The Wall Street Journal-20080212-Time to Look Ahead in Iraq

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Time to Look Ahead in Iraq

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Finally, the right kind of campaign debate over Iraq is beginning.

That is to say, the debate has turned toward where the U.S. is going in Iraq, rather than where it has been. The catalyst for the change has been the emergence of Sen. John McCain as the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

Until now, for a campaign in which the word "Iraq" has been used so often, the conversation surrounding that word has been distressingly backward-looking. Among Democrats, the questions were who opposed the war, and when, and by how much. Among Republicans the questions were who supported the war, and who embraced the troop surge, and by how much.

Now, though, the Iraq debate is taking the shape it will have in the general election. To step back from campaign rhetoric for a moment, the country faces three sets of decisions on Iraq: near-term, medium- term and long-term. The near-term ones will have to be made by President Bush in his remaining time in office. The medium-term and long-term ones will face the next president, whoever that might be, and they are the real subjects to discuss.

The main near-term decision is whether to have another set of troop withdrawals starting this summer, continuing the modest drawdown now under way. That's President Bush's call, and just yesterday, it became clear that neither a decision nor further withdrawals will come as fast as some expected.

At the moment, five of the 20 American brigades now in Iraq are being taken out. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, on a visit to Iraq yesterday, endorsed a "pause" this summer before deciding whether to take out additional American troops. Gen. David Petraeus, the top American commander, has been advocating such a pause after the initial five brigades leave before deciding whether to shrink the American force further. Now Mr. Gates has sided with him on that plan.

Gen. Petraeus is due in Washington in April to discuss next steps with President Bush, and it now appears it will be late summer or, more likely, the fall before Mr. Bush makes his last big tactical decision on Iraq, which is whether to take American troop strength down another notch starting late this year.

However that decision comes out, it's clear that the next president will inherit more than 100,000 American troops in Iraq, which will bring the new commander in chief face-to-face with the medium-term decisions.

The most obvious of those decisions is determining how low American troop levels should go in 2009. That will be a huge decision, but hardly the only one. Equally tricky will be the medium-term decision about what shape and role the American force assumes in 2009.

Does it remain largely dispersed in Baghdad's outlying neighborhoods and cities around in the country, doing the work of stabilization at the grass roots? Do American troops dramatically reduce their presence on daily patrols and turn them over largely to Iraqis? Or do American troops begin to pull back into bases and move out from there only when they are needed to help Iraqi forces quell violence?

More fundamentally, does the U.S. military mission begin to evolve away from front-line engagement at all and toward training Iraqi troops? Alternately, do American forces become a kind of antiterrorism strike force designed to fight al Qaeda in Iraq, while leaving domestic insurgents to the Iraqis?

The more profound questions are the long-term ones. Regardless of how things evolve in a new president's first year, the U.S. needs to decide what its lasting role should be in Iraq. Is Iraq to be a permanent American military outpost, and will American troops need to be on hand in some fashion to help defend Iraq's borders for a decade or more, as some Iraqi officials themselves have suggested? Will the U.S. see Iraq more broadly as a base for exerting American political and diplomatic influence in the broader Middle East, or is that a mistake? Is it better to have American troops just over the horizon, in Kuwait or ships in the Persian Gulf?

Driving these military considerations is the political question of what kind of government the U.S. can accept in Iraq. Creating and stabilizing a multiethnic democracy with a strong central government may take longer than simply accepting a balkanized nation with a weak central government and independent ethnic enclaves separated from one another.

In its early stages, even this new phase of the Iraq debate is taking on cartoon-like characteristics, as the two sides shape it for political advantage. Republicans are pretending that either Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama would cut and run in Iraq. That isn't really correct. Sen. Obama has endorsed a harder deadline for getting combat troops out of Iraq -- 16 months -- than has Sen. Clinton. But both favor leaving what he calls a "residual force" in the region to maintain Iraqi stability. The issue is how big that force will be, and what exact assignment it will be given.

Democrats are pretending that Sen. McCain wants U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for a century to come. The assertion is based largely on an offhand remark Sen. McCain made in New Hampshire in early January. A voter noted that President Bush said the U.S. might be in Iraq for 50 years to come. Sen. McCain shot back, "Make it a hundred," but followed with a more sober explanation that he wouldn't mind the kind of stabilizing, long-term military commitment the U.S. has made to South Korea and Japan provided American forces weren't taking casualties.

So both sides are stretching a bit -- but at least they're joining the right issue.