Prospective US-Iraq pact highlights modest gains
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Washington and Baghdad are moving closer to clinching a security pact that highlights Iraq's growing stability but also the blood and treasure that all sides have spent to achieve modest gains.
Iraq may no longer be descending into the civil war feared just two years ago, but it is a far cry from the "Eden on the Euphrates" hinted at before the Bush administration launched the invasion in 2003, analysts say.
Although risks remain, Iraq has started to achieve a semblance of stability in the last 18 months, analysts add.
And the State Department hails what it calls a democratic process in Iraq that is producing a pact to replace a UN mandate that expires at the end of this year and allow US forces to remain in the country until the end of 2011.
If approved, "you will have had an agreement signed between the United States and a democratic Iraq, a democratic Iraq that is in the heart of the Middle East," department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters Monday.
"And that will change the Middle East forever for the positive," he said.
But analysts -- who heard the Bush administration offer rosy scenarios for Iraq before the invasion -- take such remarks with a grain of salt.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank, recalls that President George W. Bush's administration forecast a quick victory in Iraq that would transform Iraqi and the regional politics.
It was a "wild illusion" to think that a foreign invasion would "produce overnight a stable democratic Iraq, which in turn would create a tsunami of democracy across the region," Carnegie President Jessica Matthews wrote.
If anything, there has been "more authoritarianism in the region because of greater political unrest," wrote Matthews at the time of the invasion's fifth anniversary.
"We have empowered Iran, we have made the region less stable," Matthews lamented.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in the conflict which she also noted has claimed the lives of more than 4,000 US troops and cost Washington more than one trillion dollars. Hundreds of coalition troops have also died.
And no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.
However, writing in the October/November edition of Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle, Michael O'Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack pointed to a more positive trend, even if they do not necessarily see a democratic Iraq rise from the ashes.
As violence falls partly as a result of a US troop surge, the Iraqi army and the police are boosting both their capacity to protect Iraqis and to work as national rather than sectarian units, their article said.
It said the security forces have made strides toward recruiting Sunni Muslim Arabs, who used to dominate Iraq's security and other institutions under Saddam Hussein but who lost power to Shiite Muslims and Kurds after his overthrow.
But the army and police, according to the article in the specialist magazine, "remain dependent on US and British troops to assist with planning and provide logistical and fire support."
Iraq's senior leaders have meanwhile struck compromises to pass a budget law, an amnesty for former insurgents, and a pensions law, the authors note.
But they warn: "Legislative progress on reconciliation continues to be slow, factional and sectarian differences remain divisive, and there is still no new political alignment or movement with the power to bridge these divides."
The authors write that Iraq could still be plunged into civil war through an "electoral crisis," and that a stronger army might one day be tempted to stage a coup with a political clique.
The United States must continue to nurture Iraq's fragile institutions and conduct troop withdrawals carefully to benefit from the new trends, according to the article.
If so, it could emerge "with something that may still fall well short of Eden on the Euphrates but that prevents the horrors of all-out civil war, avoids the danger of a wider war, and yields a stability that endures as Americans come home."