What if were fight­ing the wrong kind of war? Some of Americas bet­ter mil­i­tary minds have been mak­ing a tran­si­tion in Iraq, from wag­ing tra­di­tional bat­tles to clamp­ing down on insur­gents. A major part of this shift: train­ing Iraq forces to take over from American troops. Stephen Biddle, with the Council on Foreign Relations, says theyre mak­ing a huge mis­take.
The prob­lem is that Iraqization is a Vietnam-​​era solu­tion. And the cur­rent strug­gle is not a Maoist ‘people’s war’ of national lib­er­a­tion [like Vietnam]; it is a com­mu­nal civil war with very dif­fer­ent dynam­ics, Biddle writes in an amaz­ingly timely arti­cle for the new issue of Foreign Affairs. “Turning over the respon­si­bil­ity for fight­ing the insur­gents to local forces, in par­tic­u­lar, is likely to make mat­ters worse.”

Such a pol­icy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threat­ens to exac­er­bate the com­mu­nal ten­sions that under­lie the con­flict and under­mine the power-​​sharing nego­ti­a­tions needed to end it. Washington must stop shift­ing the respon­si­bil­ity for the country’s secu­rity to oth­ers and instead threaten to manip­u­late the mil­i­tary bal­ance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in order to force them to come to a durable com­pro­mise. Only once an agree­ment is reached should Washington con­sider devolv­ing sig­nif­i­cant mil­i­tary power and author­ity to local forces
In a people’s war, hand­ing the fight­ing off to local forces makes sense because it under­mines the nation­al­ist com­po­nent of insur­gent resis­tance, improves the qual­ity of local intel­li­gence, and boosts troop strength. But in a com­mu­nal civil war, it throws gaso­line on the fire. Iraq’s Sunnis per­ceive the “national” army and police force as a Shiite-​​Kurdish mili­tia on steroids to them, the defense forces look like agents of a hos­tile occu­pa­tion. And the more threat­ened the Sunnis feel, the more likely they are to fight back even harder. The big­ger, stronger, bet­ter trained, and bet­ter equipped the Iraqi forces become, the worse the com­mu­nal ten­sions that under­lie the whole con­flict will get.
The cre­ation of pow­er­ful Shiite-​​Kurdish secu­rity forces will also reduce the chances of reach­ing the only seri­ous long-​​term solu­tion to the country’s com­mu­nal con­flict: a com­pro­mise based on a con­sti­tu­tional deal with iron­clad power-​​sharing arrange­ments pro­tect­ing all par­ties. A national army that effec­tively excluded Sunnis would make any such con­sti­tu­tional deal irrel­e­vant, because the Shiite-​​Kurdish alliance would hold the real power regard­less of what the con­sti­tu­tion said. Increasing evi­dence that Iraq’s mil­i­tary and police have already com­mit­ted atroc­i­ties against Sunnis only con­firms the dan­gers of trans­fer­ring respon­si­bil­ity for fight­ing the insur­gents to local forces before an accept­able eth­nic com­pro­mise has been bro­kered.
On the other hand, the harder the United States works to inte­grate Sunnis into the secu­rity forces, the less effec­tive those forces are likely to become. The inclu­sion of Sunnis will inevitably entail pen­e­tra­tion by insur­gents, and it will be dif­fi­cult to estab­lish trust between mem­bers of mixed units whose respec­tive eth­nic groups are at one another’s throats. Segregating Sunnis in their own bat­tal­ions is no solu­tion either. Doing so would merely strengthen all sides simul­ta­ne­ously by pro­vid­ing each with direct U.S. assis­tance and could trig­ger an unsta­ble, unof­fi­cial par­ti­tion of the coun­try into sep­a­rate Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish enclaves, each defended by its own mil­i­tary force
What, then, is to be done?… First, Washington must slow down the expan­sion of the Iraqi national mil­i­tary and police. Iraq will even­tu­ally need capa­ble indige­nous secu­rity forces, but their buildup must fol­low a broad com­mu­nal com­pro­mise, not the other way around
Second, the United States must bring more pres­sure to bear on the par­ties in the con­sti­tu­tional nego­ti­a­tions. And the strongest pres­sure avail­able is mil­i­tary: the United States must threaten to manip­u­late the mil­i­tary bal­ance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to coerce them to nego­ti­ate. Washington should use the prospect of a U.S.-trained and U.S.-supported Shiite-​​Kurdish force to com­pel the Sunnis to come to the nego­ti­at­ing table. At the same time, in order to get the Shiites and the Kurds to nego­ti­ate too, it should threaten either to with­draw pre­ma­turely, a move that would throw the coun­try into dis­ar­ray, or to back the Sunnis
The only way to break the log­jam is to change the par­ties’ rel­a­tive com­fort with the sta­tus quo by dras­ti­cally rais­ing the costs of their fail­ure to nego­ti­ate. The U.S. pres­ence now caps the war’s inten­sity, and U.S. aid could give any side an enor­mous mil­i­tary advan­tage. Thus Washington should threaten to use its influ­ence to alter the bal­ance of power depend­ing on the par­ties’ behav­ior. By doing so, it could make stub­born­ness look worse than coop­er­a­tion and com­pel all sides to compromise.