Finding the Way Forward—A Negotiated Settlement in Iraq

Finding the Way Forward—A Negotiated Settlement in Iraq
Foreign Policy In Focus

It is now time for the United States to pursue the one policy option that has been missing from the national discussion of Iraq: the negotiation of a peace settlement with the insurgents that would involve the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops in return for the surrender of the insurgents and the reintegration of the Sunni region into the post-Saddam political system.

In recent weeks there have been multiple indications that some insurgent leaders as well as some in the election-winning United Iraqi Alliance are actively interested in such a settlement. TIME revealed that certain insurgent leaders had met with U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers about a settlement under which they would surrender...

The Bush administration has long discouraged any thought about negotiations, portraying the Iraqi insurgency as a terrorist alliance between the foreign jihadists aligned with Osama Bin Laden and high-ranking Ba’athist security officials who seek to restore Saddam’s regime. That propaganda line misrepresents the actual composition and leadership of the insurgency. High ranking officers of Saddam’s elite security services did start the insurgency, and some of them may still harbor the dream of recreating the old regime. But the insurgency quickly evolved into something quite different.

During the last half of 2003, tens of thousands of young men, most of them former soldiers in the disbanded Iraqi army who could not get a job, joined the insurgency, not out of loyalty to Saddam but to drive out the occupation forces and to avenge the killing or mistreatment of family members or friends in U.S. “cordon and search” operations. By early 2004, the original Saddamist “Party of Return” was only one of more than 35 insurgent operations in Iraq.

Many of the local leaders of insurgent groups are clearly not Saddam loyalists but former mid-level officers from the security services, as noted recently by an adviser to the Pentagon on Iraq in The Washington Post. These young Ba’athists and the Sunni clerics who joined the resistance in 2004 are the insurgent leaders who are likely to be most interested in a peace settlement.