Therein lies Barack Obama’s dilemma. He’s pledged to halve the U.S. troop presence in Iraq by September, and according to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed in 2008, all U.S. troops must be gone when the clock strikes midnight on Dec. 31, 2011. The problem is that this timetable may be a virtual death sentence for Iraqi democracy. Although security has dramatically improved, Iraq’s leaders have resolved barely any of the conflicts that nearly tore the country apart a few years back. There’s been no agreement on how to distribute oil revenue, on the distribution of power between the federal government and Iraq’s regions, or on the city of Kirkuk, which Arabs and Kurds both claim as their own. Stephen Biddle, a Council of Foreign Relations defense analyst with close ties to General David Petraeus, thinks the potential for civil war remains high, as does former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. As the International Crisis Group’s Peter Harling recently put it, “Nothing” has “been solved in Iraq, fundamentally.”
The coming months could be particularly treacherous. Last time Iraq held a national election, it took parliament five months to approve a new government. As Thomas Ricks of the Center for a New American Security has pointed out, Obama drew up his withdrawal plan on the assumption that Iraq would hold elections in late 2009, and thus, that it would have a government in place by the time U.S. troops began leaving in droves. But because that election is only being held now, Iraq may be virtually government-less when U.S. troops head for the exits this summer. In such an environment, the potential for chaos is real. And the greater the prospect of chaos, the greater the potential for a coup, something Britain’s ambassador in Iraq recently warned about. Few Iraqi strongmen would attempt one with close to 100,000 U.S. troops peering over their shoulder. But the faster those numbers dwindle, the greater the danger becomes.
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