Rory Stewart on Iraq

"I think that Iraqi politicians are considerably more competent, canny, and capable of compromise than we acknowledge. Iraqi nationalism, in my view, can trump the Shiite-Sunni divisions. Our continuing presence is encouraging Iraqi politicians to play hard-ball with each other. Were we to leave, they would be weaker and under more pressure to compromise. In our relations with the Iraqis we often blocked negotiations with Moqtada al-Sadr or Sunni insurgency leaders, or the offer of troop withdrawals and amnesties for former Baathists and insurgents, among others. Yet these will probably be elements in any kind of settlement.

And therefore, my belief—and I emphasize this is my belief, not a certainty—is that were we to withdraw, things would improve. I say belief because that may not be the case. I can't predict the future. Iraq and its neighbors and its internal forces are extremely difficult to understand. In a single province in Iraq fifty-four new political parties emerged after three months following the invasion. And even Iraqis struggle to distinguish between the parties called the Islamic Call Movement, the Islamic Call Tendency, and the Islamic Call Muslim Party. All the parties that call themselves Hezbollah or Hamas have nothing to do with their namesakes on the other side of Arabia.

So I cannot guarantee that the situation will improve following a withdrawal. In some countries, civil wars do indeed continue for a very long time. Whatever government emerges after our departure is likely to be Islamist and authoritarian. People talk sometimes too easily about choosing between lesser evils. In this case the choices may be genuinely evil. But I am certain that our presence is not improving things. Despite some claims to the contrary, there is not a single indicator of significant, overall improvement I know of over the last four years, neither in electricity, nor in education, nor in police training, nor in the military.

You might be able to achieve a temporary blitz, a temporary numerical drop in the number of security incidents, through deploying 20,000 troops into Baghdad, but this is not sustainable. There is no evidence I have seen that either the Iraqi police or army is prepared to take over our role, so long as we stay. In this situation there is simply no point hanging around. It would seem to me that starting to leave tomorrow, as opposed to in two years' time or six years' time, would make no difference; the situation would be the same. And there cannot be a justification for continuing, day by day, to kill Iraqis and to have our own soldiers killed in this kind of war."

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Rory Stewart was the British deputy governor of an Iraqi province 2003-2004. He describes his experiences in The Prince of the Marshes, and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq. The remarks above are excerpted from an article in the May 31 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books.

August 2007