Published for The Washington Post, April 1st, 2011:

In making his case this past week for the use of force in Libya, President Obama sought to assure the American people that this intervention is prudent and wise, and that it bears no resemblance to the controversial and costly war in Iraq. He even tried to preempt the comparison altogether, explaining why his administration will not attempt to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi by force: “To be blunt,” Obama said, “we went down that road in Iraq.”

Message: I am not Bush, and Benghazi is not Baghdad.

Given the most obvious differences between Iraq and Libya — no ground troops in Libya and no U.N. resolution in Iraq — few will take issue with Obama’s protestation. Yet, Obama’s road in Libya may prove more similar to President George W. Bush’s than it now appears.

For those of us who were deeply engaged in the Iraq war, it is hard not to hear the echoes and recognize the potential pitfalls in America’s new military intervention. Despite the different circumstances, the Iraq war, and the Afghan war as well, offer hard-won insights about the nature of coalitions, the limits of military force and the power of unintended consequences. Considering them now offers us a chance to avoid repeating past mistakes in Libya, particularly ones that proved so costly to us and the people we were trying to help.

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As published for The Washington Post on March 7th, 2010:

I still remember shuttling all night between my office at the National Security Council and the State Department’s Election Watch Task Force. It was Jan. 30, 2005, Iraq was holding its first meaningful elections in decades, and I was supposed to brief President George W. Bush in a few hours. When morning came, I made my way to the library in his residence and described to the president how our early anxieties in watching then-Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar cast his ballot in an eerily empty Baghdad polling booth had transformed into exhilaration as more and more Iraqis poured onto the streets and into the voting stations.

The exhilaration soon gave way to exasperation. Few of us had anticipated how protracted and fractious the post-election process of forming an Iraqi government would be. With both that vote and the one that followed in December of that year, an immediate lull in violence gave way to intense wrangling between and within parties over the nature and composition of the government. In 2006, the political vacuum produced a security vacuum, and when the new government was sworn in, it faced a situation that was significantly more violent and volatile than before.

Iraq is on much sounder footing today than it was in 2005 or 2006. Yet once again, after Sunday’s parliamentary elections, the country is probably in store for long negotiations over who will share power in the new government — a battle that could strain Iraq’s fledgling political institutions and complicate the planned drawdown of U.S. forces. Although forming a government is an Iraqi affair, the United States has clear interests in the character of that government. It will preside over the withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011 and determine the nature of the bilateral relationship in the years ahead. And, for better or worse, the new government may have to navigate Iraq’s role in a possible confrontation between the international community and its neighbor Iran.

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As published for Topic A on washingtonpost.com on December 2, 2009:

At West Point, President Obama sent a mixed message at a time when an unequivocal one was required. Above all, he needed to convey U.S. determination and a long-term commitment to the region. Such a commitment is necessary if America is to persuade Afghans and, even more important, Pakistanis to make fundamental changes in how they think about their security and their futures. Obama’s bold decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, to be the backbone of a counterinsurgency mission, might have conveyed just that American commitment. But the inclusion of a timeline for the start of the withdrawal of these troops deeply cuts against that message.

The reality is that timelines, however configured, alter the calculations of all actors. While some argue that timelines add urgency to the mission, evidence of the past few years suggests that they are more likely to cause our key partners ¿ and the people who are on the fence ¿ to hedge about the future. Moreover, the notion that Afghans will have built sufficient political and security institutions within 18 months defies the lessons that America and its allies have learned over the past eight years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Building state capacity is a medium- to long-term endeavor at best. The fact that the timeline in tonight’s speech marks the start of the withdrawal, not the end, is significant — but this significance is likely to be lost on the foreign audience, while noted and lambasted by the domestic one. In seeking to meet the needs of his multiple audiences — granted, a difficult and unenviable task — Obama may have failed to satisfy any of them.

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As published for washingtonpost.com on July 21, 2009:

During the first months of the Obama administration, Iraqis watching the appointments of Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell and Dennis Ross would call me and ask, “Who will be Iraq’s special envoy?” After six months of a stance perceived by many Iraqis as “hands off,” the administration appears to have realized that political engagement is most important when a military presence is waning. Yet recent comments by Vice President Biden suggest that U.S. officials’ mind-set toward Iraq could do as much harm as good.

While visiting Iraq this month, Biden spoke of a need to broker a grand bargain between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and to resolve disputes between “the different confessional groups.” He made clear that he — and, presumably, the United States — saw Iraq’s challenges and solutions largely in terms of sectarian or ethnic groups. Discussing Iraq’s problems in such terms pushes Iraqis back toward the boxes they have been trying to leave behind — and undermines incipient movement away from the dominance of sectarian political identities toward issues-based politics.

To many Iraqis, such language is familiar. The failure in security from 2004 well into 2007 crystallized sectarian and ethnic identities; Sunni extremists and Shiite militias identified both their targets and those they protected on sectarian grounds. But this language is also increasingly outdated. Security improvements over the past two years have created space for Iraqis to begin moving away from seeing themselves and their problems in such terms. Indeed, in the provincial elections held in January, issues seemed to matter to voters at least as much as identities.

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