Iraq: Presidential Distinctions

A key element of President Bush's speech on Iraq at the Naval Academy was the distinction he made between parts of the Iraqi insurgency. He was echoing the National Security Council's National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. Indeed, much of his speech came verbatim from that document.

The three parts are the Rejectionists, the Saddamists, and the Terrorists, in descending order of reconcilability. The President seemed to suggest what my previous blog entry indicated might prove useful, a strategy to divide the insurgency and to coopt its reconcilable, Iraqi-born elements.

There are three points to make here. First, an effective strategy of cooption will mean that hard choices must sometimes be made. It has to be a carrot and stick policy: in war, sticks are easy to wield, easy to justify, because a war is easiest to conduct when it is done in black and white. Carrots are harder to use if you are not offering your opponent only a chance to surrender because they suggest that the opposition includes grays as well as black. Second, I hope that intelligence analysts have found that "Saddamists" is a meaningful category in how the insurgents think of themselves. The category may prove counterproductive in policy if we refuse to offer former Baathists a chance to change sides. That kind of thinking--equating members of the Baathist Party with hard-core supporters of Saddam, led to some of our most grievous mistakes in Iraq, when we forbade Baathists to hold position in the new government and when we dissolved the Iraqi army. Both errors filled the ranks of the insurgency.

The third point is about the President's rhetoric. In his speech, after introducing the terms for the segmentation of the opposition, he seemed to reserve "Terrorists" for Zarqawi and the irreconcilable foreigners who have infiltrated Iraq. This rhetorical distinction would be welcome if he holds to it, for it suggests that the "War on Terror" is being limited, at least in Iraq. But this may or may not prove significant. Rhetoric that recognizes subtle distinctions had not been characteristic of the Administration. Or its opponents, for that matter.