The ponies went to the glue factory

By Fester:

There are no ponies left to be found in Iraq. The United States is just the heaviest armed but not particularly relevant militia in Iraq right now, as the US Army and more importantly, the Air Force is useful for beating down on Maliki's political opponents while having no legitimacy on their own. The most "pro-American" position that an Iraqi politician can take and not be hung in effigy is "Get out soon;" that is Maliki's position and it is the moderate position in comparison to the "GET out NOW" position of the Sadrists and the Sunni Arabs.

There are no ponies in Iraq.

Tom Ricks in Foreign Policy almost recognizes the implications of the lack of ponies in Iraq as he contemplated the Reese memo last week. And then he says that the pursuit of anti-ponies is still a worthwhile goal:

The question the colonel's memo begs is just how bad it gets after we leave, and whether Turkey, Iran and more intervene more than they have already. What are the chances of a regional war? Feeling lucky, punk? Well, are you?

What happens after we leave? How do we mitigate the damage done?

How do we mitigate the damage done? Well creating and distributing a couple hundred billion dollars in reperations for waging an aggressive war might be one way of mitigating past damage. Another would be to stop creating more damage. Another would be to adapt a foreign policy and domestic political regime where going to war and prolonging conflicts is not the default option. But those are absurd ideas. The basic Pottery Barn axiom really is "You broke it, you're paying for it, and get the hell out of my store as I don't want you trying to assemble the damn vase with super-glue and duct-tape"

Turkey is a NATO ally with a thorny Kurdish seperatist problem already. Turkey has into northern Iraq while the US Army and Marines have had multiple corps on the ground. Turkey has routinely bombed PKK positions even as the US Air Force controlled Iraqi air space and air defenses. Turkey initially proposed and then withdrew the proposal due to a combination of internal political costs and Iraqi opposition to deploy at least a division to the Sunni Arab heartland. Yet these actions are primarily punitive and spoiling raids. The Turks really don't want to add even more Kurds to their suppression problems. If anything the Turks would like a stronger Baghdad government that has the capability to crack down on the Kurdish PKK so the Turks don't have to.

The Iranians are paying pensions to a decent chunk of the current Iraqi government. The Maliki government is already being backed by Iran and wants to maintain strong ties with the Iranian government. The Iranian government is facing internal support issues, so it is unlikely to greatly expand its portfolio of foreign ties at this time. But even if it was, Iran has basically what it wants --- a weak, friendly state in Iraq that is absolutely no threat to Iran and in the near future, a massive decamping of the American military from one of its borders. Why interfere too much more.

Saudi Arabia and the GCC have not gotten everything that they wanted. They wanted a US garrisonned buffer between them and Iran, but Iraq is too much of a failed state for that to happen. Syria is too weak to do much, and its internal politics are getting disrupted by mass refugee flows from Iraq. Jordan has enough issues to deal with to be actively intefering at any significant scale in Iraqi politics.

Activities that have occurred with 160,000 US troops in Iraq will continue to occur with 150 Embassy Marines in Iraq. The incentives and limits are in play. The worst has already happened, and if the US visibly reneges on the SOFA, Maliki's 'moderation' on the occupation question fatally wounds him and empowers the hardliners who want to shoot at US forces to get them out of the way.

At least Ricks is only concern trolling here. Barbara Walters (no not that one) in the LA Times advocates keeping 50,000 to 80,000 US troops in Iraq for another decade or more to search for a pony.

The U.S. needs to decide what outcome it is willing to live with in Iraq. It's likely that if the U.S. withdraws all of its troops on schedule, the strategic balance will dramatically shift in favor of the Shiites, and they will press for full control over the state. This, in turn, will probably goad the Sunnis and Kurds back to war, likely ending in a brutal Shiite victory and the establishment of an authoritarian state.

If the U.S. wants to avert this scenario, it will need to create real incentives for Maliki and the Shiites to offer a fair deal that transfers real political power to the Sunnis and Kurds by the 2011 deadline, and then it needs to help them enforce it over time. This would require that those 50,000 "support troops" remain in Iraq until the new political institutions are firmly established, something most experts believe will take an additional five to 10 years.

Maybe we should have thought about that in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 when we decided to put our full weight against the Sunni Arabs and enable massive urban ethnic cleansing instead of cutting a deal to include relevant Sunni Arab elites in early discussions. Can't think those thoughts as that is looking into the past.

But this runs into the basic problem of legitimacy again. Keeping a couple of US divisions to act as Maliki's beaters or at least smashers of large concentrations of Maliki opponents undermines Maliki and Sistani's claims that the talking method worked as an anti-occupation tactic. It is hard to argue that a nation is not being occupied when there are several foreign divisions still conducting operations in that nation. Throw in the fact that keeping 50,000 support troops in Iraq is a great way for Obama to depress his door-knockers in 2012 and that just is not happening.

Walters and Ricks are in pursuit of ponies in Iraq. I hate to inform them, but all the ponies were sent to the glue factory by March 2003.