Obama in Iraq War

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) --Barrack Obama will inherit several crises when he becomes president on Jan. 20. Curiously, Iraq may prove to be the least of them.

This hardly seemed possible when the long presidential campaign began in 2007. Then, the U.S. military presence in Iraq ranked at the top of voters’ concerns, and the debate over whether to end it on a timetable or hold on until sectarian violence cooled was a central issue.

The debate now is largely moot, because of steadily improving security conditions and the fact that outgoing President George W Bush has already agreed to pull U.S. troops out of Iraqi cities by June and from the whole country within three years.

“That bridge has been crossed,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters on Dec. 2, the day after Obama announced his reappointment to head the Pentagon. “The new factor is that we have agreed to some deadlines that change the nature of the mission in considerable ways.”

Declining attacks on pipelines have allowed Iraq to increase oil exports and prompted foreign companies such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, to study possible oilfield projects. China last month signed a $3.5 billion 20-year agreement to develop the Ahdab field southeast of Baghdad, which the government says may produce about 90,000 barrels a day.

Room to Maneuver

These developments may give Obama considerable maneuvering room on Iraq when he takes office. And that would be helpful as he tackles an economy mired in recession, continuing international terrorism, waning U.S. influence in the world and a conflict in Afghanistan that is moving in the opposite direction from the one in Iraq.

In Afghanistan, insurgent attacks on U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces have risen to their highest level since the Taliban was ousted by an American-led invasion in 2001. The U.S. is planning to add as many as 20,000 troops to the 32,000 currently there and is urging allies to follow suit.

In Iraq, by contrast, security has steadily improved over the past two years. Civilian casualties have plunged to less than 500 last month from about 3,500 in January 2007, according to Pentagon data cited in the "Iraq Index" of the Washington-based Brookings Institution. Attacks on U.S. troops have fallen to less than 300 a week from a high of more than 1,500 in June 2007.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq

“We all believe now that we basically have our foot on the neck of al-Qaeda in Iraq,” says Gates.

There are currently about 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. An Army combat brigade of about 3,500 soldiers originally scheduled to come home without replacement early next year is now returning this month because of improved security.

To be sure, the security gains are fragile and potentially reversible, according to U.S. military commanders and experts on the region.

“This war is not won,” said Kenneth Pollack, a Brookings analyst who served as director of Persian Gulf affairs at the White House National Security Council under President Bill Clinton “This could all come apart at the seams.”

Pollack says it’s striking how infrequently Iraq comes up in foreign-policy discussions now compared with a year ago, considering the potential for backsliding as U.S. troops draw down and turn over more responsibility to Iraqi forces.

Improved Security

Debate continues over whether the improvement is mainly due to the U.S. troop “surge” ordered by Bush in early 2007, the movement of Sunni tribesmen to oppose al-Qaeda that began in mid- 2006 or the cease-fire ordered by Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr last year.

What is beyond debate is that events have, for now, largely defused Iraq as a divisive political issue in the U.S. and drained much of the controversy from Obama’s campaign call to withdraw American combat troops within 16 months of taking office.

“So much has changed in Iraq since the promulgation of that policy,” said former Army General Jack Keane, one of the architects of the surge strategy. “There are new cards on the table. The fact is that the counter-insurgency war is over. We’re involved in the peacekeeping phrase.”

During the campaign, Gates and senior military officers objected to Obama’s timetable, saying any decisions about new troop withdrawals should be keyed solely to conditions on the ground.

Gates ‘Less Concerned’

Now, Gates says he is “less concerned” about Obama’s schedule. “The situation has changed in significant ways since the campaign,” he said during the Dec. 2 news conference.

With the U.S. committed by a new security agreement to pull its troops out of Iraqi cities by next June, Gates said, “the commanders are already looking at what the implications of that are in terms of the potential for accelerating the drawdown.”

At the same time, he noted, Obama is publicly committed to consulting with the military before making any decisions and to draw down in a way that preserves the recent gains.

“You are seeing a convergence,” Obama said yesterday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “When I began this campaign, there was a lot of controversy about the idea of starting to draw down troops. Now you’ve seen that this administration signed an agreement with the Iraqi government, creating a timeframe.”

Obama said he would direct the military to withdraw “as quickly as we can do to maintain stability in Iraq, maintain the safety of U.S. troops” and guard against a resurgence of terrorism.

Bush, in his weekly radio address on Dec. 6, called for what amounted to a political cease-fire in the long domestic debate over Iraq.

“We have an opportunity to adopt a new perspective,” Bush said. “There were legitimate differences of opinion about the initial decision to remove Sadda Hussein and the subsequent conduct of the war. But now the surge and the courage of brave Iraqis have turned the situation around.”

Tenuous Stability

Bush’s achievement of at least a tenuous stability in Iraq at the end of his presidency, as well as his late effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, has cleared away significant obstacles for Obama, according to Richard Haass, the former head of State Department policy planning who now is president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

“The era in which Iraq has dominated American Middle East policy like it has over the last five or so years is likely to fade,” Haass said during a Dec. 2 forum on the region. The result, he said, will be a “rebalancing” that “will open up possibilities for placing greater attention and greater emphasis on other issues.”