From today's San Francisco Chronicle (
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/18/MNGTTLRELS1.DTL&feed=rss.news):
The following are quotes from Larry Diamond, one of a panel of experts advising the Iraq Study Group that is co-chaired by James Baker, and who is an expert on building democracies who is at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and is a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq:
"There's a sense among many people now that things in Iraq are slipping fast and there isn't a lot of time to reverse them..."
"The civil war is already well along. We have no way of knowing if it's too late until we try a radically different course..."
From the San Francisco Chronicle article from which the direct quotes were taken:
But having studied the situation in Iraq closely almost from the time Saddam Hussein was toppled in April 2003, and having been involved in trying to build a functioning democracy there, Diamond said the one thing the United States might no longer have is time. The Bush administration needs to initiate a "crash program" to avoid a catastrophe, he said. A key element would include bringing in new U.S. leadership to rebuild America's battered credibility in Iraq and the region...
If the Bush administration does not move rapidly in this direction and the violence continues to rise, Diamond said he fears Iraq's central government could be overthrown or collapse and the Iraqi military might disintegrate, leaving heavily armed militias controlled by the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis in a bloody struggle for power. The already heavy civilian death toll could soar still higher, dragging Iraq's neighbors into the chaos, he said.
The result, Diamond warned, could be the transformation of the Sunni-dominated Anbar province west of Baghdad into a zone effectively controlled by Islamic extremists, filled with terrorist training camps.
"What worries me more than any other single thing," Diamond said, "is if the country does effectively get broken up through a civil war -- and Anbar province, where most of the Sunnis live, becomes what Afghanistan was before 9/11."
At best, Diamond said, it appears the United States has a few months to implement a new strategy. He added, though, that an atrocity by an Iraqi group -- such as the bombing of the Askariya shrine, sacred to Shiites, in Samarra in February -- could trigger a cycle of retaliation that might spin out of control and give the United States even less time to act.
The first step the Bush administration should take is to renounce any plan to maintain permanent U.S. military bases in the country, said Diamond. Polls inside the country have shown that the vast majority of Iraqis fear that the secret U.S. aim is to continue to occupy Iraq and control its oil, a view that has fueled the insurgency...
...The United States should also announce plans for a flexible drawdown of troops over a period of from 18 months to 3 years, he said.
...He emphasized that the Iraq plan should be flexible so that, if things stabilize, the troops can leave earlier or the drawdown can be slowed if violence flares...
...Diamond stressed that the Bush administration has to move forward on all these different tracks simultaneously, in part because they are interconnected and in part because there is no time to wait for the resolution of one issue before moving on to the next.
"This is the fourth quarter, there's two minutes left in the game, and we're down two touchdowns," said Diamond. "There may not be enough time left."
That last bit would seem to support the drawdown taking longer than I predict, but my guess is that once we start pulling out troops, we'll pull them out at a faster pace than Diamond suggests, but notice he left that option open. Also note his emphasis on the immediacy of the problem, which is why I predict this will all happen sooner rather than later.
