"Let there be a strongman"?

"It is something ordinary Iraqis say with growing intensity," writes John Burns in the New York Times, "even as they agree on little else. Let there be a strongman, they say, not a relentless killer like Saddam Hussein but somebody who will take the hammer to the insurgents and the death squads and the kidnappers and the criminal gangs who have banished all pretense of civility from their lives."

But Burns writes that Iraqis might be waiting in vain:

"The message appears, so far, to have found little resonance in Washington […] The closest anyone with the White House’s ear has come to suggesting anything short of democratic rule … are leaks from the bipartisan commission headed by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, which is charged with suggesting a new American approach to Iraq; some of its members have said that the group has considered recommending that stability, rather than democracy, should become the principal objective there."

A "strongman" scenario may have little apparent resonance in Washington, but as Burns notes, it seems to be taken seriously by many people in Baghdad. Indeed, rumors of an impending U.S.-backed coup have been circulating in the capital for months, and these have always struck me as having a dimension of Iraqi wishful thinking.

The Arabic press has been dealing with a coup scenario, too. The figure most often at the center of this speculation is Ayad Allawi, who has publicly denied the rumors. He doesn't have a militia to support a coup, he says.

What are the alternatives as Iraqis see them? The Arabic press has offered four possiblities: adding more U.S. troops; withdrawing U.S. troops; a loose federation; and a regional conference. (By the way, the long-missing Ahmad Chalabi recently suggested that the right way to go would be through the marjaiya, or the Shiite religious center. In other words, Iran. Of course, Chalabi would play a significant role.)

Withdrawing U.S. troops as quickly as possible while leaving security concerns to the Iraqi government, an option favored by such newly empowered Democrats as Sen. Carl Levin, would almost certainly lead to unmitigated disaster. It's easy to wag one's senatorial finger in Maliki's ineffectual face. But what about the Iraqi civilians who are at his mercy? A U.S. that abandons Iraqis to religious butchers would be finished in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.

The "loose federation" idea isn't necessarily a bad option in principle, but if Iraqi politicians have been unable to agree on even the most minor issues, how could they agree to something that would require serious extended cooperation?

A meaningful regional conference, which is supported by such pro-war voices as the Washington Post editorial page, seems a pipe dream. It would mean getting Iran, Syria and others to stop supporting the bloodletting in Iraq. But Syria, for its part, won't end its role in Iraq's agony until its regime can stop the UN investigation of the Hariri murder and resume plundering Lebanon. This U.S. administration is not likely to be part of a Middle Eastern replay of Munich 1938, and – what's most important to me -- in the meantime, as such a conference drags on, more and more innocent Iraqi civilians will be murdered daily.

What about more U.S. troops? Harvard's William J. Stuntz has made a serious case in favor of that option. Rumsfeld's mistake, he argues, was trying to wage war against insurgents on the margins, when what is called for is the application of military might.

Stuntz wrote in The Weekly Standard that, "Between November 2004 and February 2005, according to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, the number of coalition soldiers in Iraq rose by 18,000. In that time, the number of Iraqi civilians killed fell by two-thirds, and the number of American troops wounded fell by three-fourths. The soldiers were soon pulled out; by the summer of 2005, American and Iraqi casualties rose again. Later that year, the same thing happened again. Between September and November of 2005, another 23,000 soldiers were deployed in Iraq; once again, both Iraqi and American casualties fell. In the early months of 2006, the number of soldiers fell again, and casualties spiraled up."
"Iraq is not an unwinnable war," Stuntz argues. "Rather, as the data just cited show, it is a war we have chosen not to win."

But is there still U.S. political will for sending more troops? That option probably appeals to the administration more than does the coup scenario. As the AEI's Eliot A. Cohen pointed out recently in The Wall Street Journal, a coup "would involve a substantial repast of crow that this administration will be deeply unwilling to eat." (Cohen himself believes a coup is probably the best of a set of "dismal" options.)

In the event of a coup, ordinary Iraqis would have to eat crow as well. They were tearfully proud of their new democracy and the purple fingers that brought it to power. But Iraq's malignant neighbors and its disgraceful leadership have, thus far, combined to thwart the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. No one can build an economy in the midst of this slaughter; no one can build meaningful civil institutions. Iraqi pride has been giving way to fear and despair. "Let there be a strongman," they say. I know just how they feel.