NEW PATH FOR IRAQ

Over two days this week, Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker spelled out clearly what achieving security and transition goals in Iraq would mean: many more years of occupation, many more American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars and no guarantee of success. Whatever action the United States takes in Iraq, including rapid withdrawal, it will remain engaged there, and that should push Congress to find an alternative to the endless mission chosen by President Bush.

According to the general, Iraq’s armed forces are improving; Sunnis are helping in the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq; overall violence is recently down compared with levels during a disastrous 2006. No one knows if the progress will continue, but whatever happens, Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker see the large majority of U.S. troops in Iraq as necessary through 2008 and likely a good deal longer.

On Tuesday, Sen. Richard Lugar, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked in his opening statement the key question: “Is progress largely beside the point given the rifts within Iraqi society?”

The answer, and the opening for Congress, is, yes, but the alternative – an end of progress through withdrawal – is worse. Anthony Cordesman, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, outlined in a recent paper called “The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq” how the United States is now tied, however unwillingly, to Iraq.

There is, Mr. Cordesman notes, oil – 11 percent of the world’s reserves, in a region with 60 percent of the proven reserves, where stability is crucial to the world economy. Second, Iraq’s former and potential future counterbalance to Iran serve U.S. interests in the greater region, an interest that does not diminish if U.S. troops leave. Third, fewer troops in Iraq allows them to be more easily targeted, raising the potential for casualties. Fourth, as Cordesman writes, “the idea that the U.S. can somehow simply stand aside and deal with al-Qaida or the Sadr militia by relying on air power and Special Forces is … absurd.”

The United States may choose between bad and worse options. It can decide to leave Iraq and watch it deteriorate before it sees improvement, however long that may take, or stay the course and check in with Gen. Petraeus again in six months to learn that, again, more progress is being made and more time is needed. Or it can and should choose a mission similar to the one outlined in the Baker-Hamilton report, which encourages the Iraqi military to play a more central role and pulls U.S. troops back to focusing on this nation’s strategic interests without abandoning the millions of civilians this nation has put at risk through inadequate planning.

It is beyond question that the Bush administration misled the nation into war, then bungled the post-war environment, setting up the current catastrophe. But there is a difference between knowing this war was wrong-headed from the outset and attempting to wash the nation’s hands of Iraq through a withdrawal deadline.

For better and, mostly, worse, the United States is joined to Iraq. The role of Congress now is to redefine a relationship that builds stability and leaves Iraq able to pick its own course.