Iraq, the ten year plan

It is an unpopular position right now, but I'm on board with former Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West: We need to be in Iraq for at least ten more years, in one form or another.

Can an Adviser Model work as Plan B? At the grass roots, yes. An aggressive corps of advisers and their Iraqi brethren can prevent the country from cratering. However, stability in Iraq depends on two other factors. The first is the commitment to national unity on the part of the ministries and political parties. On May 17, Ambassador Ryan Crocker said, "What I see is an awareness and focus on the part of the Iraqi leadership that reconciliation is key to Iraq's success." Obviously, Crocker has to be proved right in his judgment. To date, the top Iraqi leadership has been much weaker—and more selfish—than the bottom.

The second factor is U.S. steadfastness. There is no full exit or abrupt departure without serious adverse consequences. "If you leave quickly, we'll redistribute our units and go back to where we have local support," Lt. Gen. Ali Ghaidan, commander of the Iraqi Ground Forces, told us in a recent interview. Such consolidation, which seems logical, is the adjustment President Nguyen Van Thieu tried to make in South Vietnam in 1975. But once South Vietnamese units began to pull out of the more remote areas, panic set in and events cascaded out of control. South Vietnam had a very experienced army; for the Iraqi army to try such adjusting—meaning, pulling out of the tough Sunni areas like Qaim or Fallujah—risks total chaos.

This war will be fought for another 10 years because there is no central authority controlling the extremist groups among the dozens of gangs that compose the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. This is a bottom-up war that will be fought out in dozens of cities, towns, and farming communities. The core strength of the Iraqi security forces lies at the battalion level of the army, which is the least sectarian institution in Iraq. These battalions, paired with police departments, are the key to the war. Left abruptly on their own, they would fall apart. Like Afghanistan—where we have 30,000 soldiers fighting and advising—Iraq is a commitment for a decade.

Is West's proposal for advisers the best plan? It may well be. Although I'd argue for a significant U.S. base in the Kurdish region of the country as well, just to make Iraq's neighbors think twice before doing anything rash.