President Bush Seeks Patience as Iraq War Enters Fifth Year

And Jessica Mathews, a State Department and National Security Council official in the Carter and Clinton administrations, she's now president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Welcome to you both.

Well, you heard the president saying the fight is difficult, but it can be won. Jessica Mathews, going into the fifth year, can it be won?

JESSICA MATHEWS, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Well, it's not the same war; that's the key thing to say. He linked the beginning of the war and where we are now, and we're now fighting a totally different war.

Who's our enemy? Is it the Sunnis? Is it the Shiites, who we're opposing in Iran, but supporting in Iraq? In my view, it can't be won as a war. It's a political battle now in Iraq.

And I'd say the chances that there will be a stable outcome in the next three to five years are somewhere around 10 percent.

MARGARET WARNER: It can't be won as a war?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD, Council on Foreign Relations: Well, I agree. A political solution is really needed. Unfortunately, I think you've got to have a military presence; the political situation would be even worse, I think, without U.S. troops.

And, you know, the president is in a tough position, because four years after a war, when you say that our goal is to safeguard the capital, your allies, this doesn't -- if Abraham Lincoln had to had to say in 1864, "Our goal is to prevent Washington from falling to the Confederate forces," it wouldn't look good for him.

So we have a problem where the situation on the ground is mixed, confused, a bit alarming, where the president has clearly lost a lot of the confidence of people. People are tired of the war. And yet, at this point, it's hard to see an alternative, at least in the short term, to continuing with trying at least to stabilize Baghdad.

JESSICA MATHEWS: I think it's the latter. And several years from now, we'll just look back at this as one more spike and one more thing to remember in this long...

MARGARET WARNER: This surge?

JESSICA MATHEWS: Yes. I think the surge can work. That is, I think extra troops by both, from the U.S. and from Iraq, can reduce the violence in Baghdad. But where does that get us? It gets us back to where we were exactly one year ago when the violence started badly in Baghdad, which was also when the political situation started to really accelerate downhill. So victory, as now defined by the president, stabilizing Baghdad, turns the clock back one year.

MARGARET WARNER: But his argument is, is it not, that, if that happens, that creates the political or the space for the political process to go forward. Do you see any sign that, even in the interim, that political process, which you both agree is absolutely key, is going forward?

JESSICA MATHEWS: No. Look at what the choices are now. We're currently backing a Shiite government -- well, back up a step. What does history tell you about civil wars, that they usually take something like a decade in this last 50 years to fight themselves out, to reach some sort of stable power-sharing arrangement on both sides, where one side recognizes that violence can't achieve its ends.

If the Sunnis win, we're back to the status quo ante, with a minority government that can only keep itself in power through repression and oppression. If the Shiites win, especially a sector of Shiite government that's closely tied to Iran, then we have both benefited Iran and probably al-Qaida, because that way -- that's then the ally that the Sunnis, who won't give up, will turn to for help.

So where we've got ourselves now is into a situation where there is no good outcome for us in choosing a winner.

MARGARET WARNER: How do you see this surge? Do you agree with Jessica Mathews that it can succeed, but that, even if it does, it doesn't -- it only turns the clock back?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Well, I think you can get a little bit ahead, in the sense that the Sunni insurgents really did try to launch a full-scale civil war by the attack on the Golden Mosque and some other, you know, very extreme things, and did cause a deterioration in the security situation in the last year.

But, you know, that card, in a sense, has been played. It may be that the descent into a much wider civil war than what we have now can be stopped. It's hard to say.

But, again, I think it's more and more we have to focus on -- and here I agree with Jessica -- on what we want to prevent in Iraq rather than, you know, thinking about the beautiful, fabulous government, we rub our magic lantern and democracy appears.

We don't want Iraq to become a kind of an extra province of Iran. We don't want particularly the Sunni areas to become a kind of a haven for terrorism or chaos. And we don't want the country itself to become this kind of cockpit that all the surrounding countries get sucked into trying to pick winners and fuel the civil war, and this ends up destabilizing the whole region.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: I think, you know, there is something in what he says. Again, I think the specific thing that some people in Congress have talked about that I think is a mistake is to give a certain date, 15 months in the future, like right before the election 2008, because, truthfully, if you're going to give a firm date, you should just leave tomorrow, because once you've given that firm date, you lose your political leverage.

And this is a political situation, where in a sense we need to be able to say, "Well, you know, our forces could be here a long time. We're going to be a player here for a while," hoping that that will make it easier for us to get out. But the minute you say, "We're leaving on October 1, 2008," or whatever it is, you lose all that leverage, and at that point you start saying, "Why are these troops getting killed and for what? There's no goal."

So I think the idea of trying to set a firm date in the future is not the right way. In a sense, we've gotten a good balance now, that it's clear from the election results, from the polls, from what Congress is saying, that Bush does not have a complete carte blanche, that the American commitment to Iraq is not open-ended and unconditional.

And the administration, to give them credit, has used that fairly well to get -- to actually go to Maliki, to the government, and say, look, you've got to meet some benchmarks. You've got to get that oil law going. You've got to let us get into Sadr City. Our commitment is not unconditional.

But it's a very, very tricky game, and I don't think there are any guarantees.

MARGARET WARNER: How do you see Congress's role? One, what's the appropriate role right now? And, two, as we know, the House last week did pass a measure that calls for a kind of gradual withdrawal, but set this September '08 timetable. What is your sense, your view of that?

JESSICA MATHEWS: I think Congress has a horrible task. First of all, they certainly have a role in representing American public opinion and in being part of the decision-making now. But the only tool they have is cutting off the funds. And so when you hear...

MARGARET WARNER: Because he can veto anything else.

JESSICA MATHEWS: ... self-righteous -- Republican calls the Democrats, if they think this war is a mistake, should vote their convictions and cut off the funds for the troops. What they're saying is, "My dear friend, please commit political suicide."

So people who oppose the war, and think this is a dead-end, and believe that further American deaths will not further our interests, are left with really nothing. The only justice, maybe, in this awful situation is just that Bush has absolutely no good choices; neither does the Congress. And it is really a terrible situation.

MARGARET WARNER: So then, if you take the other extreme, and you take what the president said, which is, if we withdrew immediately, it would have devastating consequences for American security.

JESSICA MATHEWS: Well, you know, the history -- first of all, of course, you can't withdraw immediately for logistic reasons. It probably takes almost as long as the dead line that the House put in.

MARGARET WARNER: It's the same thing?

JESSICA MATHEWS: Exactly. So saying that you're setting a deadline is almost exactly the same thing as saying you're going to start the withdrawal now.

But the history does not support the notion that somehow civil war in Iraq spreads across the region. It's the opposite. It supports the notion that it will, indeed, as Walter said, suck in other involvement, almost certainly not troops, but arms and money, although Iraq has enough arms in it for 50 years of fighting.

So it's probably going to be more like the Lebanese civil war, lots of people meddling and other countries meddling in it, but there really isn't history to support the notion that it will spread.