Iraq Study Group: Iraq needs a group hug

7 December 2006, 0055 EST

Yes, my headline is unfair. But the phrase “national reconciliation” appears 45 times in the ISG report. It even gets its own subsection (pp. 64-69).

I’m far from the only blogger to note a certain fantasy-island quality to the ISG report: it calls for lots of different actors–the Iraqi Government, Iran, and Syria–to adopt policies that they either can’t or most likely won’t implement. In particular, it seems to assume that the Iraqi Government is, well, part of some sort of coherent state rather than a patrimonial and ineffectual microcosm of the civil conflict in Iraq.

But I think its repeated use of the term “national reconciliation” encapsulates all of these problems. National reconciliation is something people do in a post-conflict environment, not something they do in the midst of ethnic cleansing, sectarian massacres, an ongoing insurgency, and other assorted forms of collective violence.

Large parts of the relevant sections, in fact, read like recommendations for a peacekeeping operation. Keep the political process on track. Open dialog. Bring international organizations and non-governmental organizations in to effectuate the disarmament of the militias. Make sure the state can credibly commit to respecting the rights of minorities. That sort of thing.

These sections also strike me as very much stuck in 2004-2005 thinking. Remember back when purple thumbs, elections, and the formation of a government would resolve the conflict?

All of this makes sense in a world of, as the ISG repeatedly stresses, “shared interests.” Herein lies the basic problem with the report. Many of the factions and key players don’t have a “shared interest” in peace and stability under a national unity government. Iraq isn’t stuck in a prisoners’ dilemma in which commitment problems preclude a pareto-efficient settlement. For too many actors what the US seeks isn’t pareto-improving but, rather, worse than the status-quo of conflict and far worse than an outcome of sectarian domination, partition, or what-have-you.

We tried to bring many of the current spoilers into the process before and our efforts, if anything, made the situation worse. The ISG report, at least in this respect, offers the same–only more so.

Filed as: Iraq Study Group

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.