and last year a jury returned a $10 million verdict against the firm. But in August, a federal judge in Virginia overturned the ruling, saying the court did not have jurisdiction.

Critics think that many cases are never raised because of spotty oversight. The Pentagon has spent about $250 billion in Iraq, yet the Defense Department's inspector general's office has only two investigators and a half-dozen auditors working there. As recently as last year, it had none.

"There's never been a time in our country's history when we've shoved so much money out the door with so little oversight," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), who blames Republican indifference for the lack of accountability.

The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., has nearly 60 auditors and investigators based in Baghdad and has won bipartisan praise for his work. But the office, which was set up to be temporary, has an October 1, 2007, deadline for completing its mission. A group of Democratic and Republican senators have said they think the office should remain open beyond then, and they say they intend to push legislation after Tuesday's elections that would make that happen.

Bowen, a Republican, has overseen investigations resulting in the convictions of several people in connection with a bribery scheme. His office estimates that its audits have saved the government more than $400 million.

For example, auditors reviewed 14 projects by one contractor, Parsons Corp., and found that 13 had serious defects. Among the problem contracts was one to build 142 health clinics. Only six have opened.

Yet Parsons will not have to return any of its profit, nor is it likely to face any kind of formal punishment. Its contracts were what are called "cost-plus" deals, widespread in Iraq, in which the government bears much of the risk.

Bowen said the government should have been willing to fire contractors when it realized that projects were going awry. "I started pushing for terminations for default, which is how you hold underperforming contractors responsible, in the summer of 2005," Bowen said.

But his calls were rarely heeded. The reason? "Litigation fear," he said. "It was viewed as too much trouble."

Frederick F. Shaheen, an attorney with the firm Greenberg Traurig LLP who represents contractors, said firing a contractor is difficult because the military is so dependent on them.

If an official were to try to cancel a meal-service contract, for example, "some colonel is going to be on the phone to you ripping your lips off saying, 'Why aren't my troops being fed?' " Shaheen said.

The threat of canceling a contract "is normally the sharpest quiver in the bag of the contracting officer. But there's no arrowhead on it any more," Shaheen said. "So the checks and balances are gone. The system is broken."

Running from Iraq
Don't Imagine It Will Reduce the Jihadist Threat
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Posted: Tuesday, October 17, 2006

ARTICLES
The Weekly Standard
Publication Date: October 23, 2006

Is jihadism growing exponentially because of Iraq? The liberal parts of the press, Democratic politicians, and numerous counterterrorist experts say as much. They cite the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) "Trends in Global Terrorism," completed in April 2006 but recently leaked in snippets, which they claim concluded that we are losing the fight against Islamic extremism because the war in Iraq is producing ever-expanding waves of holy warriors.


Resident Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht

While it is surely true that jihadism is alive and well, and that the Iraq war has a role in its continued vibrancy, the insistence on a causal connection obscures a host of lasting factors that would powerfully fuel America-hatred whether or not the United States had gone back to Iraq. It also invites the fantasy that our exiting Iraq would leave us better off, when in all likelihood it would fan the flames of jihadism.

Nevertheless, a consensus is growing in Washington. There isn't really much difference between left and right: While Democrats Howard Dean, John Kerry, and John Murtha all wish for a rapid departure, former Republican Secretary of State James Baker will soon release his centrist "alternative," reportedly announcing that victory is impossible and our best bet amounts to "cut, pause, talk to the neighbors, and run." Conservative writers like George Will and William F. Buckley long ago gave up on the idea that the United States could help build a democratic government in Iraq. Fewer and fewer among the nation's political and intellectual elites believe that "staying the course" in Iraq advances the war against terrorism and our national interests in the Middle East.

The NIE, or at least the "Key Judgments" summary that the president declassified and released, didn't in fact say that the war in Iraq had made us less safe, or that Iraq was necessarily the primary ingredient fueling the "global jihadist movement." But the summary certainly implied that things aren't good and that Iraq has become a rallying cry among Sunni holy warriors. It raises legitimate questions. If abandoning Iraq would reduce the terrorist threat to the United States and leave the Middle East in better shape, then that course would be compelling.

Before March 2003, much of the counterterrorist community had already decided that an American-led war in Iraq would harm the West's counterterrorist efforts. Were they right? Is Iraq jet fuel for the anti-American hatred of jihadists? And if so, does that mean the United States should refrain from pushing policies that infuriate extremists across the Islamic world? What would be the likely strategic ramifications in the Middle East of a "redeployment" of U.S. forces out of Iraq?

Let us be absolutely clear: The war and its most tangible result--the empowerment of the Iraqi Shia and Kurds--have galvanized a Sunni jihadist cause in Mesopotamia. The Sunni will to power is a ferocious thing. Neither this magazine nor CIA and State Department analysts foresaw either the amplitude of this sentiment or the spread of fundamentalism among the Sunni community, widely deemed the bedrock of secularism inside Iraq. And the war has certainly provided riveting imagery and stories for Sunni holy warriors globally. It's reasonable to assume that the conflict has helped anti-American Sunni jihadists multiply their numbers.

Iraq, moreover, like Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War, has provided a place where jihadists from different lands can meet, become blood brothers, and acquire deadly skills. Holy warriors in Iraq might learn something from Baathists turned Sunni supremacists. Saddam Hussein's Iraq trained many men to kill efficiently and savagely. When Saddam's Baathist totalitarianism spiritually ceased to exist, in its place, religious identities gained ground. Foreign holy warriors who hook up with ex-Baathists in Iraq will probably go home more dangerous than when they arrived--especially, as the NIE warned, if they go home victorious.

Al Qaeda spokesmen regularly declare that Iraq is at the center of their global effort to humble the United States, the great violator of Islamic lands and virtue. We should believe them--although their preferred battleground would still be America if they could figure out a way to put jihadist cells onto our soil. The Bush administration and Muslim Americans, who have shown themselves highly resistant to the holy-warrior call, have so far kept al Qaeda from again fulfilling its dearest dream.

That's about all one can say for sure about the effects of Iraq on the global jihadist movement. Yet that's not where the administration's critics like to stop. In their eyes, the Iraq war has somehow ruptured the radical Muslim psyche in ways that earlier events and preexisting factors did not.

In these critics' distorted perspective, the singular provocation of the Iraq war trumps all the other well-known spurs to jihadist fury: the American flight from Beirut after the bombings in 1983, the American flight from Somalia after "Black Hawk down," the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, the USS Cole, 9/11, the continual bombing of Iraq under the Clinton administration, the economic sanctions against Saddam's regime that Muslims saw as choking the Iraqi people. The Iraq war, as the critics see it, overwhelms the American attack on the Taliban and bin Laden, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, bin Laden's survivor charisma, the Pakistani madrassa machine, General Pervez Musharraf's retreat from Waziristan, the Saudi Wahhabi multitentacled missionary-money machine--still the most influential conveyer of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian hatred in the world--the existence of Israel, the Israeli retreat from Lebanon in 2000, Palestinian suicide bombings, the resurgence of Hezbollah, the triumph of American pop culture in Muslim lands, the Satanic Verses, Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, the Western assault on traditional sexual ethics and the God-ordained male domination of the Muslim home, the constant, positivist legal assault on the Holy Law, American and European support for Muslim dictatorships, the Western-centered, Western-aping, increasingly brutal Muslim regimes that have transgressed against God ever since Napoleon routed the mameluks outside Alexandria in 1798, and the unbearable Western military supremacy that reversed a millennium of nearly uninterrupted Muslim triumphs. To these critics, the Iraq war somehow is uglier than the whole cosmological affront of the modern world: Western Christians, Jews, and atheists on top; Asian Buddhists, Confucians, and Shintoists gaining power; the Hindu pantheists rising; and the Muslims, Allah's chosen people, descending.

All of this is downgraded before Iraq. It is particularly astonishing to see Iraq-centered critics discount the role of Pakistan and "post-Taliban" Afghanistan in fueling jihadism. It is arguable that Pakistan--not mentioned in the NIE's "Key Judgments"--has now replaced Saudi Arabia and Egypt as the intellectual breeding ground of jihadism. And what has been going on in Pakistan for decades has almost nothing to do with Iraq. European and Pakistani holy warriors no doubt cite Iraq as one of America's sins, but beneath these declarations lie volcanoes rumbling from pressures much closer to home.

In the hands of the Iraq-centered critics, too, a century-long history of ideas drops by the way. Sayyid Qutb--probably the most influential intellectual force behind modern Sunni holy war, who demanded of his followers that they look inward to fight the internal rot brought on by the meretricious appeal of Western ways--is pushed into the background. Qutb knew that Israel's victories over the Arabs were just a symptom of a deeper Muslim weakness. His followers, like many less violent members of the Muslim Brotherhood, did not rise in indignation when the Israelis annihilated Gamal Abdel Nasser's armies in 1967. That was condign punishment for an Egyptian leader who'd fallen from the faith. Like the great medieval, hard-line jurist Ibn Taymiyya, who rose in anger at Muslims' aping and tolerating Mongol ways, Qutb declared war not against "Western imperialism" but against the Muslim infatuation with the West. He helped devise the ethics that in just two generations would allow young Muslim men to slaughter women in Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Madrid, London, and New York.

The Iraq-centered critics turn the wisdom of Qutb on its head, by looking for the sources of Muslim anger in American actions, principally in Iraq. Many of Bush's harshest critics now begin every counter terrorist discussion with polls of the Muslim world. For them, a successful counterterrorist foreign policy ought to improve our image among Muslims.

Under Bush, these critics say, American foreign policy has become harsh and insensitive to Muslim feelings. Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, secret CIA prisons, and other nefarious acts have supposedly given the United States a bad name among Muslims--as if we hadn't already squandered our credibility by failing to be a "fair and honest broker" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These events have supposedly tarnished democracy and strengthened dictatorship in the region. Yet the most powerful force in Egypt trying to force democratic practices upon the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak is the Muslim Brotherhood, and there is no evidence the Brotherhood wants democracy less because of American action in Iraq. Iraq may be going to hell in a hand basket, but it is an enormously dubious proposition that the powerless of the Middle East think better of their dictators because of the turmoil there.

Point: Islamic militants loathe Israel, which they view as a Jewish-Western colonial state occupying land vouchsafed to Muslims by God. There are very few mundane things that anger militant Muslims more than the "peace process," the attempt by the Americans and the Europeans to once again seduce Muslim rulers into actions betraying God, his Holy Law, and his people. But would administration critics want to walk away from the peace process because such negotiations infuriate radical Muslims, making their transformation into lethal anti-American holy warriors more likely?

Ditto for advocating women's rights among Muslims. The historian Bernard Lewis is right: The West's gradual liberation of women in their domestic and social roles is one of the principal factors behind the West's modern preeminence. And it has made the Islamic world's entry into modernity emotionally agonizing. The Franco-Iranian scholar Farhad Khosrokhavar (who recently published a fascinating study of members of al Qaeda in French prisons) summed it up nicely when he wrote:

In removing the veil from Muslim women and in extolling a legal equality [between the sexes], which contravenes the laws of God and destroys the integrity of the family and its equitable sharing of duties between men and women, the West attempts to pervert the female race. According to the Holy Law, which [Muslim militants] interpret literally, refusing any evolution as a degradation of the faith's sovereignty, women ought to dedicate themselves to the family and the home while men remain masters of all that transpires in the public realm. The West smashes this fundamental relationship, sanctioned by God, through inseminating the virus of egalitarianism, hedonism, and sexual perversion. The liberation of women is thus in the same domain [for Islamic militants] as homosexuality and HIV.

Yet should we back down from advocating equality between men and women in Islamic countries because such advocacy makes some Muslims more inclined to convert civilian jetliners into fuel bombs? Was Madeleine Albright wrong to talk about such things incessantly? How about Karen Hughes today? Should we chastise our artists and writers--and Muslim artists and writers who've come to the West for its freedom--if they transgress the proprieties of faithful Muslims, especially radical Muslims who require only a little more psychological TNT to send them over the edge into anti-American holy war?

Bill Clinton came very close to embracing artistic self-censorship, as did Jacques Chirac, over the Danish cartoon incident. Many jihad-rising critics and former counterterrorist officials in the Clinton administration argue that we need to avoid behavior that inflames anti-American Muslim passions. By this reasoning, we will always be playing defense to their offense and possibly violent umbrage.

Do the jihad-rising critics want to rewrite history, and stop President Clinton's WMD bombings and sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime, knowing now how bin Laden exploited Muslim solidarity by underscoring this Western aggression? Should we just have let Saddam go free (he was almost there in 2000)? The vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East certainly would have applauded. By this reasoning, who knows how many Muslim militants would have refrained from the leap into the all-consuming hatred of jihad? Maybe one of the 9/11 bombers wouldn't have flipped if we'd stopped bombing and sanctioning Iraq, and the Twin Towers would still be standing. Then again, perhaps such a cessation would have whetted the appetite of the same militants. To bin Laden and those who've embraced his cause, American defeats have been much more inspiring than American victories.

The truth is that much of what the United States needs to do to win the war on Islamic extremism will naturally infuriate those who view the United States and American culture as threatening to Islam, all the more because they also find it appealing. Your average Muslim fundamentalist, who has no intention of becoming a holy warrior, fears and hates, and admires and envies, America. Such men and women are probably near a majority of all Muslims in every Arab land. Almost everything the United States does in this world ought to annoy these people. Much of what the United States needs to do will outrage them.

For example, the United Sates will continue to work with the security and intelligence services of many Middle Eastern autocracies. Unfortunately, the CIA is incapable of truly judging the value of such dealings since its bureaucratic interests are best served by inflating these "secret" relationships. But even if Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Pakistan contribute little to our well-being, in an age of mass-casualty terrorism, a bit of information at the right moment could matter enormously. We will deal with these distasteful regimes, and their subjects will understandably despise us for it.

Even if we ramp up our criticism of these regimes--and we should--and start to distance ourselves from them and condition our aid, we will still be condemned by many in the region for advocating democracy but supporting dictatorship. Nor are we going to stop supporting Israel or opposing terrorist organizations that are also popular social movements (Hamas and Hezbollah), or speaking in favor of women's equality and artistic freedom, or supporting our European allies who may (unwisely) decide to ban headscarves and other traditional Muslim practices within their countries. For these reasons and more, anti-Americanism is going to remain high.

What's more, if the Middle East evolves democratically--and the democratic conversation, amplified by the deposing of Saddam Hussein, remains vibrant--anti-Americanism will shoot through the roof. Fundamentalists will enter the public conversation even more loudly than they have already. Unless one believes that the regimes in place can kill off Islamic militancy and squash Islamic organizations that have terrorist movements within them, then the only solution to bin Ladenism is for Sunni fundamentalism itself to kill it off. Throughout much of the Islamic world, fundamentalism is now mainstream thought. But holding power will deprive militants of the luxury of mere opposition. In power and out, fundamentalists and more moderate Muslims will focus more seriously on Islamic political thought and practice. Under representative government, Muslims will have a harder time avoiding the rot--the ethics that allow young men to kill so easily.

Muslims' questioning of their own world has gained steam since 9/11. Perverse as it is, the carnage in Mesopotamia, like the slaughter in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s, has forced some reflection among Muslims about their faith and the hideous abuse it has suffered at the hands of some believers. It would be wrong to call this widespread, but it is a start. If the United States gets driven from Iraq, the soul-searching necessary to combat Islamic extremism will also suffer a rout. When Hezbollah appeared victorious over the Israelis this summer, even moderate and liberal Arab Muslims began to rethink their accommodationist stance toward the Jewish state. The very liberal Mustafa Hamarneh, director of the University of Jordan's Center for Strategic Studies, who has welcomed Israelis to Amman, jumped for joy when the Israelis bogged down in Lebanon. He referred to the Israelis as Nazis. Can one ever compromise with Nazis? Intellectually honest, and unquestionably voicing publicly what many moderates were thinking privately, Hamarneh wondered why Arabs should seek peace with Israel if in fact the Zionists were beatable on the battlefield. If we withdraw from Iraq, expect Muslim liberals and moderates to once again nose-dive throughout the Middle East.

When Islamic activists become more responsible for governance, the fundamentalist civil wars will begin. (This process is starting in the Palestinian lands.) The introspection, debates, and fall from grace will be painful and quite possibly violent, as devout Muslims who incorporate the community's popular will into God's law fight it out with fundamentalists who view man-made legislation as an insult to Allah.

This contest is not what the Bush administration foresaw when it espoused democracy in the Middle East as part of the solution to the evil that struck us on 9/11. But the president's democratic reflex was correct. And as faithful Muslims decide how much of Western political thought to incorporate into their own, anti-Americanism will skyrocket. Indeed, rising anti-Americanism will be a pretty good barometer of how serious the democratic-religious debates are in the Muslim Middle East. The more serious the debates, the more furious the flailing out against America by the hard-core militant Muslims will be.

The complexity of this picture suggests, among other things, how shallow the discussion has been among those who see our mistakes in Iraq as the epicenter of our terrorist problem. Discussion of what will happen if the United States pulls out of Iraq has been similarly thin.

Osama bin Laden has always claimed that he and his followers are the "strong horse" and that the United States is a "weak horse," unable to sustain a long war against the faithful. A major American humiliation in Iraq would probably produce what the jihad-rising crowd think Iraq is already: an extraordinary stimulus to holy-warrior passion--Beirut, Mogadishu, the embassy bombings, the Cole, and 9/11 all rolled into one. The critics should at least try to make the argument that the hell we have now is worse than the whirlwind we will reap after we run.

Of course, we might be lucky. The Iraqi Shiites could conceivably save us from seeing the jihadists triumph in Iraq. The Iraqi Sunnis won't. Their traditional social structure was mortally wounded by Saddam. The Sunni elite of Samarra, for example--probably the most bourgeois town in Sunni Iraq--tried but failed to hold out against the radical Sunni supremacists, fundamentalists, and jihadists. The Sunni elders of Samarra actually cherished the Shiite Golden Shrine. They were its historic custodians, and often met within its confines, to talk politics and drink tea, before the men of violence blew it up. The odds are very poor that traditional Sunni hierarchies and the nonradicalized tribes outside of the major urban areas can withstand the Sunni radicals.

The Iraqi Sunni community has no grand ayatollahs and clerical structure of the Shiite kind to moderate and block its violent young men. Assuming the Shiites don't conquer the Sunni triangle, the Sunni community by itself will not spare us the sight of triumphant jihadists taking over American bases and planting their flags for all to see, courtesy of Al Jazeera's satellite coverage. Try to recall an image of the mujahedeen winning in Afghanistan in 1989. You can't--there were few photographs of that distant war. But every man, woman, and child in the Muslim world will be flooded with vivid, lasting images of America's flight from Iraq.

Yet if the Shiites save us from the last-GI-out-of-Baghdad jihad recruitment videos by subduing the Sunni insurgency while we're still in Iraq, it will doubtless be by slaughtering all the bomb-happy Sunnis they can get their hands on. And that Shiite-Sunni collision could powerfully stoke the anti-American flames. The Salafis and Wahhabi fundamentalists loathe the Shiites, whom they view as mushrikun, those who ascribe partners to God. The Shiite charismatic view of history, where the Caliph Ali and his descendants, the imams, are indispensable intermediaries between God and man, is anathema to most Sunnis. In the eyes of many Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere, the Iraqi Shia already carry the burden of being liberated by the Americans. If the Shiites are forced to conquer the Sunni tri angle, which they probably will be, Sunni Arabs will blame the United States, perhaps with a new level of ferocity.

And neighbors will not stand idly by. The Saudi fundamentalists, apparently the largest contingent of foreign holy warriors in Iraq, would add one more item to their list of satanic things the United States has done. An overt and proud Shiite conquest of Iraq--which is probably inevitable if the Americans leave--would spook the Saudis, who would probably aggressively back their Wahhabi establishment's holy war against the Shia, supplying money and weapons to Iraq's Sunni Arabs.

The Jordanian and Egyptian Sunni establishments might do this, too, given their fear of a "pro-Iranian" Shiite bloc developing. In addition, the Jordanians would fear a tsunami of Sunni refugees from Iraq, threatening to change the politics and culture of Hashemite Jordan (think radicalization beyond the wildest hopes of Yasser Arafat). Foreign aid would prolong the conflagration in Iraq. It is worth recalling the explosion of Islamic radicalism that followed the Iranian revolution in 1979: The Saudis and Iranians went head to head in supporting their preferred Muslim radicals, a competition the Saudis decisively won, with Osama bin Laden a major beneficiary. A new battle between Sunnis and Shiites would spur missionary activity, perhaps on a scale not seen since the 1980s.

On the other hand, some helpful countervailing forces to the Sunni-Shiite explosion might come into play after an American retreat. What is striking about the conflict in Iraq is actually how few foreign fundamentalists have joined the fight. Iraq ought to be flooded with tens of thousands of die-hard militants, wreaking vastly greater havoc over much larger regions. Yet Arab and Pentagon reports from Iraq suggest that only a few thousand foreign jihadists have entered. Islamic fundamentalism is much stronger today than when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Yet the jihadist commitment to Afghanistan was greater than that seen today in Mesopotamia, the second most sacred land for historically sensitive Muslims.

Figures for the Soviet-Afghan war are unreliable--they all come from Pakistani military intelligence. But the rough estimates were that 25,000 to 75,000 holy warriors came to Pakistan from 1980 to 1989. As crude as these numbers are, they still tell us something about the magnetism of Iraq and today's fundamentalist commitment to holy war. Also, we do not find the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, progenitor of modern Sunni fundamentalism, and its offshoots throwing their weight into this war. Why?

As the Israeli scholar Reuven Paz has noted, Egypt's dictator, Hosni Mubarak, may not want militants going to Iraq, as he once allowed them to go to Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. And Egypt's Islamic activists themselves perhaps have looked into the moral abyss of holy war more acutely than most others because they witnessed the barbarism of some of their own militants in the past. They know Ayman al-Zawahiri firsthand. Egypt's Brotherhood, like its offshoots, has been a bit reluctant to embrace the global jihad of the truly hard-core. More deeply embedded nationalist sentiments may be the cause. In any case, something is going on here, something perhaps about the Sunni-versus-Shiite and Sunni-versus-Sunni strife, that makes one suspect al Qaeda's hopes for a triumphant Iraq campaign may not be requited--not if holy war brings as much discomfort as it brings glory. This could change if the Americans left and a vicious Shiite conquest of Iraq began.

And a side note: Once a radicalized Shiite community conquered central and western Iraq, it very well might turn on the Kurds. The nationalist aspirations of the Shiite Iraqis are real and raw (and a war with the Sunnis would make them worse). If the Kurds decided that the Arabs had again run amok, they might risk declaring independence. Who knows what that would do to Iraq's neighbors. But it could well make the Shia, no longer restrained by the moderate clerics of Najaf, go on the warpath. It doesn't help that the Kurdish Sunnis have oppressed the small Kurdish Shiite community. Will Washington defend the Kurds again? Will we do so forever?

One thing is highly probable: If the Americans flee, and the Shiites begin a vengeful conquest of the country, Tehran, which is already making a play to lead the radical Muslim world, will reach out globally to Sunni holy warriors to divert attention from the Iraqi Shiite counterattack against Iraqi Sunnis. The Iranian appeal will be to target America. All the expert discussion about Islamic terrorism now being the domain of "nonstate" actors will die a quick death at our expense. And the heretical Shiite Alawite regime in Damascus would likely echo this call, especially since the Syrian Sunni majority is becoming more devout. This would be an unintended, unpleasant consequence of the war in Iraq--of our mishandled counterinsurgency against the Sunnis and inadequate defense of the vanishing moderate Shiite center against ever-more powerful Shiite radicals. Neither the authors of the NIE on jihad nor the Democratic critics of the war apparently foresee this menace.

The president's Republican base is cracking on Iraq. Virginia's Republican senator John Warner, a faithful "stay-the-course" kind of guy, is showing signs of battle fatigue. It's a good guess that a majority of Republicans in Congress would dearly love to escape from Iraq if they could figure out how to do so without sounding like "cut-and-run" Democrats.

In Vietnam, the South Vietnamese government deployed a tolerably competent military force that held for a "decent interval" after our departure. This is unlikely in Iraq. When we start withdrawing, the entire Iraqi governing structure, along with the Iraqi army, will probably fracture along ethnic and religious lines. Stay or go, America's fate, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his General John Abizaid have arranged it, depends on the integrity of the Iraqi military. That's not a good bet, especially if we start pulling out.

Once upon a time, the Iraqi army had a strong identity, which it often forced upon the rest of the nation, but that identity was inextricably connected to the Sunni governing class. Although there are many Sunnis serving in the new Iraqi army, their service to the country probably won't withstand the tough counterinsurgency that will be required to calm the Sunni triangle. Sunni participation in the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite, also will probably end with a serious counterinsurgency effort. Just remember how the Sunni elite acted when American forces reduced Falluja: Many went into open rebellion. Imagine how they would act if somebody tried to take down the city of Ramadi, the heart of Sunni rejectionism and power.

And it is equally unlikely that a Shiite-dominated army will be able to restrain its own kith and kin in the Shiite militias, at least while the Sunni insurgency thrives. They certainly won't be able to do so if they know the Americans are leaving. An American departure, be it rapid or gradual, anytime in the next few years would further stampede Iraqis to retreat to the security of their ethnic and religious communities. And U.S. threats to withdraw unless the Iraqis do a better job of forming a national-unity government and constraining their violent passions solicits from the Iraqis just the opposite of what is intended.

There are other reasons the American plans for a "political solution" to the insurgency and sectarian strife have been unsuccessful, but the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish divisions alone are sufficient to render null the "Iraqification" dreams of Republicans, Democrats, and General Abizaid. A forceful U.S. presence in Iraq was always the key to ensuring that Iraq's national identity had a chance to congeal peacefully--that the Sunni will to power was contained, that Shiite fear and loathing of the Baathists and Sunni fundamentalists didn't ignite into all-consuming revenge, destroying the Shiite center led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and that Kurdish separatism didn't flare. We're beyond that now. But we're not beyond checking the worst tendencies within Iraqi society.

We are certainly not beyond the chance that the Iraqis can govern themselves more humanely than they were governed under Saddam Hussein. Whoever thinks Iraq is hell on earth now is suffering from a failure of imagination. If we leave, it will, in all probability, get vastly worse.

And for those who are concerned about the geostrategic stability of the Middle East or the growth of Sunni jihadism and terrorism against the United States, staying in Iraq ought to be a compelling choice. We don't need to "stay the course" that Rumsfeld and Abizaid have designed. Instead, we should follow the road map offered in these pages by the military historian Frederick W. Kagan. It's the best plan out there for winning. We--not the Iraqis--need to lead a major effort to break the Sunni insurgency. We--not the Iraqis--must police the Shiite-dominated security services to ensure they don't slaughter the Sunnis, especially as we and a Shiite-dominated army with an important Kurdish contingent make a more serious effort to control Baghdad, Ramadi, and the centers of Sunni resistance. We need to keep building up a Shiite-dominated Iraqi army and slowly deploying it in ways that it can handle--with integral American involvement, as at Tal Afar. We should expect a few Iraqi governments to collapse before we start seeing real progress. Yet our presence in Iraq is the key to ensuring that Shiite-led governments don't collapse into a radical hard core.

This may be too much for the United States now. It certainly appears to be too much for the Democrats. We would have all been better off if President Bush and his team had done what Senator John McCain advised back in 2004, when the insurgency started to rip: Tell everyone that the war would be long and hard, and pour in more troops. If we no longer have the stomach for this fight--and it's going to be ugly, with few sterling VIP Iraqis who will make us proud--then we should at least be honest with ourselves. Leaving Iraq will not make our world better. We will be a defeated nation. Our holy-warrior and our more mundane enemies will know it. And we can rest assured that they will make us pay. Over and over and over again.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI.

Should Iraq Be Partitioned?
An Online Debate
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Posted: Thursday, November 2, 2006

ARTICLES
The New Republic Online
Publication Date: November 2, 2006

The following is a response taken from an online debate for The New Republic between AEI resident fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht and Peter W. Galbraith, former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006).


Resident Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht

It's always a pleasure to spar with you. Implicit in your piece is an assumption that is undeniable: There is nothing particularly holy about modern nation-states in the Muslim Middle East. Their autocratic governments have usually been much more effective at immiserating their citizenry than improving the spirit and health of the commonweal. It's not hard to understand why the Islamic identity has gained ground on secular nationalism in probably every Muslim state in the region. (The only exceptions may be the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia, where overzealous, relentlessly modern state sponsorship of religion has allowed a secular identity to remain competitive.) For the Kurds in Iraq, nationalism never made much sense, since the idea of Arabism was inextricably tied to the essence and beauty of being Iraqi. I've always thought that you have been among the most honest observers of the Kurdish condition: Iraq for the Kurds has been a naqba (to borrow from the Palestinians): a "catastrophe" that has maimed the body politic and the culture. (Would that Iraq's Kurds had been so fortunate to live under the oppressive rule of Ankara's generals.) It would be enormously unwise for Iraq's Kurds to exchange de facto independence with an explicit declaration of national sovereignty. They don't need to anger Ankara, Tehran, or Iraq's Sunni and Shia Arabs, who may look even more askance at such an action than either the Turkish Army or Iran's mullahs. But we would certainly understand if their emotions got the better of them and they decided to divorce themselves irrevocably from Mesopotamia.

This is the part of your argument that I can understand. Iraq's Kurds are a distinct people who are unlikely to have a happy home in any centralized Iraqi state. It's unclear to me how the Kurds can easily demarcate their borders in a very loosely knit federal arrangement. Kirkuk has only become the Kurdish Jerusalem since the discovery of an ocean of oil underneath it. There are Arabs and Turkomans all over the Kurdish zone, and neither cares to be incorporated inside a noticeably enthusiastic and exclusionary Kurdish union. Since the winter of 2003--but especially in the last year--the Kurdish powers have been pushing Arabs out of Kirkuk and elsewhere. (And, yes, the Kurds are also welcoming some Iraqi Arabs into their lands.) Iraqi Arabs now cannot visit Kurdistan without a Kurdish sponsor. This process is becoming ugly. The possibility that the Kurds will make a serious misstep against the Arabs and Turkomans isn't small, which could seriously embitter--possibly endanger--any lasting peaceful relationship with either Ankara or Iraqi Arabs. It also could jeopardize the rather obvious designs of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the two clan-based satrapies that rule Kurdistan, to enlist the United States in their defense against all aggressors. But, for the sake of argument, let us assume that the Kurds, who have a long track record of killing each other and calling in outsiders to abet their internecine strife, can pull this off and sustain their de facto Kurdish republic. That's as far as you go, Peter.

Leave the hills of Kurdistan for the Arabic-speaking flatlands, and you're in trouble. The nationalist idea is violently alive and well among Iraq's Sunni and Shia Arabs. You cannot have a geographic split among these two religious groups--and it is essentially a religious split, since, culturally, the two groups are the same--if they themselves do not want it. You appear to be making a very Western, secular mistake in assuming that nationalism and a strong religious identity and faith are mutually exclusive. Among the Sunni and Shia Arabs of Iraq, they are not. (You also regularly err in your association of the Iraqi and Iranian Shia, implying a growing subservience of the former to the latter. In all probability, the distance between the two--even with Iran's closest Shia allies in Iraq--is going the other way as the Arab Shia gain more self-confidence and fear the Sunni Arabs less.) You will not find any major religious figure on either the Iraqi Sunni or Shia side who favors the type of split you envision. And, unless you do, your plan--as theoretically appealing as it might be (it's very Wilsonian to believe that, if you give people land, they'll stop fighting)--has no legs.

The forced and voluntary migration of thousands of Sunnis and Shia from mixed neighborhoods into more homogenous zones hasn't really changed the vast overlap on the ground in the central region of Iraq, where Sunnis and Shia remain in a mélange. Sectarian strife is constantly growing, in part because Sunnis and Shia can still easily strike each other. Baghdad remains at the center of the Iraqi Arab mind, for both Sunnis and Shia (they each see it as their city), and there is no way in hell you are going to divide that town. If you think Moqtada Al Sadr is a problem now, just wait until the United States tries to force the partition of Baghdad, and Iraq, into Sunni and Shia zones. Among other things, Sadr is a rampaging nationalist--hence his constant mocking of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and many of the moderate Najaf-based clerics around him for their Iranian ancestry. Killing Sunnis and defending the Iraqi Arab nation from infidel invaders have become the rallying cries for Sadr's Mahdi Army and its numerous, even more undisciplined cohorts. Are you suggesting, Peter, that the U.S. Army deploy its troops with the explicit mission of separating the Arab Sunni and Shia communities and devote its firepower and training programs to ensuring that Sunnis and Shia have competing militaries? Led by Donald Rumsfeld and General John Abizaid, the U.S. Army in Iraq can't even make a dent in the Sunni insurgency, and now you are going to add to their mission by taking on much of the Shia community, which has no sympathy whatsoever for the type of rigid separation you envision?

It is a dubious proposition to suggest that the efforts of Abdul Aziz Al Hakim and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) for a large autonomous region in the south means that Hakim, SCIRI, and others who have backed this plan have given up on the idea of one Iraq, particularly one Arab Iraq. They haven't. Hakim is after a power base. Such an entity doesn't represent for him--or for any other Shia that I can find--a geographic expression of a serious religious or regional affection. The autonomy-loving people of Basra and its surrounding areas are not quite in this camp, but that's a completely different issue from what Hakim has advanced. Many Shia, both religious and secular, have liked the autonomy idea, since it gives them a redoubt where the Arab Sunnis can no longer interfere. And the Kurds have backed Hakim not because they think this plan will bring peace to the Arabs, but simply because they are selfishly interested in reinforcing the idea of federalism among the Arabs. It's important to remember that this idea of a Shia zone was developed in 2004, at a time when the Shia were still fearful of the Arab Sunni rejectionists and holy warriors. They had not yet thrown off the Saddam-era fear of a Sunni return to power or of the possibility that the Arab Sunnis--through their greater martial virtue and communal discipline--could slaughter their way back to power. When Hakim first met with President Bush in Washington after the liberation, he stressed the need for the United States to stay the course in Iraq, Today, the statements of Hakim to pay attention to are those that depict the United States as an obstacle to an effective counterinsurgency. (Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki has made similar allusions.) It's a good bet that Hakim and others in SCIRI now believe that they can more effectively handle the Arab Sunni rejectionists and holy warriors on their own, since they are not restrained by America's humane rules of engagement. For what the Sunnis have done, these Shia, who now perhaps represent a majority of the community, intend a horrific vengeance.

If the Americans start to withdraw from Iraq--if they just announce that they are leaving and give a timetable--we are probably going to see the violence in Iraq explode. Take the killing rate of today and triple it--that would be a reasonable guess of where the Iraqis will be within six months of any "redeployment" of U.S. troops. A Shia conquest of the Arab parts of Iraq is only a matter of time. The centripetal eminence of Baghdad and the Sunni suicide bombers will guarantee this. Baghdad will force the Shia to take Ramadi, and, once they take Ramadi, the rest of the Sunni triangle will essentially be a mop-up operation. Mosul will be challenging, but, with the resources of the Shia community and the killing temperament developed from the conquest of Baghdad and Ramadi, Arab Shia forces will take down the city. We should certainly expect staunchly Sunni states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia to back Iraq's Sunni Arabs. In such a collision, Iran will back the Arab Shia community, and we can expect the Shia to take possession of the vast majority of the heavy weaponry left over from Saddam. The Sunni resistance will certainly be ferocious, further enflaming and radicalizing the Shia. You can expect Shia Iraqi nationalism to be enraged--and remember, the Shia have always viewed themselves as the progenitors of Iraqi nationalism (they, not the Sunnis, were the core of the anti-British jihad after World War I). The odds are decent that, once this nationalism becomes battle-hardened and successful, it will aim for the Kurds, too. I certainly wouldn't want to bet that the Americans--who, by that time, will have "retreat from Iraq" fully embedded in their DNA--will want to save the Kurds one more time.

You won't get partition, Peter. If the Americans don't change tactics soon--which means adopting a program along the lines laid out by the military historian Frederick Kagan, who has given the best advice on how to win in Mesopotamia--you are going to see carnage that may well rival the body count of the Iran-Iraq war. I wish the Kurds well. They are going to need all of their political acumen, and enormous luck, to escape this maelstrom.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI.

GENEVA (AP)--Nearly 100,000 Iraqi refugees each month are fleeing to Syria and Jordan in a silent exodus that has turned unexpectedly into an enormous challenge for relief workers, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said Friday.

It has been impossible to obtain accurate totals on the numbers of refugees because few Iraqis are registering with UNHCR, and most are being cared for by host families or charitable organizations, chief spokesman Ron Redmond said.

The U.N. agency has been counting those entering Syria in recent months, however, and has found an average of 2,000 a day leaving Iraq by that route.

"This is not a situation where everyone has left en masse at once, nor are they going to refugee camps," Redmond said. "This has been largely a silent or invisible exodus."

The Jordanian government says another 1,000 a day are entering Jordan, Redmond said.

"We've got a displacement crisis under way here, and the international community needs to do more to chip in to support the humanitarian needs of these people," he said.

Even though many of the refugees are being cared for, there is a major impact on the Syrian and Jordanian economies because the influx has been driving up prices for housing, food and other commodities, Redmond said.

So far it has been impossible to get a more precise idea of the post-invasion flight than the estimate UNHCR gave last month that 914,000 Iraqis had fled their homes since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Redmond told The AP.

Redmond recalled that, before the March 2003 invasion, UNHCR had made contingency plans for 600,000 refugees and displaced people, and had a budget of $154 million. But there was no mass exodus in the beginning, and UNHCR has long since scaled back to $29 million.

UNHCR now estimates that 1.8 million Iraqis are living in neighboring countries and 1.6 million are "displaced" internally, but those numbers include many who fled during the 1990s, long before the invasion, Redmond said.