President Bush has said "failure is not an option in Iraq," but the Brookings researchers warn that he may already have failed there and not know it. They scoured the records of more than a dozen nations wracked by all-out civil war during the past 30 years — countries such as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Somalia — and found that while historians could agree with hindsight on when those conflicts reached the point of no return, that point was never apparent to the leaders at the time. "This should sober us to the possibility that it may already be too late to save Iraq," the report warns.
If so, the consequences of a full-scale civil war will not only be hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dying, but also the strategic problem of "spillover." Based on their review of spillover patterns from past civil wars, Brookings' researchers believe Iraq's collapse would result in refugees streaming into neighboring countries, creating an economic burden. Embittered refugees would become "a ready recruiting pool for armed groups still waging the civil war." As al-Qaeda did in Afghanistan, terror groups would establish enclaves in Iraq. Neighboring populations could become radicalized and side with ethnic and religious factions fighting inside Iraq, as Albanians were over Serbia's harsh treatment of Kosovar Albanians. Syria, which intervened in the Lebanon civil war, might do the same in Iraq, and Iran might join the Syrians.
"We were depressed as hell as we were doing this work," admits Kenneth Pollack, a co-author of the report. "It was not a fun project." Nearly all past attempts by outsiders to suppress civil wars have failed. The ones that succeeded — Bosnia, for example — required a ratio of 20 armed peacekeepers per 1,000 locals. In Iraq that would mean an international security force of about 450,000 troops, and that's excluding Kurdistan, which hopefully would remain stable.
With Congress in near revolt over adding to the approximately 140,000 troops already in Iraq, it's highly unlikely the White House would triple that number. But nor will the U.S. be able walk away from Iraq, even if it collapses. Instead, the study recommends a "baker's dozen" military and diplomatic options to contain the spillover, although Pollack admits these are only the "least bad options we have, and very hard to make work."
Among the report's recommendations:
The humanitarian catastrophe inside Iraq will be horrific, but unless the U.S. is prepared intervene with 450,000 soldiers, the report recommends that it should pull its smaller force "back from Iraqi population centers" to safe havens "and refocus American efforts from preventing civil war to containing it."
The Defense Department has no comment on the Brookings report, or on what kind of contingency planning it has under way in the event of catastrophic failure and an all-out civil war. Bush's new strategy — sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq — "is designed for victory," says a Pentagon official. "And that is what we're moving out on." But Pollock hopes the generals are thinking as much about Plan B, "because as much as we hope Plan A works, at this late date it may not."