As the experts poke the ashes, I think the emerging consensus is that Moqtada al-Sadr won more than he lost, because he and the government agreed to a cease-fire. That makes him 3 for 3 in taking on state powers (the U.S. in the previous two rounds, and now the Baghdad government). If nothing else, this guy is a survivor.

What puzzles me most is the role Iran played, especially in ending the fighting. There are lots of rumors that it brokered the ceasefire, but I have seen nothing definitive. If it did, that indicates that the Tehran government felt it had something to lose through the fighting. I have been told by U.S. officials that the Iranians were taken aback by intra-Shiite combat in Iraq last year around Karbala. I don't know why they would be surprised: It seems to me that one of the obstacles to major political movement in Iraq is that the Shiites still haven't sorted themselves out.

The other international actor of interest is Britain. They have 4,000 troops at the airport on the outskirts of Basra. You wouldn't know it, would you? (By the way, the British defense minister, Des Browne, said today that he is putting on hold a plan to further cut the British troop strength. Why? Seems kind of meaningless to me.) Nance's subhed: "It's Always Tea Time at Basrah Airport."

At any rate, the phrase that keeps coming back to me is one I heard last year from a diplomat: If you want to know what Baghdad will look like eventually, look at Basra now.

Now let's get to your questions...

Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark and Malcolm Nance at Small Wars Journal Blog are quoted by Tom.

Jihadis continue to pursue terror training and knowledge exchange with fellow jihadis through Internet forums. Often, the jihadi forum participants post short, though significant, details pertinent to terror conduct drawn from real life experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. Recently, a forum participant posted six training episodes comprised of the basic knowledge needed by a novice jihadi to become a full-fledged terrorist (ek-ls.org, March 15). The episodes begin with two basics lessons on "How to set up a terrorist cell." Four more episodes followed, over a week, on sniper attacks, assassination techniques, attacking and looting government centers, and conducting massive terror strikes. Terrorism Focus will cover all six episodes of this important training manual, beginning with this issue and continuing over the next two weeks...

On 19 March, 2008 CNN's Iraq war correspondent, Kyra Phillips gave a live interview from in front of the crossed Swords at the Tomb of the Unknowns parade ground in Baghdad's International Zone (IZ). She cheerfully reported that Iraq had somehow changed after five years and the lack of mortar and rocket fire allowed her to broadcast live. Rockets and mortars were a daily occurrence in the heavily fortified center of government over the previous 1,825 days. On this indirect fire free day, Phillips proclaimed, "there was a time twice a day there would be mortar rounds coming into this area. Now, five years later, Kiran, very rarely are you seeing that type of action, mortars or rockets coming in here. And the fact that I'm here live right now tells you this is a sign of progress."

The media's definition of "very rarely" would be exactly four days. That Sunday the IZ and surrounding neighborhoods would be bombarded with a 12-hour long barrage of rockets and mortars, which killed 13 civilians in the outlying neighborhoods. The barrages continued throughout the week and embassy workers and residents of the IZ were informed they could not go outside of concrete structures without body armor and helmets -- a standing order for the first five years, which somehow needed to be reiterated. Phillip's ridiculously premature assessment that the surge had dispelled mayhem and resentment of the 2003 invasion, was short-circuited by the Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM), or Mahdi Militia.

The JAM are an armed Shiite paramilitary group that have spent the last five years fighting American forces with Iranian weapons, systematically murdering Sunnah insurgents, conducting ethnic cleansing of non-Shiite civilians and playing bugaboo as an influential part of the Iraqi government. Within days, soon after the death toll of US forces in Iraq crossed 4,000 soldiers, CNN's rosy predictions were replaced with breathless Breaking News reports from Iraq's second largest city, Basrah. It was engulfed in brutal combat.

Operation Predictable Outcome

The limited successes of the 2007 Surge, the increased manpower injected into Multi-National Force - Iraq (MNF-I), are completely misunderstood by both pundits on the right and the left as well as its progenitor, the White House. This is clearly indicated by attempts by both sides of the political aisle in Washington to hail the combat in southern Iraq as both success and failure. Both sides miss the point entirely.

While some progress related to the Baghdad Security operations and usurping some insurgent groups away from extremism by forming the Sahwa (Awakening) councils contributed to lessened violence, it was the July 2007 truce and the August 2007 unilateral ceasefire announced by the JAM leader, Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr that resulted in the 60% drop in violence that journalists like Kyra Phillips enjoyed until last week.

More interestingly, it was the MNF-I that broke the truce last Tuesday when they felt the Iraqi army ready to take on the JAM in their southern stronghold.

The Maliki Gambit

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki arrived in Basrah on 24 March ahead of what was being labeled "a major security push" that was massive for the Iraqi army. It was a planned gamble to snatch Iraq's second largest city away from the JAM.

The operations in southern Iraq began when the Iraqi army launched a major offensive on 25 March. This nameless operation, lets call it Operation Predictable Outcome, was launched suddenly and was reported in the press as Iraqi forces being attacked by the JAM. Within hours, 15,000 Iraqi army and police were pushing into the city. Through the media was fooled into believing that Basrah was embroiled in militia fighting and the army was intervening, it would take one announcement from PM Maliki to clear the air. Maliki announced to tribal leaders that this operation against the Mahdi militia was weeks in preparation.

The Basrah operation appeared to be a chance for the Iraqi army to attempt the "seize, clear, control and retain" strategy. Maliki would adopt the same counterinsurgency pattern seen in the 2007 Baghdad Security Plan (BSP), Operation Enforcing the Law (Fadhl al-Qanoon).

The first objective is to neutralize and/or drive out the insurgents and criminal elements like the notorious Garamsheh tribe. The army would then start securing the local population from the insurgents to dry up their base of support, most likely through compounding neighborhoods with Texas barriers, ala Baghdad. The next phase would be to segregate the hot sectors of the city from each other and keeping a heavy boot down on resistant sectors under their control.

If this week's poor showing is any indicator, they will need far larger involvement of US forces for combat support or a heavy British presence to secure the gains necessary for the core elements of the BSP to take root in Basrah. Depending on how critical this demonstration is to the White House we could see heavy combat between the JAM and MNF-I in the weeks to come.

The Jaysh al-Mahdi's stiff in-your-face resistance in Basrah may be just a desperate short term response to the government's offensive. Then again, after months of light skirmishes and training, it may have presented the JAM with a fortuitous opportunity to conduct a major live fire exercise and to evaluate its combat viability for when America withdraws.

The JAM sent a direct message Maliki defense ministry personnel to indicate exactly how personal a stake they have in their Basrah actions. The spokesman for the BSP, Tahseen Sheikhly, was kidnapped from his home after his security detail was slaughtered and his house set afire. He lived in a Shiite neighborhood.

Playing Splinter Cell - Targeting the JAM, Piece by Piece

For the last year the MNF-I has embarked on a campaign to isolate the JAM one cell at a time and bring them to heel through a series of targeted raids. Referring to these groups as "Rogue" or "Splinter" Jaysh al-Mahdi and categorized as belonging to Iranian trained "special groups" they were believed to be roadside bomb laying cells that did not heed the control of Muqtada al-Sadr and went on their own to attack the coalition. It is a neat trick semantically and created a pathway for the coalition to engage the JAM by putting one group at a time under the umbrella of Anti-Iraqi Forces (AIF). The AIF designation meant they were no better than al-Qaeda and could be killed on sight. This progressive labeling allowed the MNF-I to break JAM units they identified apart from major JAM concentrations and clear areas of interest such as Hillah piecemeal. Cautiously balancing al-Sadr's popularity, loyalty and willingness to adhere to the cease-fire, these cells would not be attacked as part of the JAM as a whole, but were attacked a little at a time. These were described as just another localized small unit action against a "rogue" JAM unit. Done this way the entire JAM organization is not called to account and "good" JAM units would be tolerated ... until attacked later when the entire organization was weakened.

These rogue or splinter JAM cells are alleged to be specially trained groups with direct ties to the Iranian al-Quds paramilitary forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, but they just may be the JAM cells that MNFI has managed to identify as vulnerable or responsible for continuing sectarian operations. However, this play on words appears to have reached a critical breaking point. Considering that Maliki's Badr Corps is just as closely aligned with Iran as the JAM, it attempt to seize Basrah draws suspicion.

It does not help that Maliki has described the popular Shiite militia as al-Qaeda-like, "Unfortunately we were talking about Al-Qaeda but there are some among us who are worse than Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is killing innocents, Al-Qaeda is destroying establishments and they (Shiite gunmen) also." My discussions this week with Iraqi Shiite friends trapped in Basrah and Baghdad is that most Shiites in Southern Iraq do not see it that way. They see this as a fight between two rival militias, the Badr Corps (aka Maliki and the Iraqi army) and the JAM. The JAM sees only one group being attacked this week and that is the infrastructure of the JAM in Basrah itself.

Its Always Tea Time at Basrah Airport

After news of the Iraqi army offensive stalling, reports surfaced that the US wanted Britain to take part in a surge of its own in southern Iraq, to be supported by the US Marines if need be. As of this writing, the British forces are having none of it. With the exception of a few patrols supporting IA forces and a battery of artillery fire against JAM mortar positions, the British in Basrah remain stubbornly on the sidelines. This is through no fault of their own, as the war remains equally as unpopular in the UK as it does in America.

News of a demand for a British surge became known as reports of a second combined US-Iraqi army offensive was taking place in Mosul against Iraqi Sunnah insurgents and al-Qaeda in Iraq. In effect, there are now Northern and Southern offensives underway in Iraq indicating a major shift in strategy to retake and secure all sectors of Iraq, most likely by September. Combined with the Baghdad and western provinces operations MNF-I is gesticulating like a wrestler who tentatively pins down an opponent's wrists (Baghdad and Anbar) but is flailing to pin everything else.

This operation is in no way part of General David Petraeus's 2007 surge. This altogether different animal is a nation-wide offensive in the two largest contested cities in Iraq. If successful, the dual arm strategy could empower PM Maliki with military control of all of Iraq's non-Kurdish areas. On the other hand should the JAM as a body throw its full combat weight against the Maliki government in Basrah and start to widely deploy their caches of closely cherished Iranian supplied EFP-IEDs and RPGs southern Iraq from Basrah to al-Kut could fall to the JAM.

Denial Warfare

By the weekend, the Pentagon was trying to spin the Iraqi Army defeats as a sign of the success of the surge in Baghdad. Pentagon press spokesman (and ex-ABC news White House correspondent) Geoff Morrell, stated that the Iraqi army operations were a result of the PM Maliki's desire to take back Iraq's second largest city and a sure sign that the US strategy in Iraq was working. Morrell stated "Citizens down there have been living in a city of chaos and corruption for some time and they and the prime minister clearly have had enough of it ... I think at this early stage, it looks as though it is a by-product of the success of the surge."

That's an amazing statement considering Basrah has JAM forces in the Hayaniyah, Jumhuriya, Five Mile, Downtown, al-Ma`qal, al-Janinah, and al-Kazirah sections of the city as well as reports they control the road from al-Amarah, another JAM stronghold north of the city. No one who has ever been to Basrah would predict that the Iraqi Army, even with US Special Operations support would penetrate the Hiyaniyah district, a large swath of poverty-filled slums dominated by the JAM. Iraqi and US Special Operations had to spearhead the offensive there and still have yet to make more than limited headway. The British tried for five years and now have retired comfortably at Basrah airport.

Where will the Basrah offensives against the Mahdi Militia take MNF-I? Is it possible they will force all of southern Iraq into rebellion again? This played out badly in 2004 as Petraeus' predecessor was ordered by the White House to invade Fallujah while inartfully attempting to arrest al-Sadr. That resulted in the JAM set the entirety of the south afire. A rebellion took months to quell.

Political Aspects of Chaos

Like all good insurgencies, the Iraqi offensive has a broad political component to it as well. However, the American political scene is more critical than that if Maliki and Sadr. The timing of this offensive comes almost a year to date with the beginning of Operation Enforcing the Law, the current surge effort in Baghdad. A successful operation which does not see the Iraqi army completely routed from Basrah would give General Petraeus yet another opportunity to claim before Congress that he needs an additional six months (... by September) to secure the gains of the offensives in Basrah and Mosul and no lessening manpower so he can secure the gains of those gains.

Coming before the election, it could also play well to the we-are-winning-in-Iraq-meme of Senator John McCain. An Iraqi army defeat would only give him cause to demand more time, blood and money so they can gain proficiency.

In fact, Senator McCain may have transmitted the North & South strategy-punch at the end of his visit in mid-March when he said, "Today America and its allies, stand on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism."

Petraeus is Operating Under Orders

I have no doubt that the warfighters such as General Petraeus and his former deputy General Ray Odierno are doing everything they can to fight the war. That is their job and they like it. They will be the last to acknowledge publicly or privately that they cannot make additional headway in the face of a changing administration or a dysfunctional Iraqi government. They will soldier on and fight whoever comes in their way until ordered otherwise so civilian criticism of them is pointless. Far be it for General Petraeus to kick the can down the road. He wants to deal with the problem at hand, which is to stabilize a fire breathing insurgency long enough to get adequate numbers of trained Iraqi forces online for any decision to withdraw and to get Iraqi reconciliation back on track. That will be winning to him.

Unfortunately, the Basrah Operation may have also been an attempt at a Hail Mary pass for both General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in the heart of the election season. To show dramatic tangible gains all across Iraq would bolster the President's case for continuing the war. This is most likely due to pressure, if not direct orders from the White House through the Vice President's visit last month. Considering their stunning record of incompetence when making even the smallest decisions about Iraq, the over reliance on the Iraqi army to complete even the simplest independent task by all parties may only increase US casualties and public intransigence about the entire adventure.

Unfortunately, scheduling General Petraeus to testify back to Washington in early April while the fighting occurs may herald the end of American "last chances" in Iraq. That depends on the election. The results of November 4th may force both Petraeus and Crocker face up to the possibility that they had better have withdrawal plans drafted by November 5th and standby to execute them on January 21st 2009. No matter who is in charge or how it is sliced, the longer it takes the Iraqis to fight even small pockets of militias means more American soldiers will die in their place.

No one doubts US Supremacy on the battlefield, but this is the Iraqi Army engaged now in Basrah and by all accounts performing poorly. Any attempt to extract them will be a victory for the JAM. On the other hand the JAM can easily make it clear that hardball is a two way game, as they have done in the past. They could suddenly disappear from the battlefield, secretly open up those hidden away crates of Iranian made EFP-IEDs and make Basrah a living hell for whoever comes in with armor. JAM's "brave, but stupid" street tactics have a low survivability rate against US soldiers but they are more than a match for the Iraqi army and police of 2008. The Iraqi army of 2009 may be a different matter, but there is no doubt that the JAM may use on any more ceasefires to train their cadres so they can continue to fight the Iraqi and US army like Hezbollah fought Israel in Lebanon.

UPDATE #1: As predicted, in a replay of the 2004 and 2005 Mahdi militia uprisings, Muqtada al-Sadr ordered the JAM to conduct the cease-fire-and-vanish act that typified his conflicts with Prime Minister Maliki. This is not a victory for Maliki, as the Iraqi army will only symbolically enter Basrah and none of the JAM controlled districts. This is a strategy that worked very well for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and will work again as the JAM gains strength and once again convinces members of the Iraqi police to mutiny and either refuse to fight or abandon their posts to join the JAM.

-----

Updated SWJ Editors' Links:

The War over the War w/ Tom Ricks - Washington Post online discussion

Did Maliki do Sadr a Favor in Basra? - Noah Shachtman, Danger Room

More on Sadr - Richard Fernandez, The Belmont Club

Stunning Vitory in Basra, or Possibly Stunning Defeat - AllahPundit, Hot Air

The Basra Backfire - Herschel Smith, The Captain's Journal

Discuss at Small Wars Council

By Stanley R. Sloan

As the NATO countries prepare for the last alliance summit of George Bush's presidency, scheduled for April 2-4 in Bucharest, there is widespread recognition that the alliance needs reinforcement. On the practical level, the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan needs more men and equipment, particularly helicopters, to block resurgence of the Taliban. On the strategic level, the alliance's 1999 concept of its role and operations is in dire need of updating to reflect new realities in the wake of 9/11 and NATO's subsequent mission in Afghanistan. On the political level, new life needs to be pumped into the alliance's veins, to convince skeptical commentators, publics and parliaments that the transatlantic bargain is still a viable and valuable deal.

Hopefully, new commitments to the alliance mission in Afghanistan will emerge from Bucharest. None of the allies will want to celebrate NATO's 60th anniversary in 2009 by acknowledging that it is incapable of handling the Afghanistan mission.

However, the commitment to prepare a fresh strategic concept along with a new "Atlantic Charter," as advocated by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, may have to wait. As good an idea as it is, the reality of the American election schedule will enforce a delay. Do the European allies really want to take the chance of handing off a drafting process begun under President George Bush to a new American administration led by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? There could not be a more awkward way for the allies to greet the next US administration.

Preparation of revised strategy and a new charter for NATO are highly political tasks, not appropriately left to a lame duck administration. This would be the proper perspective for the allies to take, even if one were betting that the Republican nominee will succeed President Bush.

In these circumstances, what should the European allies do? First, they should go along with the Bush administration's desire to invite Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia to join the alliance. These countries will not add significantly to the capabilities of the alliance, but their membership would be another important step in NATO's mission of helping tie up the loose ends left at the end of the Cold War. This step surely could be seen as the last major contribution of the Bush administration to the process of making Europe "whole and free," a process begun by his father's administration nearly two decades ago.

The administration's desire to put Georgia and Ukraine on track for membership is, not unreasonably, opposed by several European governments. The populations of the two countries are not yet sufficiently convinced of the wisdom of NATO membership to support giving their governments "Membership Action Plans." The fact that Russia opposes the move is the major concern for some European allies, but should not be the reason for delaying the first step toward membership for Georgia and Ukraine -- they simply are not ready. Their time will come.

With regard to the future of the alliance, NATO leaders at Bucharest should support the goal of preparing a new strategic concept and a contemporary Atlantic Charter. They should even make it clear that the new declarations would have to tackle not only traditional security issues but also the "new" question of energy security and electronic warfare against NATO countries. The drafting project, however, should be left on the table for the allies, in concert with a new American administration, to tackle in 2009.

In the meantime, both the United States and the European allies need to devote more military and non-military resources to the mission in Afghanistan. Recent reports about the failure of the international community, including the United States, to deliver promised aid to Afghanistan are unfortunately not a surprise. American priorities have focused on Iraq, leaving Afghanistan as the step-child to Iraqi military and non-military requirements.

The fact that the United States has appeared to care less about the stabilization of Afghanistan has taken the Europeans off the hook. After all, if Afghanistan is not important to the United States, how can European countries make the critical difference? The recent decision by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to dispatch some 3200 marines to Afghanistan is the kind of leadership by example that perhaps will help bring allies along.

The renovation and political revitalization of NATO should be high on the agenda of the next American administration. Senators Obama, Clinton and McCain all say it will be if they are elected. In the meantime, perhaps French President Sarkozy, during France's EU presidency in the second half of this year, will set the transatlantic table by laying out a realistic plan for bringing France back into full participation in NATO and overcoming problems that have hampered NATO-EU cooperation in the past. We all can hope.

Stanley Sloan is Director of the Atlantic Community Initiative and teaches transatlantic relations at Middlebury College, Vermont.

SWJ friend, former Soldier (he led a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks and subsequently led a platoon of Army Rangers as a part of special operations task forces in Iraq and Afghanistan) and King's College of London PhD candidate Andrew Exum stirs things up over at The Guardian (see the comments section).

... But maybe the British army was never that good at counterinsurgency warfare in the first place. In fact, the very existence of the United States of America points toward an 18th-century counterinsurgency failure of epic proportions. At the moment, Americans are reliving their revolutionary era through HBO's slick new mini-series on founding father John Adams. But this interest in the American Revolution surely opens the door onto an interesting thought experiment: What would have happened had the British army applied contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine against those pesky colonists in the 18th century?

This question is one currently being asked by several smart US army and Marine Corps officers who have taken their experiences fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and applied them to historical analysis of other American wars...

More at Kings of War - Could the British Army have fought successful COIN in 1776? by Dr. David Betz.

More at Abu Muqawama - 1776 and All That by AM.

Overhaul the budget. If you'd awakened from a 20-year-long slumber and glanced at the current defense budget, you'd think the Cold War were still raging...

Rejigger the military services. One obstacle to rational military planning is that, for the past 40 years, by unspoken agreement, the defense budget has been evenly split among the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force....

Fix the Army. The Army is (barely) meeting its recruitment goals by lowering standards and dishing out large bonuses...

Invest in people. When the draft ended in 1973, the Army chiefs shifted incentives from veterans' benefits (such as the GI Bill) to enlistment bonuses...

Promote the right leaders. Owing to a shortage of officers, almost anyone can get promoted to lieutenant colonel...

Create incentives for a real nation-building or counterinsurgency capability. ... more troops are trained in such operations and more officers with expertise in that area are promoted to general...

Spread the responsibilities around. Civilian experts are probably better than sergeants at the kinds of stability operations described above....

Taxes. ... more citizens have to contribute something to national defense—if not their blood, then more of their treasure.

Fixing America's Military - James Joyner, Outside the Beltway

Phil Carter has teamed with Fred Kaplan to write the first in a ten-part series on fixing what ails America's military.

Many of the suggestions are familiar: drastically change budget priorities away from major procurement programs designed to fight an enemy that doesn't exist; do away with parity between the Service budgets, realigning spending to our real-world mission requirements; stabilize career patterns to make them less burdensome on wives and families; and promote the most innovate, visionary leaders rather than the best bureaucrats...

Fixing U.S. Diplomacy by Fred Kaplan, Slate

Travel to all the Middle East countries and leave behind a full-time envoy to the region...

Iraq: Use the troops as leverage. Most Democrats realize that total withdrawal in the next few years is impractical...

Prevent Iraq's internal violence from spreading into neighboring countries...

In certain neighboring countries... In 2006, Condoleezza Rice was asked why she wasn't talking with Syria...

Separately, open up talks with Iran with an eye toward negotiating a "grand bargain."...

Work toward new Pakistani alliances...

Pursue public diplomacy. What we do sends a more potent signal to the world than the cleverest PR campaign...

... The case for U.S. disengagement from combat is compelling in its own right. But it must be matched by a comprehensive political and diplomatic effort to mitigate the destabilizing regional consequences of a war that the outgoing Bush administration started deliberately, justified demagogically and waged badly. (I write, of course, as a Democrat; while I prefer Sen. Barack Obama, I speak here for myself.)

The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for "staying the course" draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush's and Sen. John McCain's forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of "falling dominoes" that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier...

How Not to End the War by Max Boot, Washington Post, 31 March 2008.

Why am I not reassured by Zbigniew Brzezinski's breezy assurance in Sunday's Outlook section that "forecasts of regional catastrophe" after an American pullout from Iraq are as overblown as similar predictions made prior to our pullout from South Vietnam? Perhaps because the fall of Saigon in 1975 really was a catastrophe. Another domino fell at virtually the same time -- Cambodia.

Estimates vary, but a safe bet is that some two million people died in the killing fields of Cambodia. In South Vietnam, the death toll was lower, but hundreds of thousands were consigned to harsh "reeducation" camps where many perished, and hundreds of thousands more risked their lives to flee as "boat people."

The consequences of the U.S. defeat rippled outward, emboldening communist aggression from Angola to Afghanistan. Iran's willingness to hold our embassy personnel hostage -- something that Brzezinski should recall -- was probably at least in part a reaction to America's post-Vietnam malaise. Certainly the inability of the U.S. armed services to rescue those hostages was emblematic of the "hollow," post-Vietnam military. It took us more than a decade to recover from the worst military defeat in our history...

Five years into the war in Iraq with no end in sight, a new strategy is needed. The current strategy of unconditional support to Iraq's central government has not produced nearly enough political progress. President Bush and those wishing to succeed him should embrace a new political strategy in Iraq that makes our military presence conditional on political accommodation.

Under the leadership of General David Petraeus, U.S. forces in Iraq have designed and implemented the best military strategy possible under the circumstances. But security progress appears to have leveled off, and violence has started to tick back up. Further gains can only come through the political process. General Petraeus recently told reporters that "no one feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation." Similar candor will likely be on display when Petraeus testifies before Congress in the coming days. Rather than re-litigate the debate over how we got here, Congress must look forward and help shape the public debate over the basic strategic choices from which this and the next President must choose.

President Bush and his successor have only three basic choices on strategy for Iraq: unconditional engagement, conditional engagement, or unconditional disengagement. Only a policy of conditional engagement can help translate recent security gains into something more sustainable...

More of The Case for Conditional Engagement.